The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
While they still don’t look as smooth as a PS3 or the Windows Media Center interface, it was easy to see in the demonstration that the menus have definitely been improved, made much simpler to understand and follow and will allow users to easily learn the system and use it to their advantage, rather than being befuddled by on-screen menus.
Indeed that’s part of Panasonic’s new “promise” to consumers – its technology comes with “built-in genius” making the finding and use of functions so easy that you can actually use them as intended, instead of just having features that never get used because they’re just too hard to fathom.
Panasonic also explained that they’re taking green issues very seriously, promoting the fact they are establishing a television recycling program in Australia and are working with other manufacturers to gain their support for the program, so old CRT (and other) TVs get recycled instead of being thrown into landfill.
The DMR-BW500 will retail for AUD $2,199, and comes with three 25GB BD-RE (re-writable) discs valued at $119 for the three pack.
Disc prices are as follows: a write-once single layer 25GB disc costs AUD $29.95, a write-once dual layer 50GB disc costs $59.95, a re-writeable 25GB disc costs $39.95, while a 50GB re-writeable disc costs $79.95.
I remember paying $100 for a write-once black CD-ROM back in the early 90s, and I remember when write-once blank DVDs cost $70 each, so these prices are no surprise and will inevitably see massive drops in price, but at this still early stage they are expensive.
With a retail price of $2199 for the Blu-ray recorder, I can only imagine the street price will fall to something like $1999 before too long, although that might only happen after the Olympics itself, or perhaps during the Olympics as a way to get people to ‘buy now’, as the Olympics will be broadcast in high definition for the first time ever.
As an official Olympic worldwide sponsor, Panasonic are engaging in a marketing campaign featuring four Olympians, and have also released a swathe of other new products, from new Plasma and LCD TVs, to DVD recorders, portable DVD players, a Blu-ray home theatre system with wireless rear speakers, and hi-fi sound systems with iPod dock capabilities included.
Clearly, Panasonic is hoping that in the battle for supremacy in sales of consumer electronics, it will be the one to win the coveted gold medal, although its competitors will be trying as hard as possible to win that medal too.
Who will try to do ambush marketing? Which company will be next to release its own Blu-ray recorder before the Olympics? All these things are yet to be seen, but in an Olympic year, a year which has helped sell new TVs to consumers globally for many years, the competition will most definitely be high definition – and intense!
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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