Best Buy to give $50 coupons to HD DVD buyers

Best Buy hopes to satisfy disaffected buyers of HD DVD players by offering them a $50 coupon, the retailer announced today. Worth $10 million, the deal will hand out the in-store discount to anyone who bought either a dedicated HD DVD reader or add-ons such as Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD DVD drive on or before February 23rd, the Saturday that followed Toshiba's discontinuation of the format. The decision was made to head off concerns from customers who unknowingly bought into the now-obsolete format and will help them make their own decisions, whether to switch to Blu-ray or something else altogether, Best Buy claims.

"The DVD format war has divided our customers in a way we haven’t seen since Betamax took on VHS more than 20 years ago," company president Brian Dunn said. "We understood and shared our customers’ frustrations as they were being asked to choose one format or the other."

The coupons are not dependent on returning the HD DVD players themselves and can be used for anything in the store, rather than just Blu-ray devices. A trade-in program is nonetheless underway that will let HD DVD viewers recover some of the value of their players or movies. The coupon program is automatic for anyone who bought an HD DVD player at Best Buy and won't require contacting the store unless they receive no notice, according to the company.

Best Buy is believed in part to have hastened the demise of HD DVD by declaring that it would back Blu-ray over HD DVD more than a week before the official end to the format, taking away one of Toshiba's most essential sales points in the US.

Filed under: industry, gadgets
Other story tags: blu-ray, Toshiba, Best Buy, HD DVD