Consumer electronics retailer Best Buy said yesterday that it would distribute $50 gift cards to customers who bought HD DVD players in its stores before major manufacturers and studios declared surrender in the format wars with Blu-ray.
Best Buy said it will spend $10 million to mail the gift cards to customers who purchased HD DVD players or attachments before Feb. 23. That’s several days after Toshiba announced it would no longer develop and market the HD DVD format, due to lack of support from the movie studios. The competing Blu-ray technology is largely the creation of rival Sony Electronics.
On Feb. 11, Best Buy said that it would give Blu-ray equipment more prominent retail and advertising display than HD DVD appliances and would instruct sales staff to recommend Blu-ray to customers as the emerging single standard in digital movie players.
Yesterday, Best Buy said that HD DVD customers who had signed up for the Best Buy Reward Zone program, bought a service plan for their equipment or purchased their player online at http://www.BestBuy.com should see their gift card arrive in the mail by May 1. Shoppers outside those categories will not be as easy to identify, the retailer said, but they can call 1-888-BestBuy and offer either a receipt or a credit card statement as proof of purchase.
“The beauty of this offer is that it doesn’t require our customers to give up their HD DVD player,” chief marketing officer Barry Judge said in the statement. “We know that many people who purchased these players have HD DVD movies that they would like to continue to watch. We’re telling our customers they can keep their players to play these movies as well as their older DVDs and use the $50 to treat themselves to anything else in our stores.”
Starting today, Best Buy will also include HD DVD players in its Online Trade-In Center at http://www.bestbuytradein.com. Consumers who want to trade in an HD DVD player—whether purchased from Best Buy or another retailer—will be able to use an online estimator tool to find the trade-in value of their HD DVD player.
If that amount is acceptable, they can then register with the site, ship the player to Best Buy’s receiving facility, and get the trade-in value in the form of a Best buy gift card about a week after Best Buy gets the item.
Best Buy’s trade-in site already pays out in gift cards for a range of “gently used” electronics consumers have no more use for, from computers and digital cameras to game consoles and Apple iPods.
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