Toshiba has HD DVD players at around two hundred dollars. The cheapest Blu-ray machine you can buy costs roughly twice that, and Sony seems in no hurry to change it.

On the face of it that is a decisive advantage in a consumer format war, where the cheaper standard has usually won. It is also, I think, an attempt to win a fight on a board that stopped being used.

Back in February I argued that the war was being settled by drives placed rather than players sold, because Sony had put a Blu-ray mechanism inside every PlayStation while Microsoft made its HD DVD drive an accessory. Eight months on that has not changed, and the arithmetic has got worse for Toshiba rather than better.

Consider what a price cut has to achieve here. Toshiba needs to sell enough two hundred dollar players to outpace a games console that sells for its own reasons and happens to contain the rival format. Sony is effectively subsidising drives into homes out of the games division, and no player manufacturer can match a subsidy funded by a different business unit. Toshiba is not competing with Sony’s player pricing. It is competing with Sony’s willingness to lose money on something else.

There is a second problem with going cheap that gets discussed less. A two hundred dollar player is bought by someone reluctant to spend, and a reluctant buyer does not go on to build a disc collection at twenty-five dollars a title. The cheap machine attracts exactly the customer least likely to generate the follow-on purchases that make the format worth owning. Meanwhile a PS3 owner paid four hundred dollars for reasons of their own and has the drive anyway.

So the strategy sells hardware into the segment with the lowest attachment rate, against an opponent whose hardware arrives as a side effect.

I do not blame Toshiba for trying. Price is the only lever they have left, given the studio alignment, and doing nothing is worse than doing something that probably fails.

But price cuts of this size in a two-format market usually mean somebody has run out of other arguments, and the retailers can read that as well as anyone. Shelf space gets allocated on where the buyer thinks the category is going, not on where it is, and a format that is discounting hard while the other one is not tends to lose that decision quietly some months before it loses in public.