Gateway kills the Connected DVD player?

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Gateway kills the Connected DVD player?

Gateway Connected DVD player One of my favorite devices and the source of hundreds of comments here and dozens of sales of the unit, may just be dead. The official Gateway DVD page no longer lists it for sale, even though it is mentioned in the page's title tag. Over the past few weeks, prices on the unit had fallen to just over $100, so it's not really too big a suprise to hear it's now gone from the page. They're now moving the DVD recorder at just $149.

If the change is permanent, it's a bummer to see it go, but hopefully they took it down to instead launch an updated unit (hey, I can dream, can't I?). If they combined the networking with a DVD player and recorder, I would jump at the chance to own one.

by Matt Haughey October 11, 2004 in Products

Comments

Gateway is slowly abandoning their consumer electronics lines. I believe they've dropped their Media Center PC, too.

http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,697322,00.html

Posted by: Brian at Oct 11, 2004 4:28:44 PM

Weird, their TVs are still selling like hotcakes. I assume they're cutting all the dead weight, all the things that aren't huge profit centers.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Oct 11, 2004 4:53:06 PM

Yep, Gateway is restructuring and refocusing their business yet again. The Gateway Stores lost money as did alot of their consumer electronic lines. The stores are closed and the consumer lines are going away.

Posted by: Scott at Oct 11, 2004 9:57:06 PM

They completely abandoned the DMP-X20 MP3 players. If you have one that breaks, they will tell you to "take it to a local electronics store" for service. Personally, I'd never buy another Gateway product. Ever.

Posted by: Bruce at Oct 12, 2004 7:01:53 AM

A little sad to see the Gateway branded box go, but when I learned about this several months ago I ended up going with the GoVideo D2730 anyway. It's got essentially the same guts and runs on the same digital5 middleware as do several other boxes selling under different brands. Plus it was a bit cheaper, slightly better looking (to me), and they had one sitting on the shelf in my local Good Guys that I could go poke at.

If I had to guess, it's actually competition that's making this uneconomical for Gateway. Plus, there's some indication that Gateway customer service doesn't really *get* consumer electronics. On one forum the caller was asked something like "Have you tried resintalling Windows from the CD?"

Posted by: Mike at Oct 13, 2004 9:35:31 AM

I ordered the connected DVD player from Gateway on September 20th and I'm not sure I'm ever going to get it! The ship date has been pushed back four times, and I just called today and was told their "order status system is down, call back tomorrow." I was so excited when I ordered it, now I don't expect to receive it. I'm just playing along to see how long Gateway is going to drag this out.

The GoVideo D2730 looks good, but I was looking to stay under $175. Any other products out there that compare?

Posted by: Will at Oct 26, 2004 12:08:26 AM

I too ordered mine on Sept. 20th. I just got an update yesterday that it's shipping and I should get mine tomorrow. We'll see.

Posted by: sport-o at Nov 3, 2004 1:35:14 PM

Mike or Will, let me know if you're interested in buying mine. I've had it for about 4 months, works great, I just don't need it anymore since I bought a new Windows Media Center PC and it hooks right to my TV :D

Let me know, 100 bucks, and it's yours.

Posted by: Ray Espinal at Nov 4, 2004 10:40:37 AM

sport-o - I'm interested - please email me at bigboy AT winisp DOT net (don't want spam that's why I'm spelling it out :)

Posted by: bigboy at Nov 5, 2004 5:32:54 PM

Sorry - that was Ray Espinal - I am interested, not sport-o. :)

By the way - is your unit ADC-320 ?

Posted by: bigboy at Nov 5, 2004 5:36:41 PM