Blu-ray vs. every other consumer technology (2010) - Page 4

Americans and most Europeans don't need a visa to go to HK.

The reason the visa for the PRC is so expensive now is that they adopted something called "reciprocal fees" which means they charge the same amount to certain countries that those countries charge for Chinese citizens. Bush, in his infinite wisdom, (well, his administration, anyway) decided to quadruple visa fees to the US. China rightfully got pissed off, and reciprocated.

Heh, we're probably coming out ahead. I've seen a huge number of Chinese tourists in Hawaii...actually I saw a huge number in Vegas too.

Still, probably better off not being prickish about it and move it back to what it was.

Definitely time to move out of Hong Kong!

I'm doing well with Blu-Ray for my home theater, though I don't expect it in my computers.

I really haven't seen a legal download or streaming alternative that looks anywhere nearly as nice on my display, and Netflix by mail is pretty inexpensive for what I get.

Bingo. Do you think the content providers will ever get the hint?

I own all the Star Wars DVDs, but I acquired the 1080p versions of the films through the only means possible, even though it took weeks and ate up massive storage space.

George Lucas and others: If you want to combat piracy, give us the fucking option!

Think about the future.
Does anybody really expect any variety of discs with moving parts which cause more problems to survive?

Dude, I looked it up on a whim (who knows, may want to go play tourist in China sometime). It's:

$130 for single entry.
$130 for double entry.
$130 for multiple entry for 6 months
$130 for multiple entry for 1 year
$130 for multiple entry for 2 years

http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/hzqz/zgqz/t84246.htm

If I was an expat in HK I'd just pony up the $130 for 2 years and hit the Walmart in Shenzhen all I wanted.

Except that you're not allowed to get a multiple entry visa to China for tourism purposes, and you have to prove a business relationship with a company in China in advance. It should be possible to find a friend with a factory or something like that, but with HK retail prices as they are (very very low, for all but luxury goods), there's just not that much in China to make it worth the effort. In addition, there is a security risk for foreigners who visit Shenzhen.

That's a lot of efforts just to get to a Walmart. Is Walmart a magic store in HK or in Asia? In the states, Walmart is not the best place to go to seek best deals on Blu-ray movies. Even Best buys/Frys have better deals on new releases for the opening week. Thus far, most online stores, like Amazon, offer the best deal on blu-ray and it has been true for at least last 4 years. I miss the BOGO deals during holidays, back in the days.

James Cameron says that 50% of Avatar pre-orders are for the blu-ray version. But please Apple, just keep waiting for"sales to really take off" before you adopt it

I wonder who would pre-order a movie month in advance. I am pretty certain this is very very very small representation of the market, but more aligned with niche HT enthusaists. Actually, 50% is kind of disappointing, I would think it would be much higher assuming most enthusists have already been sold to HDM viewing.

I better place my order on Amazon to boost up the pre-order status.

Apple can wait.....

Edited:

Nevermind. Current Blu-ray combo version on Amazon is not 3D. Perhaps, I will wait, too.

Thanks, Captain Spin! Create your own definition of the market and then dismiss the numbers as negative, based on how they fit into your made-up definition.

When did Apple say they were waiting for sales to take off to include Blu-Ray? I thought it was the licensing issues, (i.e. "Bag of hurt...").

I included a link in the comment of mine you quoted

It links to a Macrumors article about the town hall meeting Apple held after the announcement of the iPad; during it, Steve supposedly said "Blu-Ray software is a mess, and Apple will wait until sales really start to take off before implementing it." They've said something to that effect in the past though, as well. Like in the fall of 2008, when Steve said, "we're waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.". I'd say 50% pre-orders qualifies as "taken off in the marketplace" status.

Spin what?... The emperor's new clothes? 50% of 1% is 0.5% out of 100.... Do you really think 50% pre-orders, in month advance, represent the sales trend and buying habits for rest of the world?

I tend to buy Blu-Rays that are BR+Digital Copy. That covers all my uses: HDTV and mobile.

Including Digital Copy is worth more to me than including a DVD in as much as it saves me from ripping the DVD for mobile use and archival. I've purchased a few DVDs a couple times when the kids ruined them. Now I just let them watch em on the computer or my iPhone.

I wish Jeff had left your political commentary in; your political alignment makes perfect sense given your distorted methods of reason.

Yes, home theatre enthusiasts are more likely to pre-order films, but you cannot extend that to mean that only home theatre enthusiasts pre-order films; Apple allows people to pre-order films on iTunes as well, and people who pay $20 for Apple's "HD" content are most certainly not home theatre enthusiasts. No, when they tally the Avatar disc sales after the first week it's been released they will not find that 50% of shoppers purchased the blu-ray version; I have no delusions that it would be the case. But 50% of pre-orders is a significant number, and is a positive indicator of blu-ray adoption. I have no idea how you came up with these "50% of 1% is .5%" nonsense; how you concluded that pre-orders only account for 1% of sales is beyond me. How you concluded that no further blu-ray discs would be sold beyond the pre-orders is even more of a mystery.

I don't suppose Apple will be selling any more iPads once they ship out the pre-orders to the Mac enthusiasts next Saturday, either? Shut the factories down, boys! Do you not think that comparing the pre-orders of the Wi-Fi version to the 3G version is a means of indicating roughly how well one will sell compared to the other in the following months? Would one argue that the 3G models' sales are inflated because only Apple enthusiasts opt for the most expensive models, and make pre-orders? No, no one would not.

Who made what conclusion? I was just commenting on your ridiculous extrapolation of blu-ray mass market adaption rate based on pre-order purchasing pattern on Avatar. Also demonstrating logic of your own spin.... which proves ridiculous even to yourself.

I am sure apple has much educated and talented consultants providing more objective spin to the matter. Hence, the wait from apple implementing blu-ray. Perhaps, the decision is more political, but who knows.

Actually, MacOS is not a good platform for HTPC, yet. It will require time and available 3rd party applications support for playback and streaming(Netflix, Blockbuster, Vudu, amazon, etc.) some yet available even on winpc. Perhaps, some users may be happy with streaming only from iTunes and Netflix for now plus blu-ray support.

Except, I wasn't trying to imply that Avatar pre-order figures directly equate to adoption rate; I was just trying to show that it seems blu-ray sales have "really taken off", which is what Apple claims they were waiting for. You know as well as I do that if 50% of a movie's pre-orders were from the iTunes store, people would be shouting from the rooftops that physical media is dead — long live digital distribution. I'm suggesting something far more modest here, and that is simply that Blu-Ray is doing well. Well enough, I think, for Apple to stop treating it like Betamax.

In my opinion, Avatar pre-sales are not indicative of the mass market. Not at all.

Instead, what it shows are the buying habits of a niche group. The vast preponderance of people who pre-order movies are likely to be avid movie watchers, people who put lots of time into their hobby. These are the same people who spend more than an average amount on their home theater experience, and have been quick to adopt blu-ray. The visual effects and genre of the film are also probably skewed to people who also prefer blu-ray.

Blu-ray sales are certainly climbing. Though that case is probably best made with stats other than pre-orders of Avatar.

Hopefully they break out the blu-ray vs DVD sales numbers the week after Avatar comes out and then we can have some numbers that can't be discredited. Or would you guys find a way to take issues with those as well?

lol, taking this a bit personally?

Those numbers would certainly be indicative of Avatar disc sales.

I'm just baffled by how much blu-ray has to beat the pants off of digital downloads before Apple will stop pretending that it doesn't exist.

That's what you think is going on? Apple is "pretending blu-ray doesn't exist"?

But yeah, I too wish Apple would start supporting blu-ray playback. My 27" i7Mac double as a TV screen with an HDHomerun, netflix streaming, etc. Adding blu-ray playback to its capabilities would make me quite happy, even after having to pay for an optical drive upgrade.

LOL... I think apple knows blu-ray. Just don't want to use it, yet. That's all.


At one point, I was hoping iTunes to let me keep all my digital movie library within iTunes, but I think apple is ignoring that as well.

Happy Easter Sunday everyone,

Blu-Ray now has a spec for 100-128GB discs. Not backward compatible though, you'll need a new player.

For those who didn't believe the report that half of Avatar pre-orders were blu-ray was any indication of actual sales:

But by all means Apple, just keep on saying you're waiting for blu-ray to "really take off" before you offer it in a Mac.

Are you really not understanding or are you purposefully mischaracterizing my point about what Avatar pre-sales were indicative of?

My 27" iMac would have a blu-ray drive if Apple were offering it as an option. But that doesn't mean i'm pretending that pre-sales of a special-effects movie is the best indicator of the overall market preference between media formats. Something like, oh I don't know, overall market figures would be better for characterizing the entire market. It isn't like they only collected data on Avatar sales.

Those numbers are meaningful and significant, but they're only for one movie. To see how the entire market is doing, we should look at figures for the entire market.

I don't think I was mischaracterizing. When I presented the pre-order numbers you felt the blu-ray pre-orders were disproportionately high because the kind of people who pre-order movies are the home theatre enthusiast niche. Well now we have actual sales figures, and 4 in 6 physical copies sold were blu-ray; not drastically different than what the pre-order figures suggested.


I don't disagree. But when Apple started putting DVD players in iMacs, I bet it was before any single movie had sold even one in ten copies on DVD.

Hm..... PS3 genre represents all BD sales pattern? I remember someone covering this regards to type of genre release being another niche behavior. We've seen this trend before during the release of spiderman, x-men, 007, and etc. Which was just a spike rather than sustainable pattern. Nonetheless, 4 million copies are 4 million copies. This is definite improvement over the past 5 years. Darn, it's been almost half of decade and we're getting excited about 4 million copies? Does BD even beat LD in retrospect to 5 year mark of LD?

...Are you serious? All of the laserdiscs ever sold probably didn't equal one million copies. While you're skoffing at making a big deal about only four million copies, keep in mind that the DVD only sold six million copies, and it's been around for thirteen years. Blu-ray is just coming up on 4 years old. In both cases, I'm going by when the first players shipped in the U.S.

Are you two arguing over the number of LD players sold, or the number of disc titles sold for LD?

Well since Blu-ray is outpacing DVD that would be a yes...

Who's arguing?... Yes, I was inquiring about the number of disc titles sold for LD.

Really?... Interesting, I would've thought the announce would have been out in the avsforum first.

Sorry, didn't mean for that to sound like it did.
I just wondered whether one of you was talking players, while the other meant titles.

I've never seen any figure of US home uptake of LD players to be greater than 1% of households (maybe a million players at its height), so 4 million of just one movie at release is doing quite a bit better than the entire LD format did in the US. Non-US acceptance is a different matter, I don't know those figures any more.

Yes, I did make that statement, but it was a supporting point, not the main point. By vaguely rewording and fixating on that one sentence, you've created a strawman argument. If you want to know my main point, try looking at the first and last sentence of that post you linked to.

On top of that, the sentence you've fixated on was correct. By the numbers you posted, pre-sales were indeed skewed toward blu-ray. Pre-sales were 50% and normal sales were 40%. (Or is that "4 in 6"?)

Combine this with the other supporting factors I list, and the overall point seems quite reasonable. That point is: Avatar pre-sales is not the best metric for assessing the overall market preference for blu-ray.

The reason why I pointed this out in the first place was that it seemed like a cherry-picked metric. Companies with a financial interest in the success of blu-ray obviously chose to push the publicity of the skewed metric. There isn't anything terribly wrong with that. But neither is there anything wrong with pointing out that more informative numbers are available.

It isn't like they only tracked Avatar sales. All sales were tracked and they chose to push the Avatar figures. This is partially because Avatar's popularity was phenomenal and Avatar stories get more air time. The other reason is because it represents their new, more expensive product as the "it" thing. It is good publicity, just not the most accurate way of representing blu-ray's position in the marketplace.

No big deal. I was just curious myself.

Come to think of it, the home theater hobby at the time was considered as a premium hobby. I don't remember movie viewing from home was as popular as it is now. Most public was happy with OTA TV programs. I guess DVD's and Cable TV, video rental stores like
Blockbuster made public evolve in this home theater market. Back in the days, 30+" TV was considered big screen TV so things have evolved quite a bit.

All in all, as I did note in my preview post, 4 million copies even for Avatar is an impressive progress. I do wish that future sales trend for BD follows this pattern for all releases, but I have my doubts.