Blu-ray vs. HD DVD (2008) - Page 65

Originally Posted by Carniphage


...

Flashback to the 1800s. Someone figured it was cheaper to move goods and people via railroad than on horses.
Problem: There isn't enough capacity in rail network.
You either: Increase the capacity of the rail network or conclude that horses are the future. And try to breed a really big horse.

C.

]

Originally Posted by OldCodger73

Actually, your analogy is a little off. Railroads put hauling freight by canals obsolete. When the railroads laid sufficient trackage they did become the transportation of choice for moving large loads over distance, but horse cartage was still the norm for short distances and for distribution transportation until it was displaced by the motor vehicle.

Originally Posted by Carniphage

I do agree that it will be some time before the internet replaces TV Broadcast (via Satellite, Antenna and Cable) - Families consume many hours of TV a day and broadcast is still an inexpensive way to shift video in bulk. So I think we will still be seeing broadcast media, of some sort, in 10 years time.

But displacing physical disk distribution can happen much sooner. And has of course is kicking-off with Netflix and Apple in a perfectly viable way. Sony plan to start doing direct downloads soon.

The games industry is about to make a similar transition. The motivation is to cut-out the middle-men retailers who take about half of the revenue (simply for selling a box)

C.

Originally Posted by jimmac

Trust me this battle has been going on for 30 years with the movie companies. They'll be a much tougher nut to crack than the record companies. While the record companies were looking the other way for years with cassete tape copys of records the movie companies were up in arms about the VCR. Yes we won eventually but they haven't stopped being obsessed with people having free rein over their product. Even though they make more money they still want total control. If it was up to them we wouldn't have home video or computers to copy with. Absolutely paranoid about it.

Also there's currently only so much bandwidth. An HD movie takes up a lot more room than a song.

So if this was so easy how come iTunes doesn't let you burn ( or write to a portable device ) HD video right now?

Originally Posted by Northgate

I think the reason the movie studio's are so adamant about copy protection is because most people only watch a whole movie once, sometimes twice. Beyond that, that sale is lost forever. They've only got one or two chances to get you to pay for their content.

Originally Posted by Carniphage

The tighter they squeeze the more slips through their fingers. The problem with all DRM is it punishes the consumers and rewards the pirates.

Legitimate purchasers of a DRM disk, get less for their money. They can't back up their content, or move it to another medium once the player goes out of style. DRM copies are less valuable to consumers.

The piracy option is not just cheaper, it ends up being faster and leaves you with media you can do whatever you want to. ie. Put it on you iPhone.

And in the meantime, these anti-piracy efforts have done precisely *nothing* to prevent good quality copies of all movies hitting the nets. So we get this bizarre situation where illegitimate copies are preferable to the the real thing.

The studios need to adopt methods which rewards legitimate purchase and discourages casual copying.

Here's my suggestions:

1) Improve the experience in theaters. Currently it sucks. Insist on quality standards for picture, audio etc.

2) Reward consumers with bonus content , prizes for their loyalty - and the best, most flexible copies of the media. Maintain contact with those customers and especially reward fans who help create a buzz and keep the product alive.

3) Deter casual copying with watermarking.

4) Acknowledge there are two forms of viewer. Casual watch-once-viewers and hardcore fans. Create different products, with different price points for the two audiences.

5) Target commercial piracy aggressively.


C.

The tighter they squeeze the more slips through their fingers. The problem with all DRM is it punishes the consumers and rewards the pirates.

Originally Posted by jimmac

Kind of like our anti drug policies? Well to use that analogy that's been going on longer than 10 years. You just don't get how stubborn these people are.

You're talking about people like Jack Valenti ( dead now ) who testified before congress about the evils of the VCR and how it would destroy the movie industry.

That was back in the early 80's. They haven't changed much since then even though we won that battle. They want strict control. Getting them to give up that idea will take a while. It would be like watching paint dry.

Originally Posted by marzetta7

Apple's Margin-Reducing Product that Wasn't: Blu-ray?

http://arstechnica.com/journals/appl...-wasnt-blu-ray

Originally Posted by Carniphage

1. If you own a collection of movies and TV - having that collection on a server of some kind (a video jukebox) is massively more convenient than having hundreds of physical disks.
Physical disks are a pain in the ass. Once you switch, you'll never want to go back.
Many people with extensive DVD collections are transferring their library to files, because they can finally get their content in convenient way.

Originally Posted by Frank777

The Margin-Reducing transition was clearly the unibody process on the MacBook/MBPro line.

Originally Posted by Cory Bauer

Like I said earlier in this thread, if I'm going to sit through a film for two hours, I think I can take thirty seconds to remove the movie from a case and put the disc in a tray. Especially if that means getting the best picture and sound quality possible in return for my extra 20 seconds of strenuous, laborious work. Movies are not like songs; you're not going to decide to change it every 3 minutes, so you don't need instant access to every movie you own instantaneously. And unlike the inevitable drive failure that comes with an all-digital collection, the only way I can lose my thousands of dollars of physical media at once is by fire or theft neither of which are likely scenarios.

Piggies at the trough

The Blu-ray Disc Association hoped for a massive cash bonanza as millions of consumers discovered that standard DVDs looked awful on HDTV. To cash in they loaded Blu-ray licenses with costly fees. Blu-ray doesnt just suck for consumers: small producers cant afford it either.

According to Digital Content Producer Blu-ray doesnt cut it for business:

Recordable discs dont play reliably across the range of Blu-ray players - so you cant do low-volume runs yourself.
Service bureau reproduction runs $20 per single layer disc in quantities of 300 or less.
Hollywood style printed/replicated Blu-ray discs are considerably cheaper once you reach the thousand unit quantity: just $3.50 per disc.
High-quality authoring programs like Sony Blu-print or Sonic Solutions Scenarist cost $40,000.
The Advanced Access Content System - the already hacked DRM - has a one-time fee of $3000 plus a per project cost of almost $1600 plus $.04 per disk. And who defines project?
Then the Blu-ray disc Association charges another $3000 annually to use their very exclusive - on 4% of all video disks! - logo.
Thats why you dont see quirky indie flicks on Blu-ray. Small producers cant afford it - even though they shoot in HDV and HD.

A forward looking strategy would include:

Recognition that consumers dont need Blu-ray. It is a nice-to-have and must be priced accordingly.

Accept the money spent on Blu-ray is gone and will never earn back the investment. Then you can begin thinking clearly about how to maximize Blu-ray penetration.
The average consumer will probably pay $50 more for a Blu-ray player that is competitive with the average up-sampling DVD player. Most of the current Blu-ray players are junk: slow, feature-poor and way over-priced.

Disk price margins cant be higher than DVDs and probably should be less. The question the studios need to ask is: do we want to be selling disks in 5 years? No? Then keep it up. Turn distribution over to your very good friends at Comcast, Apple and Time Warner. Youll be like Procter & Gamble paying Safeway to stock your products.

Fire all the market research firms telling you how great it is going to be. They are playing you. Your #1 goal: market share. High volume is your only chance to earn your way out of this mess and keep some control of your distribution.

Originally Posted by OldCodger73

murch, you've been crying doom and gloom about BD ever since the original HD/BD thread started. Will BD survive? Will it become a niche product? Who knows, only time will tell. In the meantime, I'll continue to enjoy BD movies on my "clunky, overpriced, feature poor" player.

Originally Posted by bitemymac

No one doubts about having to enjoy HiDef discs we already own, but it is becoming more apparent that BD is not going to succeed even the path of LD. Whatever the reason for the poor consumer acceptance, it is real.

Originally Posted by bitemymac

No one doubts about having to enjoy HiDef discs we already own, but it is becoming more apparent that BD is not going to succeed even the path of LD. Whatever the reason for the poor consumer acceptance, it is real.

Originally Posted by Cory Bauer

I'm pretty sure Blu-Ray has already well surpassed laserdisc in terms of success. I doubt Laserdisc ever accounted for 12% of physical media sales. Nor do I believe it ever had the steady release of popular titles that Blu-Ray has now. There's not a single desirable new release that isn't published on both DVD and Blu-Ray.

Originally Posted by Cory Bauer

In another year, since Blu-Ray players are backwards compatible with DVDs (and most of the time make them look even better), we'll start to see DVD player shelf space being taken over by Blu-Ray players. Much in the same way people weren't necessarily willing to pay more for an HDTV, consumers can't walk out of a store with a television anymore that isn't high definition.

Originally Posted by OldCodger73

bite, that's just your perception. There's always nay-sayers out there. Time will tell but if BD doesn't replace DVD, IMO it'll succeed on a larger scale than LD did.

Originally Posted by bitemymac

Has average disc sales on blu-ray surpassed 12% of total optical disc sales? This would be great news if it's true.

Originally Posted by Cory Bauer

Blu-Ray has been accounting for 12% of the DVD Pie fairly regularly, yes. In fact, they say 18% of Hulks optical media sales were Blu-Ray. That's a pretty fat niche.

Originally Posted by bitemymac

Thanks for the link. The data looked good for a second, but when you look closely, the data by Nielson is misleading as usual. Even if the presented data is absolutely accurate, the pie percentage shown from the link is by $ amount spent, but not comparing the number of discs sold. I would guess that average movie disc price would easily cost 2X to 4X more for the Blu-ray discs which means that number of discs sold is still less than or equal to about 5-7% of the overall market. Yes, it is still interesting market size.

Originally Posted by Cory Bauer

That's good to know. I did not realize the neilson numbers were dollars and not units sold; however, Blu-Ray disc are at the very most less than double their barebones DVD counterparts, and usually just 1/3 more than their "two disc special edition DVD" counterparts.

Originally Posted by Cory Bauer

That's good to know. I did not realize the neilson numbers were dollars and not units sold;

Weve gotten another update from our [Paramount] studio and industry sources on great titles that are in the planning or production stages (or both) for release on Blu-ray Disc in 2009. You can reasonably expect to see most of the Star Trek feature films on the format, as well as Chinatown, Deep Impact, The Ten Commandments, Sunset Boulevard, Apocalypse Now, Breakfast at Tiffanys, Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance and The Elephant Man. According to our sources, theres also an outside chance that you MIGHT see Titanic on Blu-ray before the end of 2009. Keep your fingers crossed..

Originally Posted by onlooker

It's rough economy that is for sure. Blu Ray player sales will be just as poor as everything else this holiday season. If we still had that Regan/Bush - Bush/Quale escalating economy in place, Blu Ray would probably be in 70% more homes than it is, but we don't. You can thank Bill Clinton for surfing that Tsunami tidal wave of good fortune all way into shore. He wanted Change. That's what we got, that's all we got in our pockets. You shouldn't try and change anything that isn't fundamentally broken. That clown pulled the bottom out from under the strongest economy America had ever seen. I saw it coming, and watched it dissipate. It was so clear. I can not believe some people then wanted to elect his wife. They f****d it up once, that was enough for me.

Originally Posted by OldCodger73

Back on topic, it's being widely reported that BD players will drop into <$200 category this Christmas. Hopefully that should give sales a boost.

Originally Posted by onlooker

It's rough economy that is for sure. Blu Ray player sales will be just as poor as everything else this holiday season. If we still had that Regan/Bush - Bush/Quale escalating economy in place, Blu Ray would probably be in 70% more homes than it is, but we don't. You can thank Bill Clinton for surfing that Tsunami tidal wave of good fortune all way into shore. He wanted Change. That's what we got, that's all we got in our pockets. You shouldn't try and change anything that isn't fundamentally broken. That clown pulled the bottom out from under the strongest economy America had ever seen. I saw it coming, and watched it dissipate. It was so clear. I can not believe some people then wanted to elect his wife. They f****d it up once, that was enough for me.

Originally Posted by Walter Slocombe

..Still, it is THIS thread, crazyier crap has been posted.. see Frank above

Originally Posted by Frank777

The biggest hurdle for Blu-Ray is that even when it's a $200. buy, its really a $2000. buy.

You have to buy the player, a new widescreen hdtv, good AV cables and upgrade your cable subscription.

There are already stories about people having the proper setup and yet still buying DVDs because they're cheaper.

Originally Posted by OldCodger73

Your revisionist history is highly amusing. It's almost like reading a delusional fantasy.

Originally Posted by Frank777

I'm simply saying that those 'extra' costs factor into the decision to purchase a BR player. That's all.

Originally Posted by Frank777

The biggest hurdle for Blu-Ray is that even when it's a $200. buy, its really a $2000. buy.

You have to buy the player, a new widescreen hdtv, good AV cables and upgrade your cable subscription.

The actual player price isn't really the problem anymore. Headed into a recession, the problem is that enough people won't buy the player if they can't afford the add-ons. There are already stories about people having the proper setup and yet still buying DVDs because they're cheaper.

Originally Posted by Carniphage

You must have noticed that when it comes to human behavior, people just do whatever they want, and the law is just an irritant. Anti drug policies seem to have zero impact.

The record industry wasted years trying to prevent something that had already happened. The genie was out of the box. Adding ever more padlocks to that box was just a waste of money. DRM infected CDs drove even more people away!

The movie people are doing the same thing; comically trying to hang-on to a business model from the previous century. But I agree they'll take some time to reconsider. After a few years, curiosity gets the better of them. They peek inside the box and realise that it's empty.

What the industry does won't change how people chose to use media or technology. They don't have that power.
But the industry *can* attempt to monetize what people are doing.

Alternatively they can just sit there and watch their business model slowly evaporate.

C.

Also today, do you recall that rant I posted a couple weeks back about how the talk of Blu-ray's demise was absurd? Our friend Ben Drawbaugh weighed in on the subject over at Engadget as well, and he's clearly of the same mind. Ben and I were e-mailing back and forth recently, and he made a few additional points about Blu-ray and the notion of downloading that I thought were interesting. First, he noted that while Apple was recently thrilled to announce program-to-date high-def TV series sales of $5 million via iTunes download, Blu-ray sold $17 million worth of titles that same week alone. Ben also sent the following, which made me smile...

"Top ten reasons that prove Hollywood is only playing in the downloads world while focusing its real efforts on Blu-ray.

10 - Movie commercials say "now available on Blu-ray and DVD" never mentions downloads.
9 - You can't rent TV shows from any download service, but you can buy them on disc.
8 - 24 hour rental window.
7 - 30 day rental limit.
6 - Extras only available on discs
5 - Can't rent HD movies on the PC (only on boxes like the 360, Vudu etc).
4 - Pulls previously available movies from the selection.
3 - About a 30 day window between when a title is released on disc and on download services.
2 - Digital copies are now included with many discs.
1 - Can't buy HD movies from any service."

Those are good points all. To them, I'll add the fact that according to VideoScan, Blu-ray now regularly hits as much as 10% of total sales of new release titles. In addition, there are now over 1,000 Blu-ray Disc titles released or scheduled for release according to the DVD Release Report (1,057 to be exact). That's a significant milestone after just two full years of format availability. Let's go further... as Blu-ray player pricing drops below $200 and even $150 this holiday season and into 2009, buying a Blu-ray player will become a no-brainer. Just a couple days ago, I was at the dentist and the hygienist was talking about how her DVD player had just died and she needed to get a new one. She asked about "this Blu-ray thing," and when I told her that she could get a BD player for under $200 and that it would play all her DVDs too, she was sold on the spot. That story is going to be repeated millions of times next year. ANYONE who walks into a Best Buy or a Wal-Mart looking to replace a broken cheap DVD player is going to learn about cheap Blu-ray/DVD players and think, "Why the hell not?" Have I mentioned the fact that Hollywood is being relentless in getting the word about Blu-ray Disc out? You're not going to see that with downloading. Why, you ask? You want the real clincher? The REAL reason why Blu-ray is going to be around a long time, and downloading isn't going to take over for a very long time? It's not just bandwidth, folks, though that's a problem too and will be for a while. No, the real roadblock is profit. Hollywood studios will NEVER be able to sell you a downloaded movie for $29.99 or $39.99. It'll NEVER happen. That would be like telling hardcore gamers that they can't buy games on physical discs anymore, but they still have to pay $60 for the latest, greatest titles. What this means is that downloading - best case - is going to take over the movie rental market, not sales. Any movie fans who want extras beyond just the movie itself, and want to actually own the content rather than continually rent it again and again, are going to stick with physical media. And that means Blu-ray. Anyone who tells you otherwise A) doesn't understand the home video industry or the movie enthusiast market, B) is a downloading advocate, or C) preferred HD-DVD and still feels sour grapes. That's not to say everyone who watches DVDs will make the switch to Blu, but this whole idea that Blu-ray isn't here to stay or is going to remain a super-über-high-end niche product is a load of malarkey. I'm just saying. Ben too. (Thanks again, Ben - great talking with you!)

Originally Posted by Frank777

What's crazy about my comment? HD media has always had that problem.

The whole world has caught a financial flu, with the American market particularly hard hit.
I was watching a show yesterday that said 1 in every 9 houses in areas of Cleveland (I think) has been foreclosed.