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Blu-ray Discs Won't Be Cheap
frdmfghtr writes "Red Herring has a story on the forthcoming price of Sony Blu-Ray HD DVDs. At $23.45 wholesale, they aren't cheap. From the article: 'Some of the movies to be released in the first batch by Sony are The Fifth Element, Desperado, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, Legends of the Fall, and Terminator. Sony's wholesale price of $23.45 for Blu-ray discs is 56 percent more than the $14.99 it costs to buy a new DVD of Hitch from BestBuy.com. A Terminator DVD is available for $9.99.' Another reader suggested a link to an Ars Technica article with more information.
You missed an important point. The $23.45 is a wholesale price. When the wholesale price of the item is about 60% more than the retail price of a competing item, there's enough of a difference to sit up and take notice.
I should point out that "Sony Blu-Ray HD DVDs" is probabyly a bad phrase to use, as the main competetor to 'Blu-Ray' is 'HD-DVD' (Yes, HD applies to Blu-Ray too).
With regard to the competition, ZDNet has coverage of Blu-Rays expected cost compared to HD-DVD based on the retooling cost, which experts expect could be up to $1 billion worldwide for Blu-Ray, and one tenth of that for HD-DVD (Which relies on pretty simmilar technology to existing DVDs).
One other point which may help out HD-DVD is the materiel cost. HD-DVD uses the the same materiels as DVD, whereas Blu-Ray uses a "high-tech film layer currently produced only by Sony."
What might be most damaging for Blu-Ray however, is Microsoft's direct support for HD-DVD. They've already announced that Longhorn will support HD-DVD, and the XBox360 will be recieving an HD-DVD addon. (Its in various news sources that I won't ref here).
This may be a Betamax type thing where the technically superiour device doesn't win due to corporate activity.
Obligitory wikipedia links:
Blu-Ray
HD DVD
Betamax
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
If this is the price for a single layer Blue Rray dish then the cost is about 1$ per gig. Even 7 years ago the price of DVD's was more than $5 for a single layer and cd's had more memory for the dollar but then, as with all things the cost to produce it dropped drasticly and now DVD cost about the same as a CD.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Actually new VHS movies were somewhere between $80-100 (CDN) for most titles. There were very few sell-through VHS titles in the $25 range. The cheaper copies were either used or old titles of which the distributers wanted to rid themselves.
This didn't change much at all over the life of VHS.
I do agree with your comment on dvds though. They have become cheaper since they were first released.
What's the retail price for the average Xbox game versus wholesale on the average Xbox 360 game? How about the retail cost of a VHS _player_ versus the wholesale cost of a DVD player when DVD first debuted?
Early adopters will cough up the money without taking notice. Late adopters won't ever have a price difference to notice.
A B A C A B B
VHS movies had a rental window when they'd be sold to Blockbuster-style outfits for $80+ for a few months before dropping to $20-30 for everyone else to buy. DVDs never had rental pricing; they started at around $20-30 and went down from there as they got old and/or new "special editions" arrived on the shelves. I don't recall either format having an obscene initial cost for general consumption.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
OK, let's do some maths...
a DVD-18 double sided, double layer on both sides = 17.1 GB
Ultimate collection comes on 212 discs = 1700/212 = $8 per disc
Bluray discs (dual layer) are stated to be at least 46GB and at most 54GB
so, 17*212=3604GB in total for the collection.
54GB : 6404/54 = 119 discs * 23.45 = $2790.55
46GB : 6404/46 = 140 discs * 23.45 = $3283
So, in theory, it'll be way more expensive on BluRay. ** prepares to have maths shown to be wrong **
"They'll claim that in time, the price to the consumer will come down. (See also: "The history of compact disc pricing")."
For the benefit of our younger readers who might think CD prices have always been about the same: when I started buying them in 1984, I paid about $20 per CD, to play on my $250 CD player.
That's the equivalent of a $37 CD playing on a $460 CD player, kids!
By comparison, in 2003 the average price of a new CD was $13.42, and by the end of 2004, it was down to $12.95. In other words, CD prices have fallen by 2/3 in the time I've been buying them. I wish I could say the same thing about clothes, food and gas.
The point is: just be glad you were born in the 80's or 90's. You're paying 66% less for CDs than I was at your age, and if you happen to be a fan of P2P, you can get all the music you want for free. The other point is that people who try to tell you that CD prices haven't gone down are, quite simply, lying to you.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
"it can give you orders of magnitude higher resolution."
That statement is inaccurate.
NTSC DVD: 640x480=307200 pixels
HDTV: 1920x1080=2073600 pixels
2073600/307200=6.75
That isn't even a single order of magnitude more pixels - just little more than half. If we were comparing PAL instead of NTSC the difference with HDTV would be even less.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
The price of Blu-ray wholsales for $17.95 (which is the same price as when DVDs first launched), the $23.45 price point is for new-releases only.
Being that the average profit for large retailer for DVDs is ~$4, I would expect Blu-ray disks to cost $20-$25 catalog titles, and $25-30 for new-releases depending on how agressively the retailer is trying to sell them. Many retailers (BestBuy, Walmart, etc) also also sell them close to cost to bring foot traffic into their stores.
IMHO, seems like a resonable price for 1080p movies, the title of this thread should really say "Blu-ray Discs Won't Be Cheap (but not that expensive either)"
Also correction for Zonk, the poster of this thread.
>>Movies like "Hitch" and "Terminator 2", etc. are catalog releases, and won't be sold wholesale at $23.95.
>>Also, for the statement "forthcoming price of Sony Blu-Ray HD DVDs", Blu-ray isn't HD-DVD. They are different formats.
My sarcasm detector must be malfuntioning. I mean you were being sarcastic right? Unless my memory is also malfuntioning, DVD's come in a protective casing.
That's as maybe, but get a DVD from the library, used, Netflix, etc. Apparently some people do use belt sanders on their discs. I've often had to use DVD decrypter just to recover a playable copy of a disc I was legally entitled to view, and even that doesn't always work.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
DVD's max resolution is 720x480 30 interlaced frames per second. That's 720x240, 60 fields per second. That's 10,368,000 pixels/second.
BluRay goes beyond HDTV (1080i or 720p) to 1080p. That is 1920x1080 60 frames per second. That's 124,416,000 pixels/second.
That's about 1.1x, which is an order of magnitude. That comes in just under the wire as "orders of magnitude" more resolution.
And before you say "my DVD does progressive", it may output progressive, but the data on the disc is interlaces, your DVD is doing an intelligent algorithm to turn 720x480 interlaced 60 fields per second into true 720x480 progressive 24 frames per second. But movie progressive reverse pulldown actually produces even LESS actual data than the DVD can carry, so your DVD player doing this doesn't increase the information carried, just presents it in a much more pleasing manner.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95