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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.
Hi, remember me? I'm the first DVD you ever bought. Back in 1997, I cost you $25 and had no extra features. I eventually went down in price.
Would you like to meet my friend, VHS? He cost $25 a pop back in 1980, had no features, and was a linear format that degraded over each use. Maybe being from the past makes me naive (sorry no dots for you), but, it seems that the point of this article -- although factual -- is totally irrelavent.
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But seriously, why wouldn't they be more expensive? You get a much, much nicer end product. Why would you pay $10 for a hamburger at Outback when you can get one for a dollar at Mickey D's? They both feed you (poorly!), but one is much more pleasant to eat than the other. How about a music file? Are you happy with a 64kbps encoding of a tune, or do you prefer a lossless encoded version?
It's the same with an HD movie -- it's much more pleasant to look at HD than an NTSC quality movie.
John
1) They'll claim that in time, the price to the consumer will come down. (See also: "The history of compact disc pricing").
2) It won't.
3) People will continue to buy them in droves anyways.
4) Profit!
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Nothings cheap when its first released. I remember buying 1x blank CD's for $13 a long long time ago ... give it a couple years and prices will drop.
New things that are better than old things cost more than the old things! Quick, grab me some reporters, I've gots me a SCOOP!
What a surprise sony's upping the cost of movies. Perhaps if we're lucky they'll add some new and improved root kit that opens more holes in our systems. Seriously, sonys stratagy is: up price, make everyone rebuy everything for 3 times the price they paid before, screw consumers with stealth software. Yep. Nothing to see.
Don't buy them...
Deleted
Just the other day the community was blasting Verizon for thinking about extorting Google. Now Verizon is providing Slashdot readers with sneak previews of article postings. Is there an alternative to Slashdot?
Only the Slashdot and like-minded crowd, that's for sure. Average Joe movie-watcher on the street knows nothing about Blu-Ray. When the DVD came along to be the next big format, it was quite clear to the consumer what the difference was between it and VHS. In this case the lines are a bit more blurry. Let's put it this way; I can explain to and show my 48 year old uncle why he might want to start watching DVD's instead of VHS; i'll have a much harder time telling him why he wants to buy a Blu-Ray movie as opposed to a cheaper DVD of the same title.
Bring me any consumer technology which doesn't have a higher price point when it first hits the public, and then lowers when demand increased. Let's try an easy one: DVD's. I got my player in 1998 and almost every DVD on the market cost upwards of $30. Did I still buy them? Yes! Why? Better resolution, amazing sound, no annoying tape winding, rewinding to find the spot I left off at!!!
Seriously, even if Blu-Ray DVD's hit the consumer market at $30-40, people will STILL be buying them. There is a WHOLE lot to be said for the ability to say... have an ENTIRE season of StarGate or whatever show you want on ONE DISC! Or better yet, in 1080i HD, with HD-AUDIO IN 87 different languages, and all the damn bonus features you can shake a stick at!
Yeah, it's a gamble initially; they're expensive to manufacture, Blu-Ray players are really expensive (although that New Shiny PS3 is going to be (maybe) less than $500: marketing plan anyone?) So the adoption rate will be slow at the get-go. But in 5 years, you, your mom, and your little nephews and neices are ALL going to be watching Blu-Ray. Quit complaining. I've got Super Nintendo to get back to.
--- Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion -Lem
And I'm not talking about prices going down here. Consider this:
In 1984 I could buy a brand new record with up to 40 minutes of music for $7.00. When CDs first came out they were around $36.00 a pop for the same album at my local retailers. Of course people griped saying "how are we ever going to afford to buy those"? But then the prices dropped until you could buy the same 40 minute album on a brand new CD for $15.00 in 1988. Since then the average price of CDs has gone up and you are typically paiying $19-21 per new CD. Of course none of the arguments that the industry used at the time ("we need to make up for the cost of retooling from making records to making CDs") hold any water today. They're just greedy fuckers. But, the buying public, while they might moan and groan about it are still going to pay the price when they want the latest pap that and RIAA conjured "artist" puts out. There is one thing missing in the original CD Audio spec. DRM.
Enter BluRay and other DRM controlled forms of media. After reading the Slashdot article on CableCard and DCAS the other day (end-to-end encryption for cable television), you better believe devices to play HD DVDs will be no different. Not only will you be completely lubed up and owned by the MPAA, but if you really want to watch their products you'll have to pay the money they ask. No matter how high or unfair the pricing. Welcome to corporate fascism. The price today might be in the $25.00 neighborhood. They'll say, "we need to amortize our investment in this new technology and then the prices will come down as the market grows". And the prices will go down temporarily. But in ten year's time, you'll be paying $30 a disc and likely will just accept it instead of raging at these assholes like I do.
Now, add to this element that the only people who read Slashdot that count (in my book) are the so-called hobbyists... and that we are targetted as "undesirable crackpots", well you see where this is going. The funny thing is that there was a time in America when the guy who built his own electronic equipment at home was looked at as a neighborhood hero or potential "genius". Today, we're looked at like the Unabomber. We're told by these corporations and their brainwashed customers, "Why don't you just do what any other normal person does and just buy a damn HD DVD player fer christ sakes"! We do't want to do this because the commercial products are typically lacking in base functionality that we would prefer to have. For example, you SHOULD be able to skip the advertisting at the beginning of the DVD and get straight to the film. However, the MPAA doesn't want you doing that so commercial players aren't supposed to be able to do this. It's not a technical limitation (although they might try to make it seem like one), it's an artificial limitation calculated to benefit them. And it's unfair. Fortunately, players like Xine and MPlayer allow you to bypass these tracks altogether since they usually add nothing to your viewing experience. That's just a single example of the crippling that the MPAA forces on consumer devices. And it's only going to get worse.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Can someone please explain to me what is so superior about BLU-RAY that we just have to switch away from dvd. There were really obvious arguements to switch from VHS to DVD, but from dvd to blu-ray I just don't see a really compelling arguement to switch, unless they start selling writeable media, then the obvious selling point would be storage capacity. Mod me a troll if you must but is this more creating a market for a product that isn't needed or is there a legitimate reason for this shift in media???
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Let's see if I get this right. I'm going to pay more money for a DVD that I can only play in a player that will cost $1800. Yeah, right. Oh, and it may not end up being the generally acceptable format? Ooookay!
I've got a better idea! Why don't I just sit here and wait? That's right, I'm going to wait about five or so years. That way, the price will have dropped on the players, and the battle over formats will have settled out. I figure I can somehow struggle along without having seen the movies you're releasing in this format, probably because...well... I've already seen them.
This is yet another repetition of the past. A NEW! HOT! TECHNOLOGY! which is supposed to IMPROVE! our ENTERTAINMENT! EXPERIENCE!. Ok, fine. But.. um, we have a couple of different formats and the prices are enormous! Betamax/VHS. DVD/VHS. Players running around one to two grand. Been there, done that, got the t-shirts. What I've learned is that there's no rush. Wait. Prices will come down on players. Format types will standardize. You won't feel scre^H^H^H^Hvictimized by the manufacturers/retailers.
I remember how expensive CD's and CD players were at first, too. You will pay a premium for being an early adopter. For everyone else it means that non blue ray DVD's will drop in price.
ConsultingFair.com
Between this post, and the parent post for this thread that you made, I really wish we had a -1; Annoying tone mod.
Right now, people are clamoring for HD content, and these movies are really the first taste. There is a HUGE demand relative to the available supply.
I am utterly unsurprised at this pricing. It means we can expect retail prices about double DVD's for some time. The only good news there is that DVD prices will continue to fall as HD movies see increased competition and lower their prices.
This will continue until two things happen:
This will allow volume effects to occur that allow for pricing reductions. Until then studio's will make more money from their "outdated" DVD sales pipeline than they could possibly generate from HD movies.
So, give it a year or so. When there are a few million PS3's out there with BD-ROM's and people use them for watching movies (like they do PS2) then prices will tumble.
Since I am in a predictive mood, I'll say that we'll get price breaks on per movie costs when we have two or more studios with 100+ titles released in HD format. We'll start to approach current DVD pricing when we have four or more studios with 1000+ titles available for purchase, and there are 200+ TV series for sale.
If you think that is unreasonable drop by a Best Buy and count the number of titles they have on display.
As an additional side effect, there will be a point when HD discs "take over" the market from SD video. WHen that happens DVD prices will tumble well below what we have seen VHS prices drop to- because DVD is much cheaper than VHS to replicate on a per disc basis. You can make a profit at retail on a $5 DVD, but you can't on a $5 VHS.
Unlike the RIAA which depends on you buying a pice of music you are going to listen to time and again, the film industry depends on you buying LOTS of content you use infrequently and continuing to buy more and more. As a result of this difference the film/video folk will drive prices down for older products to clear inventory so they can get new product out the door.
Remember that with time you'll be able to make a profit at retail on a $5 BD-ROM, so they have no qualms about dropping prices. They have already seen the value of volume sales.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
Another tactic that some are looking to is to play them on a computer monitor. This is especially attractive to those that use their computers for more than email and web surfing, as they are more likely to have hardware that will support HDTV resolutions already. And even if the monitor isn't as large as the big hdtv options out there, having it serve dual purposes makes justifying a upgrade more palletable. The big problem that Blue-Ray is going to have in convincing the computer using audience though is their built in DRM system. For that reason alone I can see many looking more towards the alternative.
"This reminds me of when CD's were introduced. LP's were $8 and CD's were $16. They told us "Unfortunately, there are only 3 plants in the world that can make these disks. As soon as more production comes on line, these will be cheaper than LP's because they're cheaper to make". I guess they were lying."
Huh? That was back in the 80's, right? I was buying them, too. My recollection is that it was a few years before they came down to $16, but let's use your number.
$16 in 1985 dollars is $28 in 2005 dollars. If prices hadn't gone down, you'd be paying $28 per CD today. The average price of a new CD is now less than $13. That's about $7 in 1985 dollars -- in other words, if CD prices hadn't gone down, as you claim, we'd have been paying $7 each for them back then.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
"As soon as more production comes on line, these will be cheaper than LP's because they're cheaper to make".
Oh, the CD's were probably cheaper to make, but the recordings are state protected intellectual monopolies. Pricing is set as a function of what the customers can pay, not as a function of production cost enforced by competition. Revenue when you have monopoly control is maximized when a higher number of customers are unable to afford the product, so that the more surplus capital the consumers have, the higher the price will rise.
See Wikipedia entry for Monopoly (specifically the monopoly pricing section) for further detail, and Deadweight_loss for the economic implications of it.
Whether the "saturation point" has been reached with CD is a bit more debatable. People have a surprising amount of difficulty distinguishing between the "next gen" formats and correctly-downconverted CD audio in double-blind tests.
Anybody excercising a certain degree of perception, though, can see that DVD could easily stand to be bumped up a little bit. Would it necessary matter to most people? That's a different question entirely.
It won't matter how much better Blu-Ray is over HD-DVD if Sony can't get the prive down. Granted new technology is always more expensive when it is first released but in the end your average consumner is going to make a decision that is in some part based on price. If Joe Sixpack is looking to the upgrade his DVD player and he goes to Worst Buy and sees two options side by side, One is the Sony BDP-S1 Priced at $1000 (low end of most estimates) and the Toshiba HD-A1 Priced at $499.99 (Amazon) and they are both playing HD 1080i content. What do you think he is going to choose? Now you have to remember that Joe could give a shit that the Blu-Ray disk holds more content, all he sees is the fact that the disks and player both cost more. Joe just wants to play HD content on his new 64" HDTV. If Sony were smart they would swallow their pride and price Blu-Ray at $499.99 to compete with HD-DVD. The problem is this won't happen, and Sony's baby will fail because of it. You can't price something twice that of the competing offering and expect people to choose based soley on your technical merits. BetaMax was better than VHS but more expensive and remember what happend there? I guess Sony dosen't learn from their mistakes.
As an aside, isn't it ridiculous that inflation over 20 years has been just under 100% in this case?
Garbage noise peddled as music not withstanding, real prices for both DVD and CD have only very recently moved into closer range of VHS and audio tape. Yes, I remember paying over $20 for some VHS tapes, but it's trivial number compared to DVD. And you got that nigh unbreakable cassette that you could copy instead of a ludicrously fragile optical disc that's merely a license until the second you need the media replaced...