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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.
Judging from the wholesale price, I can only imagine that the retail price will be minimum of $30, depending on how high demand ends up. More likely $40-45, at least for new releases. Store cost for most DVDs when I worked at Circuit City was around $1-3 below retail, and it's been 10 years since DVD spec v1.0.
I don't have an HD-TV quite yet, since I haven't had to buy a TV in years, but I'm not sure I'll be willing to buy these movies at these prices, had I one. Especially not until there's a much bigger library than the 50ish that are apparently expected this year.
The real measure of success for the nextgen optical media will likely be the adult film industry (in addition to video game consoles). Everyone talks about gaming, but it would appear that there's going to be a pretty deep divide in consoles.
And Blu-Ray very well may be the winner in the adult film realm.
The adult film maker Digital Playground, which claims to control 40 percent of the US adult DVD market and is reported to have sales of $12.6bn in 2005, today told Adult Video News (AVN) that they've decided to support the Blu-ray format and release movies as soon as hardware becomes available.
According to TFA, new titles will receive the $23.45 wholesale price. Older (ie less popular) titles will have a $17.95 wholesale price.
Movies haven't followed the same pattern as music. VHS got really cheap when DVDs became popular. DVDs are already becoming pretty cheap even before an alternative format is released. You can get movies as low as $5.00. Sure they're old movies, but I don't think you could get any DVD for under $25 when the format first became popular.
$23.45? Ars Technica is saying the price will be from $23 to $39 for consumers, with newer releases tagged with the latter one. They'd better offer something major for me to be interested in paying that much.
So retail is going to be about $30.
I paid $40 for Lawrence of Arabia on DVD in it's special edition that came out in 2002 or so. While I probably won't pay for Hitch, I might for Fifth Element.
Fully understanding that new/better technology is traditionally more expensive than old/lesser technology, I think this is a poor decision. If the next-gen dvds were marketed at a price closer to that of current-gen dvds, adoption would catch on quicker ("Why not pay $2 more?") and the format war would seem less important. As is, you're paying a huge entry fee to get into one of the two next-gen formats, then getting shafted again in price comparison to current generation dvds. Is the quality worth the extra $10-$15 bucks per dvd AND the price of the player? Not to me; not to many, i would guess.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I know that I would be more willing to adopt a format in speculation of the final winner if the prices weren't so much more than current dvds.
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When VHS was still hot, a new release might cost as much as $80. DVD brought that down to about $40 at first IIRC and now it's sunk to about $25. I suspect this new format will dick around at $40 for a while and then come down to $25 a year or two later.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why, it has more pixels of course!
Seriously, that's the only benefit of blu-ray as a video format. it can give you orders of magnitude higher resolution. For those people who want to see the pores on Will Smith's nose in Hitch, it's quite impressive.
I'm just not enough of a videophile to care. And with the upcoming format war (HD-DVD vs BLU-RAY) I'm going to sit back and wait either for a clear winner to emerge, or for someone to invent a dual-format player so that I don't have to care what format I'm buying.
At least it's looking like both formats will have backwards-compatible players so that standard DVDs won't require a seperate player.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
So... 1) Netflix will probably have to charge a higher monthly fee for people who want HD discs, and 2) for companies like Netflix, HD is going to make them a ton of money.
> I mean, there is a limit to what resolution your eye can discern
Yes, but it's not been reached with DVDs - this also applies to red book CDs (ears, not eyes, obviously).
Serious question here -
I recall one of the biggest arguments against P2P sharing of movies, music, etc. is that I don't "own" the content - I license it. If I license the content by owning a copy of "Movie A" on DVD, why is it that I have to buy another license of "Movie A" on Blu-Ray at full price, instead of just the price of the new media?
In the licensing model this makes sense, but it's not going to be available. The "ownership" model would support having to purchase new content when the format changes, but then I'd technically be able to put it on P2P or back it up to my HD, no?
Why the catch-22?
"What cost $23.45 in 1997 would cost $27.64 in 2005."
Sure, but isn't the trend for hi-tech stuff to go down? Computers, mp3 plahyers, satellite radios are going down in price.
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.
But on the plus side, Sony would never lie to do anything underhanded; their reputation is at stake. I'm sure the prices will go down later when more production is on-line.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Doh! I'll prove my own maths wrong
so, 17*212=3604GB in total for the collection. 54GB : 3604/54 = 67 discs * 23.45 = $1571.15 46GB : 3604/46 = 79 discs * 23.45 = $1852.55
So initially more expensive, but eventually less.
I think your argument would be valid if what was coming out on Blue-Ray was the exact same collection of VOB files that existed on the current DVD.
But it's not; on the Blue-Ray disc you get the high definition version of the movie and this is a different product.
The reverse question makes some sense, though -- if you buy a Blue Ray of some movie and it is otherwise identical content-wise to the DVD version of the same movie, shouldn't you be entitled to get a DVD copy of the movie for the cost of the media, or at least *make* a DVD copy yourself? Because in those cases, you're not getting a different product.
Beyond that, when you're talking about printing, you have all sorts of colors, tints and effects that are outside of simple offset printing... and even simple offset printing is not in the home. Give me a printer that can do metallic gold gilt white letters on a deep red cardstock, emboss a crest into the page and then round the corners, sell it at a consumer price, and I'll be happy. But that's many many years away.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
You're in luck. A decent projector goes for about a grand now. Do you have a 10 foot wide wall?
I dropped a tad over a grand a year ago for a 6 foot wall screen - it'd be bigger, but my viewing wall has an inconveniently-placed door...
I was just talking about this phenomenon last night. DVDs have already reached the good enough point for most consumers. Even some people who have HD-TVs (my brother for example) don't know that DVD isn't true HD quality, because let's face it, it looks just fine how it is.
Why they would try to give this product to consumers when it is obviously too expensive to market as a real DVD alternative is beyond me. Especially since I know I get by just fine on a divx rip of a movie. That's just like when they release surround audio CDs. It's going to be hard to convince a generation that just underwent an upgrade to pay more for an even less significant transition to some "a little better looking than DVD" format. Why doesn't the technology market wait until a media has matured in the R&D department before releasing it?
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Errr, ummm. Yeah, that's basically true. All DVDs an average person buys will be 720x480. However, the standard also allows for eg. 352x480 video in MPEG-1, PCM audio, etc. Still, you'll never see anything like that from a major studio, which is where most everyone buys DVDs.
Not unless you've got a display that is higher-res than a TV. It really amazes me the number of television myths there are. A TV is low enough res that you can actually get close to a reasonably large one, and manually COUNT the pixels.
No, no, no. Just completely wrong. I'd say something like 95% of movies are just pure, 100% progressive. Nothing at all interlaced.
Line-doublers have nothing to do with interlacing, and only to do with how well your TV upscales, versus how well your expensive progressive-scan DVD player upscales.
Progressive-scan players are needed because:
A) the circuitry in normal DVD players outputs each field seperately, one field after the other, rather than both fields together (even on fully progressive material).
B) things like TV shows on DVD are encoded as interlaced, and need to be deinterlaced for progressive display. You really don't get any benefit to deinterlacing if your display is a CRT or something else that can natively display interlaced video. However, it makes all the difference on things like Plasmas, LCDs, etc (EDTV).
C) some content is either fully or partially hard-telecined. That means while it is fully progressive, it's gone through the 3:2 pulldown process, and been encoded as interlaced fields. There's really no reason at all for studios to do this, but for some reason, they do... Because hard telecine patterns vary, it is very difficult to reverse, and very advanced hardware is needed.
Actually, PROPER (motion adaptive) deinterlacing is harder than "inverse telecine"/"pulldown reversal"/"3:2 pullup", but truth is, proper deinterlacing is uncommon, and simple deinterlacing is quite easy, whereas even the most simple and glitchy inverse telecine process is difficult.
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