Slashdot Mirror
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.
A B A C A B B
Related Stories:
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.
I can't wait to watch Hitch in High-Def! This type of movie is the exact reason why I bought an HDTV!!!
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.
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.
Blu-ray Discs Won't Be Bought.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
Don't buy them...
Deleted
According to TFA, new titles will receive the $23.45 wholesale price. Older (ie less popular) titles will have a $17.95 wholesale price.
Great strategy. Switch up the format every decade or so and obsolete the old hardware so that people have to keep buying the same movie over and voer again if they want tomaintain a viewable collection.
On another note, I still buy VHS every chance I get. At least when a HVS tape gets a little worn out it just keeps on going with some blips and squiggly lines instead of just.......stopping and displaying a "Can't Read" error.
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
$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.
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
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.
Internet Archive: Live Music Archive
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.'"
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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?
Between this post, and the parent post for this thread that you made, I really wish we had a -1; Annoying tone mod.
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 **
"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
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
I wouldn't call almost 7X "a little more than half"... That's a lot more than half. In fact, it's more than 2/3rds, and not far from 3/4ths (an order of magnitude).
Yes, but then you have to take into account the 20% higher refresh rate, then it all evens out to about the same ~6X improvement.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Log10( 2073600/307200 ) = 0.83 orders of magnitude.
Anyway, what is important is how much the human eye is able to see. It is well tested that the limit for where humans can percieve more scanlines is about 8-9x screen size for SDTV, and 3-3.5x screen size for HDTV. Or if we want to express it in degrees, if you want a perfect image an SDTV screen should take up 6 degrees of your field of vision, a HDTV screen 20 degrees. Hell, we could double the resolution to 3840x2160 and still only cover about 60 degrees of your 180 degree field of view (though you vision is poorer towards the edges, so it's not entirely accurate).
My point is, this isn't like the above-and-beyond CD formats where they can't tell them apart in double-blind studies. A healthy young eye should be able to see every pixel HDTV has to offer with plenty of room to spare. The difference is very real. That is much more important than technical pixel counts.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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