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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?
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.
According to TFA, new titles will receive the $23.45 wholesale price. Older (ie less popular) titles will have a $17.95 wholesale price.
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
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.
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?
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