Slashdot Mirror
Some Blu-Ray, HD DVD Discs Sell Only 200 Copies
An anonymous reader writes "Much has been made of the strong sales for some recent high-def disc releases (such as 'Casino Royale' on Blu-ray), but a new Sony research report reveals some startlingly low sales numbers for other titles released on the next-gen formats. When disc sales of under 1000 can land you on a weekly best-sellers list, you know your format is in its infancy."
People aren't buying into it in droves, because the previous thing they used works well enough for them and the new features offered by it aren't enough of an incentive to 'upgrade'; on the other hand, it is laden with DRM that the previous thing wasn't.
Am I talking about Vista or HD-DVD/Blu-ray?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
You mention DRM to most buyers and they will think it's a "feature". I think price has more to do with it then DRM.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Nice... So if you are bundling the movie with PS3s, how does this constitute a "sale" of the movie? Meaning sony clearly knows what both numbers are.. :-)
Heck, by those sales metrics, people a couple of years ago were just clamoring for the AOL cd... In fact, I suspect it was the hottest cd of all times...
What do you do with an aging format? Try to convince consumers that they need something better, and try to get them to buy the same thing twice. This whole HDVD/BLURAY sounds like another round of DVD-Audio, SACD, HDCD, business. So who's surprised with some low sales figures? The current CD and DVD standards are good enough, and the LCD usually wins.
www.itjerk.com
On the other hand, consider the market, right now, for Blueray/HD: Rich technogeeks and videophiles. Both of which are much more likely to be within the .01% of the market that cares about DRM. Heck, many of the videophiles may have been burned with DAT. Most people with the money do be dumping $3k into an entertainment system will be older, old enough to remember VHS vs Betamax.
From what I understand, even many of the early HDTVs don't have the correct plugs for these players for full resolution.
Format War: Not good
Having to buy movies again(at 2X the price): NG
DRM: NG
~$2k to see the difference at home: NG (yes, I'm including the price for a HDTV; market penetration for those are still bad, after all).
Result: Slow adoption. Could even be termed 'niche market', at least for now. The analysts may have said that blue ray is catching on as fast as DVD, but not faster if you look at it as a percentage. Most of that came from Casino Royale sales. I think that an important point would be that the HD standards require a new TV, DVD didn't. So I think that you have will see a brief surge of (rich or spendthrift) buyers to help justify the HDTVs they already purchased. After that, it'll be much more difficult.
I'd like to have HDTV, ps3, etc... But I baulk at the price tag every time. I could go cheaper if I was willing to have HDTV in monitor sizes (27"), but I want one at least as big as my current 32" TV. Add in that I don't have cable or satellite and you'll see that my available content is limited and expensive. Not time to adopt yet.
Heck, with the whole casino royale best seller thing I wonder how many people bought the HD discs by mistake, thinking they were getting some kind of deluxe version, but still playable on their DVD player?
I don't read AC A human right
The one thing HD discs do better is carry more bits. Already we are seeing movies released in 3 and 4-DVD packages -- that is a lot of disc shuffling that can be reduced. TV series are commonly on 7-disc sets (e.g. Lost, The Wild Wild West) -- one Blu-Ray could hold this.
I think (and hope) future movie discs will have even more commentary tracks, and extras. Already DVDs are a great value, once one has filtered out the 98% of movies that suck. I look forward to Lawrence of Arabia with twice the quality of the current two-DVD package, and one or more commentary tracks. HD "Stuck On You", not so much.
I hope also, perhaps unrealistically, that the commentary tracks are also available in an unencumbered form (even if at super low quality) so I can listen to them while I commute, and work. I can dream, can't I?
I come here for the love
Already we are seeing movies released in 3 and 4-DVD packages -- that is a lot of disc shuffling that can be reduced. TV series are commonly on 7-disc sets (e.g. Lost, The Wild Wild West) -- one Blu-Ray could hold this.
Somehow I expect to see this at about the same time as I see the entire Beatles catalog released on an MP3 CD at 192 Kbs ready to load into your iPod, Zen, iRiver, or Zune. (not counting the release in the flea market from someone's trunk)
The ability to put more data content on a single disk does not mean they will. HD will be reserved for HD content, not collections of SD shows. CD's will be reserved for CD format audio (with a few exceptions of extra DRM digital tracks and DRM player for your Windows PC. To fit on the redundant tracks, the digital content is at low bitrates and the CD holds less music to make space.)
The truth shall set you free!
I don't want to come off as one of those old "get off my lawn" guys reminiscing
about walking barefoot in the snow to school every day... BUT
When Laser Disc came out, it was definitely a video-phile's format in that publishers
like criterion rushed to make the very best discs possible. They would remaster prints,
add interview audio tracks with directors, create great liner notes, etc, etc.
Discs were made for movie lovers by movie lovers.
DVDs saw the same sort of attention when it was first released, but in my opinion not
to the same degree.
And now we have HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and what's available on this awesome new format?
It's not Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, it's Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai. It's not
The Lord of The Rings, it's Eragon.
Meh.
It also gave us so much more. Computer DVD-ROMs existed from the beginning, and portable (battery-powered) players appeared almost instantly (at outrageous prices initially, but still). We got amazing picture, no degradation with multiple plays, multiple languages/subtitles, special features and extras, interactive menus, scene selection, no need to rewind at the end, a pause button that would actually let you see the frame, and a much smaller physical medium. It also brought us 5.1 surround sound for the first time and crystal-clear picture for any television.
HD/BD gives us better picture (on large enough displays to see it) if we have HDTVs and the right connections. Whoop-de-damn-doo. The picture is pretty amazing if done properly (bad mastering still has artifacts and fuzziness), but come on. We don't have portable playing options (almost no computer playback or handheld devices), and there is zero advantage on a standard-definition set. The movies should have been introduced at the exact same price as DVDs. The player hardware's outrageous prices could recoup the R&D costs. All in all, I'm unimpressed, very much like Laserdisc.
I may well be in the minority here - but when I buy a DVD, 99 times out of 100, I have no interest in the extras and commentary. I buy it to watch the movie. That 1 time out of 100, I'll buy the collectors edition.
Of the people I know who have recently bought big-screen flat-panel sets: one of them invited us to watch a movie with them. They didn't perform any deliberate setup steps. They popped the DVD in and played it. It happened to be a 4:3 "full screen" DVD, and their settings, whatever they were, simply stretched it to fill a 16:9 screen. They seemed unaware of any issues with this. After about five minutes I was going bonkers and finally got up the courage to ask them whether they could change the setting. They pushed a few buttons on their remote, got a few all-black screens and error messages, and finally put it back the way it was and told me to stop being so picky. (I settled for moving my chair way to the side...)
Another couple I know recently bought what called a "high definition" set. They were proud of having gotten a good deal on it. They mostly used it to watch DVDs and standard-definition broadcasts. They thought the picture was great. When they weren't around, I, curious to see whether HDTV was really the mind-blowing experience it was supposed to be, tuned the set to the local NPR affiliate. The picture looked good but not all that great... not the sort of 35mm cinema experience I was expecting. On closer inspection I saw that something on the set's faceplate said something like "Enhanced Definition" or "Enhanced Digital" or something like that. I sneaked out their instruction booklet and leafed through it. It wasn't a high-definition set at all. It was a regular set with some kind of electronic sharpening effect. They didn't know and didn't care. I didn't tell them.
I don't think the average consumer understands high definition or cares about it. They buy a set, the picture looks "good" because of technology improvements--the perfect geometry, high brightness, and high contrast of solid state screens compared to picture tubes... and because it's digital, and their cable company's analog signals were crap.
They will probably buy HD DVD or Blu-Ray players someday, but they'll hardly know that they are buying them. They'll buy them when high definition essentially comes for free: when the nice-looking name-brand high-quality $129.95 players just happens to include high definition, and the only ones that don't are $39.95 el-cheapo deluxe models. They'll probably refer to them as "DVD players." And as long as they pop a disk in it and it plays, they probably won't even notice whether it's high or low definition... any more than my friends noticed whether the DVD they rented was 4:3 or 16:9.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why would anyone buy their TV shows again? Just keep a flipping DVD player around and watch them on that. It's not as though the magic of HD is going to do anything for the majority of TV shows on DVD.