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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.
"Casino Royale" is being sold in a bundle with the PS3 in my country. Could this be where many of the sales of that particular movie are coming from?
At the store where I work, BluRay has outsold HD-DVD 8-1 during the last few months.
We have sold 8 BluRay discs and only one HD-DVD disc.
On the other hand, we usually sell at least 50 DVDs on most days.
It doesn't look like these titles are all so new that you'd be correct (and anyway, new releases nearly always have greater weekly sales than ones that have been around awhile). The real story here is in comparing the HD/BD sales to regular DVD sales--the low rate reported here would probably remain quite low.
Even if Wal-Mart isn't on the list, weekly sales of less than 1000 copies isn't good news for the next-generation titles (particularly because all the HD/BD discs I've seen tend to be the "money makers"--not box office flops). Lots of the movies do suck, but that never stopped people from buying them in massive quantities on DVD or VHS.
The more pressing problem is that no one really needs these discs. There are about 30 million HDTV sets, which is still a small fraction of all televisions in this country. Of those, most people think DVDs look good enough. Why buy an expensive player with wacky DRM schemes and maybe-HDCP and all kinds of other bogus crap, only to have to buy more expensive movies that are presently nowhere NEAR the quality difference that DVD had over VHS? I have an HDTV, and I've seen some amazing HD-DVD content, but I was an early adopter of DVD players and I'm just not doing it again for HD/BD players. It's someone else's turn to fund the birth of this industry.
Wake me when I can get the player for $100 and the disc gives me something better than "great high-definition video mastering" on one of my TVs. I can play my DVDs anywhere, and they mostly look pretty good with progressive scan. Maybe that whole "multiple camera angles" vaporware from DVD would be a good thing to include so I could have some fun with my movies.
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...
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
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.
I wonder how Netflix fits into all of this. For no extra charge, one can have bluray and HD-DVD versions of movies sent to their home. I've never bought a HD-DVD but I am a rather heavy consumer of them. I have rented 34 titles so far from them. All of my friends that have HD-DVD and BluRay players do the same thing. The cost of the movie is prohibitive, but Netflix charges no more for the privilege.
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!