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Sony Thinks Blu-ray Will Sell Like DVDs by Year End
An anonymous reader writes "Sony CEO Ryoji Chubachi knows something we don't. At a press conference, he announced Sony's plan to increase Blu-ray market share to 50% of all movie discs by the end of the year. 'DVD and BD currently account for about 80% and 20%, respectively, of global demand for movie discs, Chubachi indicated. The new BD devices to be offered by Sony include models integrating an HD LCD TV with BD recording functionality, Chubachi pointed out. Sony has relied mainly on the PlayStation 3 (PS3) to promote BD, and sales of the game console will increase along with the offering by top Hollywood studios of new BD movies, Chubachi noted. However, Sony will extend its BD promotion from the current focus on the PS3 and BD players/recorders to IT devices, Chubachi pointed out.'"
Seriously, whats the point of spending 2-400 bucks on a DVD player and then an additional 2--50 per movie? I know that they look better, but they don't look 40 bucks better than upconverted DVD in my opinion. especially when you are talking about older movies that sure as heck were not recorded in HD....why the hell would you pay triple for someone else to unconvert it when you can do it with your 80bucks DVD player? Then again, why buy and DVD? Personally, I would prefer to download it.
I won't buy another drive/receiver/player for a format which doesn't allow me to store the content in a networked media library under my control. I know it's technically feasible to see movies without shuffling pieces of plastic. I won't pay for the houses of another round of media executives just because they think they can hold back technology.
Amen to that! I only have the Spiderman 3 disc that came with my PS3 for that same reason. IMHO, there's a pretty short list of movies that could pry $30 from my wallet.
However, Netflix could be the savior for all parties involved. They already let you borrow BD discs for the same price as DVDs so that's really the only cheap BD source for consumers. As demand goes up, Netflix will have to increase BD purchases which should ultimately lead to lower production prices.
Blank recordable Blu-Ray discs (BD-Rs) cost $109 for a 10-pack of 25GB/1L ($11ea), and a 50GB/2L costs $175 ($37ea).
DVD-R costs $190 for a 1000-pack, $0.19ea.
Sony's got to cut those BD-R prices really a lot, to something like 2-5%, to get the IT industry using them the way we use DVDs. Compared to media prices, the burners even at $500 are only the price of 15-45 blank discs.
There's still not much demand for single packages of content spanning multiple DVDs, which is where BD is better. BD is only 5-10x DVD, so once content is larger than a single DVD, there's good chance it's larger than a single (1S) BD. So real applications will still need a changer, which is expensive. By that time, the whole contraption is more expensive than a competing HD (eg. 200BD changer is at least $2000 for IT, BD-R drive is at least $500, discs at least $2180, so $4680 (probably well over $5000) for 5TB, which is clunkier and slower (and less rewritable) than 7*750GB HDs @$115ea = $805 + maybe $150 for an entire 1Gb ethernet host PC, at $955 for a way better system. But one that doesn't spit out 25GB or 50GB discs you can hand or mail to someone, or let some normal user put in their "videodisc" player.
You can, however, get a 20-disc 1xBD-R USB duplicator for $3025. Which should cost $500.
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I think your facts are a little off.
1. "Not to mention that DVD looked good on virtually any TV (even older legacy sets)"
DVD looks like crap on any television with coax inputs (a significant portion of them when DVD first came out) because of Macrovision copy protection. Running the DVD player through a VHS machine to get coax outputs triggered the copy protection, and DVD players did not have coax natively.
2. "Blu-ray players will (for most people) require the purchase of a new, potentially very expensive, HDTV."
Actually Blu-Ray will work just fine on older televisions, although it won't look any better than DVD. But if the prices do come down it would be silly to buy a DVD when you could future-proof your collection with a Blu-Ray disc instead.
3. "By the time DVD reached that kind of market share, the prices on players had dropped to the sub-$200 range and disc prices had dropped to the average $20 range."
Firstly, it's not really comparable because DVD players could not play VHS, so you were making a pretty big jump back then. All Blu-Ray players can play DVDs, so if you're buying a new player you might want to future-proof the hardware, as well. But even so, with inflation you can't compare exact dollar figures. If folks are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on iPods, it doesn't seem unreasonable they'd spend something similar to play the latest disc media.
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The other interpretation is that regular DVD sales will crash, to the point where they're even with BluRay sales.
In a severe recession, anything is possible, especially since cable is rolling out video-on-demand like crazy, and if people have a choice between a dvr or a bluray player, they'll take the dvr.
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I agree. Also, where does HD DVD fit into that figure? I remember reading that HD DVD was selling like mad after Toshiba conceded defeat, so if 20% is Blu-Ray and 80% is DVD, where are the HD DVD sales?
I think they are spinning it:
DVD and BD currently account for about 80% and 20%, respectively, of global demand for movie discs
So this isn't sales, it is demand. What is demand and how do you quantify it? Through a survey? Through a market expert? Are people really demanding Blu-ray, or do they merely want HD and Sony is conveniently using the Blu-ray trademark to represent all HD content in all forms? Just because 20% of people want higher resolution than DVD doesn't mean they will pay for it. Heck, I demand even better resolution than Blu-Ray, but that doesn't mean I will actually pay money for it. Do the people that demand and seek only HD movie torrents count in that 20% too?
Better known as 318230.
Agreed. I have owned a bluray player for over a year now and there just isn't much of a selection. Amazon's entire bluray selection contains about three pages of movies. And most of them are garbage like "beautiful sceneries set to the sound of guitar music" or lame movies from the 80s.
I wanted to buy The Mist. Can't.
I wanted to buy Battlestar Galactica. Can't.
(There's not even a Season 2 on bluray).
Have wanted to buy some other stuff, but either the movie doesn't exist on bluray or it's an edition with limited content. For example, why would I want to spend $30 to get Fifth Element with no extras or other special content when I could wait a year or two and buy the full ultimate type version for much less money?
After a year of owning my bluray, I own Planet Earth, Apocolypto, 300 and the special five disc edition of Blade Runner. That's it. Four movies in a year. They're losing a lot of money by having nothing but crap out there.
What's the point of an upconverting DVD player when the TV can do it natively and likely much better (as it knows what its own native format is)?
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"And if by year's end you can't watch a movie put out by Sony without owning a blu-ray player, then that will drive up blu-ray sales."
I dunno... for me it will drive down the amount of Sony movies watched.
Some people are already complaining that their profile 1.0 Blu-Ray players can't play the latest discs. I'd say DVD is the better bet for future proofing at this point, especially as far as hardware goes. Who wants a $400 Blu-Ray player that won't play next month's discs?
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Well I think we're in completely different markets, which is probably why we have different perspectives on it. I know loads of people with HDTVs, but cable is almost non-existent here (let alone on-demand cable). Sky HD is prohibitively expensive, the box alone is between £200 and £250 (so, at least $400). That's with a subscription, which increases by £10 if you want HD channels. So Blu-ray starts to look less of an expensive option. HD channels on Freeview are a few years away, by which time Blu-ray prices will have dropped.
You're also not considering that many people, having already bought an HDTV and having an expired cheap DVD player, might be willing to spend a little more money on their next shiny disc player (assuming prices drop over the next few months).
Just thought I'd mention as well, the digital switchover, which is beginning this year and will be complete by 2012, is driving sales of Freeview-compatible TVs in general, and many people will opt for an HDTV as the future-proofed option, which is why there are possibly more in my market than in yours.
Every DVD player that I know of can be flashed with new firmware by the simple expedient of burning the update file to a CD-ROM and putting it in the drive. It was common to do this back in the day, because sometimes the old firmware couldn't play some newer DVDs. Or sometimes people did it to gain access to extra features like region code hack menus.
You can update the firmware on Blu-ray players as well. Probably the exact same way.
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In all seriousness, my laptop, my wife's laptop, my PC, my wife's PC, the PVR in the entertainment center, and the cheap portable DVD players that we're considering getting for my wife and for her parents all use DVDs, not Blu-Ray. EVEN IF the desktop PCs become cheap to upgrade to Blu-ray I'd have to buy at least two readers and a burner, and I'd still have to buy laptop drives and install them, and I'm not aware of any reasonably-priced ($100) Blu-ray portable player.
I'm still converting Laserdisc, SVHS, and VHS (thanks to COX Cable for removing Turner Classic Movies from analog cable) into a format that will at least play on the laptops if not be burnt back to DVD, and I'm not going to add even more optical players to my already electrical-straining entertainment system until I'm truly convinced that I should bother.
In my opinion, the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD was a red herring anyway. Like with Betamax, Sony still has to compete with another less expensive, consumer friendly format, and their only advantage this time is that their device can play regular DVDs. Rather than a format elimination, I suspect that Blu-ray will be to Laserdisc as DVD is to VHS; the videophiles will spend the money for better quality (or the perception of it based on the sum of equipment in their racks), while the regular consumer will go, "Oh! Look! Spaceballs is five bucks in the bargain bin!", or, "That promotional price for The Bourne Ultimatum at fifteen ninety-nine is a steal!" (with the unsaid, "Compared to $30 for Blu-ray.") and the technology might be adopted, but again, not nearly as widespread as a cheap, good, established format.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.