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.'"

Comments

Then you had better lower those prices!

[elrous0]

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.

Right now, the cheapest blu-ray players are still up around $400 and the discs still average (at most brick and mortar retailers) in the $30 range. Not to mention that DVD looked good on virtually any TV (even older legacy sets), wheras Blu-ray players will (for most people) require the purchase of a new, potentially very expensive, HDTV.

If you're going mainstream, you had damn sure better get those prices into the mainstream. Japan made be filled with technophiles who are willing to spend big money on the latest tech of the moment. But most of the rest of world isn't.

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[kevin_conaway]

If you're going mainstream, you had damn sure better get those prices into the mainstream. Japan made be filled with technophiles who are willing to spend big money on the latest tech of the moment. But most of the rest of world isn't.

Average people will not spend $400 on new technology especially with an economic recession looming over us.

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[Gription]

More to the point: BlueRay won't hit 50% until the price drops so there is a $150 player and the disks have dropped to a sub-"premium" price.

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[yankeessuck]

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.

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[Hognoxious]

Average people will not spend $400 on new technology especially with an economic recession looming over us.

Right. So credit cards serve what purpose, exactly?

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[Alphi1]

I'll be honest, the "average person" sure won't see that much of a difference between DVD and BluRay. Even if they do, it'd be a real hard sell to convince them it's worth buying a $400+ player and spending MORE for each disc than they could with DVD. I mean, it's one thing when there's a MASSIVE jump in technology, like going from VHS to DVD. I mean, with DVD suddenly the discs were a lot higher quality (picture and sound), and were considerably closer to indestructible than VHS tapes (that would wear out over time regardless of how well they were maintained). And then you add the DVD extras as well, it's a slam dunk. What does Blu Ray have over DVD? A better picture (but only for those who have HDTVs and can see the improvement), a little better sound (but how many "average" users think that 5.1 from a DVD really sounds "bad"?). What else? Not much. Certainly not enough to justify the extra cost. Personally, I'll buy my first BluRay player when I can buy one that will also up-convert my existing DVDs and cost $100 or less. Considering you can get up-converting DVD players now for $40, I'd pay an extra $60 for the ability to play BluRay at some point. But pay an extra $360? No way.

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[Firehed]

Unfortunately, there are a lot of mentally defective people in the world.

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[FredFredrickson]

I'm calling you out.

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.

BS. DVD is always better, even on crappy sets. And, no, people didn't just deal with the macrovision and assume that it was functioning normally. They got themselves an RF modulator (or just used their VCR, since back then, a lot of VCRs didn't even have macrovision features). But claiming that DVDs looked like crap? I still use a DVD player hooked through an RF modulator, looks just fine, and there's no annoying stripe at the top of the screen for the first half hour of the movie.

So compairing the best scenerio (Blu-ray) with a clearly not-functioning setup (DVD-through macrovision enabled VCR) is just a bit disingenuous. At least give us a fair comparison.

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.

Actually, blue ray will require a new tv. Know why? Technically, it'd work on an old TV. But wasn't your last argument simply that DVDs "DVD looks like crap" on older tvs? So why go blueray if that's true? At least be consistent!

The upgrade from DVD to Bluray is purely asthetic. So don't get your panties in a bunch, but people are only going to upgrade to blu-ray if they have a TV that will show the difference. Otherwise you're throwing $400 out for absolutely NO increase in quality.

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.

First problem in your reasoning:

1. Blu-ray needs to be backwards compatible because it's the only way to get people to switch. DVD was a major improvement over VHS, that alone was enough reason to switch and buy replacement DVDs for all those crappy VHS Tapes. Additionally, it didn't take long for combo players to appear, to get those people who wouldn't make the switch.

2. The iPod comparison doesn't work. There are obvious benefits to the new iPod: Space. Your old iPod only fits X number of songs? But you have more? If your audio collection is cumulative (and it is) then you'll always need more space. But the comparison you're trying to make is buying an ipod that plays the exact same amount of songs, but pretends to do so with higher quality, which isn't that big of a deal unless you're plugging it into $1500 speakers or earbuds. Oh, and this high-quality version of the ipod is $400 more, but again, offers no new space for more music.

As you can see, you've compared apples and oranges. During a recession people will have to make decisions on what they'll buy. Understand that you must maximize the advertised value to get people to buy. Money is tight, but not gone. So yes, people will buy an iPod because it's obvious what the benefits are. Blu-Ray? Expensive, plus neccessary additional equiptment to enjoy. Not in the budget- my dvds play just fine.

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[phantomlord]

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 I can play any DVD in my DVD player...

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?

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[codegen]

However, once you have a BD player, are you going to buy a DVD or a BD of the latest movie. I'd hazard a guess that most folk would opt for the new technology.
  It very much depends on the movie. I know that there are many movies out there that I won't even pay regular DVD prices for, and I only buy them when they hit the bargain bin. There are a few movies that I would be willing to pay a premium price, but for the rest, I would buy the DVD.

I don't think tour analogy to VHS is entirely accurate. I also stopped buying VHS tapes as soon as I had a DVD player, but that was because (a) no more rewinding, (b) smaller size and easier to store and look through (c) easy fast forward and backup [including skip] (d) subtitles and closed captioning, (e) easy access to bonus materials. The advantage of Blue Ray is not nearly as compelling

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[twistedsymphony]

Does the upconverting really make any difference? I've never seen the output of an upconverting player, but I don't understand how upconverting in the player can look much better than upconverting in the TV.

Technically it doesn't matter where it gets up converted but the general thinking is that up conversion in the player is of a higher quality since it is performed before the signal is compressed to fit over the video cables.

Also players typically offer a higher quality of up conversion since they're designed to work specifically with the kind of content found on DVDs while TV upconverters are designed to be more generic (jack of all trades, master of none... or some such).

Really it comes down to which device has the better scaling equipment. No matter what you should set it up to only scale the image once. ie: having your player scale from 480i to 720p then your TV from 720p to 1080p is a no-no.

What you should be doing is setting your player to scale to the native resolution of your display, and see how that looks, then set your player to output at the native resolution of the original content, thus letting your display do all the scaling, and see how that looks.

The problem is most people have their player set to upscale something stupid like 1080i (because it's the "biggest") when their display has a native resolution like 1366x768 and the results generally look like garbage in comparison to what they COULD look like.

As for myself, personally I have a projector with a native resolution of 1280x768, and I have an Oppo upscaling DVD player set to scale the dvds to 720p (1280x720), my projector is set to just center the signal and leave some black bars on the top and bottom (often called "just scan" mode) thus completely bypassing the scaler in the projector. Both the player and projector have identical scaler chips (Faroudja DCDi) so the player is the better place to scale since it's done before converting the signal for travel over the cable. The scaling is only done once and the picture looks fantastic.

Re:Then you had better lower those prices!

[Enderandrew]

By the way, every retail store I've gone to has had expensive BluRay movies. Yet, on Amazon I have found tons of BluRay moves (new and used) for $15 or less, which sure beats the $35 they want to charge in many stores.

I don't know if they're still doing it, but when I bought my PS3 I mailed in the proof of purchase, and got 5 free BluRay movies. Check online and they may still be doing that.

Maybe if they give away HDTVs

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got two perfectly good non-HD televisions in my house that I have no plans to replace anytime soon-- the longer I hold out, the better and cheaper HD sets get.

Regular DVDs look fine to me, and the price is right. When you factor in the TV needed, upgrade costs are ridiculous.

Upgrade? Not Worth It

[Tiberius_Fel]

They seem to be overlooking the problem that DVDs are good enough for most people and that Blu-Ray doesn't really confer the same advantage over DVD that DVDs did over VHS.

I don't believe it.

[MMC Monster]

Looking at the local Best Buy and Walmart, I can't believe that BluRay makes up 20% of the demand of video discs. Even if you throw in all the Playstation 3 games. I'd be surprised if it was more than 5%.

Maybe 20% of generated income, since Bluray discs are not discounted and tend to be $30 or more, while DVDs are getting to be heavily discounted.

Upconverting is good enough for me.

[andy1307]

I have a good HDTV and I'm quite happy with my upconverting DVD player. I don't see the point in spending 300-400$ on a bluray player.

Re:Whats the point?

[91degrees]

especially when you are talking about older movies that sure as heck were not recorded in HD.

They were recorded on 35mm or 70mm film. The grain size is finer than a High definition CCD's pixel.

Not in this household.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Real question :

[Arthur B.]

Will blu ray rips outdownload dvd rips ?

Re:Whats the point?

[gEvil (beta)]

I love these discussions, because it's ridiculously easy to pick out the people who have no idea what they're talking about. The "but it wasn't shot in HD" argument is one of my favorites.