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Sony Warns Demand For Blu-Ray Diminishing Faster Than Expected
Lucas123 (935744) writes "Sony has warned investors that it expects to take a hit on expected earnings (PDF), due in part to the fact that demand for Blu-ray Disc media is contracting faster than anticipated. In two weeks, Sony will announce its financial results. The company expects to post a net loss. Sony's warning is in line with other industry indicators, such as a report released earlier this year by Generator Research showed revenue from DVD and Blu-ray sales will likely decrease by 38% over the next four years. By comparison, online movie revenue is expected to grow 260% from $3.5 billion this year to $12.7 billion in 2018, the report states. Paul Gray, director of TV Electronics & Europe TV Research at market research firm DisplaySearch, said consumers are now accustomed to the instant availability of online media, and 'the idea of buying a physical copy seems quaint if you're under 25.'"
Especially when those copies come with awful DRM.
They should re-tool all of their factories, embrace the inevitable, and minimize (or prevent) losses by marketing it for storage and reducing the price of the discs and drives. The only thing that can save Blu-Ray now is to re-purpose it.
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Was it even ever popular? I never had a Blu-Ray player in my house and I have only held a internal player once in my hands. In my opinion, Blu-Ray has failed as a successor to DVD. Even in the autumn days of DVD, you can find disks and players everywhere. With the better Blu-Ray, adoption had been hurting and it has never seen the lift-off its predecessor had. I doubt that a successor to Blu-Ray will fare much better.
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I live in Australia, where on average the price of a Bluray is twice that of a DVD. Recent movies are $40 on Bluray, which is staggeringly expensive in comparison even if you don't have the option of digital download (paid or pirated).
I believe this is a major reason for Bluray not taking off - it is simply to expensive to invest in, at least in my home country. Unfortunately we don't have Netflix available to us (or the infrastructure to support its use), but for the majority of people it's just too hefty a price tag to step up from a DVD to a Bluray...
... is that there were ever people who bought Blu-Rays in the first place. I personally know only one person who ever bought any and they since have returned to purchasing DVDs. There just wasn't a reason to upgrade. The difference in picture quality is impressive, but not so impressive as to warrant the time and cost to convert one's library over--especially considering that many digital downloads are about at the same quality level. Though, both have that crappy, pesky DRM to contend with in most cases.
Because you media types went and fucked it up as hard as you could. I am the sort of person who would like to buy a fair bit of Blu-ray movies. I don't mind movies on disc, I have a player, and I'm fussy about picture and sound quality. Blu-ray is noticeably better than streaming video on my system.
However, greed and stupidity have screwed it up. For one it is just too expensive. I'll see a new movie int he store and the Blu-ray version is $10 above the DVD version. No, I'm not paying you for the extra bits. It does not cost you more to make. I'm not going to go and drop $35 on the Blu-ray version of something.
Then there's the DRM. "That wouldn't affect you unless you are a pirate!" you say? Bullshit. So while my TV setup is nice, by far the highest def system in my house is my computer. It has a high end home theater speaker setup connected to it, and a professional monitor. So I wanted to watch one of my Blu-rays on it. It has a BD-RW, it has software, it has a GPU with the stupid "secure" drivers, and everything is HDCP compliant. So I fire it up and... no dice. See I mirror my video signal, one goes to the monitor for display, one goes to the soundcard to provide clock for the audio. That isn't allowed, even though every device is HDCP compliant.
It also means should I wish to watch on my laptop, I'd have to buy it a Blu-ray player and lug the discs with me, there's no ability to copy them over.
Is it any wonder I'm not more interested? I have a few Blu-ray discs, but not many, and I don't buy them often. I'm not paying an inflated price, and part of their interest, the extremely high quality, is dulled by the knowledge that they won't work on my highest end system.
Netflix may not look as good, but it is cheap, and it works on, well, everything I own practically.
The real reason is many people are fine just buying the DVD version of a Movie/TV show instead at about half the price or less.
Quality snobs will have their local storage. I expect prices will go up.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
because this person alone did not have a blu ray player, it was never popular. the logic is flawless
I don't quite understand the logic of the editorial statement at the bottom, given that online streamed videos are also bound by "awful DRM". This stopped streamed videos from playing on Linux and on rooted Android devices for years (I think the situation is gradually improving due to better workarounds etc.).
Besides, at least I could rip and watch my DVD's on my devices - I know it can be done with BluRay, but they made it unpleasant enough to deter me exactly as they (Sony) intended. Now that me and guys like me just aren't that interested, I can't say as I'm surprised how things are ending up. Must break their hearts over there at Sony, eh? Doesn't break mine.
Blu-ray support is the biggest pain in the ass in our very tweaked media center. HDCP lag, endless ads at the start of each disk, incredibly complex software installs that frequently fail all in the name of 'security.' Try this security ... we will no longer tolerate your product. Now we're safe, how 'bout you?
Sony fought *hard* to make Blue-Ray the dominant standard. It was basically "everyone and their brother behind HDTV" vs. "Sony and a couple of their bestest buddies behind Blue-Ray" until Sony spent a ton to get exclusives and woo studios away, all so that they could monopolize the next generation of movies (and not repeat the Betamax experience).
As somone who hates to see companies monopolize technology, the fact that all their efforts were largely wasted makes me very happy :-)
...This stopped streamed videos from playing on Linux and on rooted Android devices for years (I think the situation is gradually improving due to better workarounds etc.).
The opposite is happening. For years, everyone used RTMPE with SWF Verification which is trivially breakable so you could watch things like Hulu and Amazon Prime with ease. Now everyone is enabling "real" DRM.
Sony, a company with two divisions that want to choke each other.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
What with the much lower quality video and far worse compression artifacts streaming has, also having to be connected to the internet to watch a movie, and also often having to pay per play rather than a pay once model, it totally boggles my mind that people prefer streaming video to blu-ray and even DVD.
I'm much more inclined to believe that its really Hollywood that is killing off Blu-Ray (and any other form of physical media) rather than Joe Public.
Hollywood have had so many bad experiences with successfully applying DRM to physical media, they've now turned to trying to do away completely with any/all forms of physical copies being in the hands of Joe Public. In mybook, thats a BAD thing for us.
...for those of us with projection screens. When you're looking at a 150" screen projecting at 1920X1080, a blu-ray is gorgeous, just like being in the theater. At 25mbits / sec, artifacts are nonexistant. With the reduced bitrates and resolutions of even "HD" streaming, it all shows up. Streaming is not quite there yet due to last mile problems at least here in the states.
At this year's NAB conference in Vegas, 4K was starting to take over in a really big way. I was flabbergasted by the difference in adoption between last year and this year. Everyone had 4K gear. I don't know how long it will take that to filter down to the consumer market, but I don't think streaming services are going to be able to keep up at all for a while. A 4K disc format will hopefully be in the offing.
That being said, Blu Ray has been a pretty raw deal for small and independent video producers. If you want to make a video and publish it on Blu Ray officially, you have to pay the Blu Ray consortium a hefty royalty fee up front and you are obligated to use DRM even if you don't want it. They have come down hard from the beginning so that you can't go to any replication house and get replicated BRDs made without going through this process. You're limited to burning BD-R discs on your own if you don't want to deal with that. Fortunately BD-Rs are 100% compatible with all Blu Ray players, unlike DVD-Rs and DVD players, which were very problematic with compatibility. (that's a long story in and of itself)
I was initially happy that Blu Ray won over HD-DVD until I found out how bad it was to actually just get something replicated onto BRD. I don't know that HD-DVD would have been any better though.
Weird, I still rather buy a physical disc that can be broken over a DRM'ed streaming file that can be taken away from me.
Still pushing the same agenda after all this time, slashdot? You know that all downloadable media also has DRM, right? You're not only a broken record, you're wrong, too.
The publishers were already experiencing this issue when they forced 30+ day delays before Redbox and Netflix could carry their movies, hoping to get in as many sales as possible. Now, I won't be surprised to see that exclusivity period creep up to 45 days or even 60 days.
I never bought a Blu Ray player. Why? Because the DVD was such a disappointment. We were promised all these features that never materialized. The only feature that DVD used was the feature that kept the consumer from skipping content, fast forwarding over commercials at the beginning of DVD, and of course DRM that makes it hard to copy onto the hardisk. So if you don't want to be tied to a DVD player, the best option is a subscription to Netflix. And since Bluray is DRM incarnate, unless one want to live in the 19th century, it is a trade off that most younger people choose not to make, Bluray becomes a non starter. The validity of these statements is shown by the inclusion of digital copy on some DVD and Blu Ray. If bluray had this a standard feature from day 1, I suspect it would have been widely succesful. But like DVD, the main goal of Blu Ray was to screw the user.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
And in some cases the video is exactly the same (grain per grain) as the DVD, and perhaps even with inferior audio and features. The studios decided to just ship out any crap and we would pay a premium because it was on BluRay. Some of us fell for it once or twice but eventually learned and went back to buying DVDs. Blame downloading services if you want, but I much prefer to own a physical DVD than a DRM crippled download of lower quality with repressive DRM or not even having the download at all, just watching and then having nothing. And I do like the extra features on discs and the ability to watch again or even lend the disc to a friend. There are lots of advantages to physical media, but several disadvantages to BluRay. I expect some studio execs would rather blame downloading for the decline in BluRay sales than take responsibility for decisions they made.
And, yes, I know that DVDs have DRM too, but it tends to be much less of a problem for most users.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Net neutrality is done for. Forget FTTH, it won't matter how fast your connection is when you'll be paying your ISP plus the content providers AND now the backbone transit gatekeepers for the opportunity to stream your movie. Blu-ray will be competitively priced, all things considered, Sales have declined in line with disposable incomes shrinking. Prices for blu-ray have been diminishing and will continue to meet with what the market can bear. Online streaming will be the convenient luxury that some will pay extra for.
1) Whole seasons of television on fewer than half the number of disks as DVD.
2) When the burners get faster and cheaper, convenient backups. But realistically, Blu-Ray is too small for geeks - you want a backup medium that's at least 10% if not 20% of the size of your data set so a full backup won't be a huge stack of disks. You also want the differential backup from several weeks or months ago vs. today to fit on one disk.
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I don't quite understand the logic of the editorial statement at the bottom, given that online streamed videos are also bound by "awful DRM". This stopped streamed videos from playing on Linux and on rooted Android devices for years (I think the situation is gradually improving due to better workarounds etc.).
Too true. Physical media trumps streaming on DRM (it's broken on physical media), quality, availability, and even convenience when the film you want to watch isn't available on any of the streaming service you've subscribed to at the moment. And if you care about which cut of the movie you want to watch, or maintaining theatrical aspect ratio, or any crazy things like that, streaming becomes a real toad.
But, most people don't decide what they want to watch and then check to see if it's available on streaming. That's a formula for disappointment. Most people check what's available on streaming and then choose from that pretty limited selection, and that seems like convenience. And since convenience trumps everything else, streaming wins.
Complaining about DRM right after a snarky comment about how old-fashioned it is to want your own copy of a movie was the best laugh I've had all day. Because the only people who complain about DRM on video discs are people who want their own copies. Meanwhile, the oh-so-modren approach of streaming movies from cloud services is wrapped up in all sorts of DRM, as well as the certainty that you'll lose access to them one way or another down the line (the main legitimate argument against DRM).
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And parts for buggies.
Sorry, time for a reality check. Physical media is dead. New computers are more often than not bereft of optical drives. Streaming has destroyed rental joints. Digital downloads are the standard in software distribution. Nobody in their right mind backs up their files to an optical disc in the age of thumbdrives.
Refusing to let go of the past does not allow you to lay dominion over the present and future.
and blue rays, but with hulu+netflix I won't normally let her buy them. I think people still like media, but at $25+ bucks a pop for a Blue Ray (and with a pretty weak economy) I think ppl are settling for what they can afford.
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Steve Jobs declare that "Blue Ray was in a world of hurt." for no good reason other than to push the iTunes store. The world would have been very different if Apple had equipped their Macs with blue ray players. No I'm not anti-Apple. I personally believe as go Apple as go the industry (usually).
I'd love to own more movies/tv shows in Blu-ray. I love the quality of the audio/picture. But the amount of hoops you have to jump through just to get the damn thing to play makes it a painful experience.
I have several devices in my house that *in theory* can play blu-rays, but the reality is that its usually easier to just download a blu-ray rip and watch that (despite owning the blu-ray itself).
Classic DRM- annoys the legitimate customers, whilst the 'pirates' provide a better product.
That's because streaming from Netflix or Amazon just works, on your TV, on your phone, on your computer.
BluRay often doesn't work, and when it doesn't work, it usually because of the DRM.
When DRM is invisible, people don't even realize it's there.
>"Especially when those copies come with awful DRM. "
Um, and streaming doesn't? There is just as much DRM on Netflix/etc. Plus it has its own limitations:
* I can't use it on any of my many Linux machines.
* I can't use it without an Internet connection.
* I can't get QUALITY without a GOOD Internet connection.
* I can't use it at all if that Internet connection has blocking.
* They have the ability to FORCE the user to watch anything they want- commercials, previews, copyright notices, public service announcements, etc.
* The quality or playback is far more likely to change or be interrupted.
* Streaming is often very "clunky" when it comes to fast forwarding and rewinding.
Was it even ever popular?
Oh yes. The quality is absolutely better than DVD, and still much better than streaming.
That said, I stream a lot of shows and video - but some selected movies I love I still buy on Blu-Ray because you can't beat 50GB of data locally cached.
I can see why the absolute sales of Blu-Ray have declined because people used to buy the "filler" movies on DVD that you can now easily stream, so the sales of filler stuff on BluRay must be dropping like a stone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I am old enough to remember when Sony was an electronics company and made the best products in the industry. You either got a Sony or second best. When the media companies made threats against DAT, Sony came out with DAT recorders that recorded at exactly the correct rate to copy DVDs.
Then, they bought CBS records and became a media company. They lost focus on their electronics business and started using proprietary standards that no one else used. They have been declining for years and seem to be close to a death spiral. No one thinks of Sony as premium any more. I miss the old Sony, but have very little sympathy for the new Sony.
I have never seen a bluray with only dvd quality video. Do you have any examples?
I remember when Blu-rays were first being talked about and one of the big features was multiple ratings of the same movie. I was super excited about this, but it never happened. So many other great features never happened, and then they cost more and have DRM. Sony and its ilk killed the format.
I wonder if we would be having this same conversation if HD-DVD had won the format wars.
Also as far as the DRM is concerned, I have been successfully ripping my Blu-rays onto my network storage server for a long time and have had no problems.
Stargate was released on BluRay with the exact same video as the DVD, an awful two channel audio track, and even fewer subtitles than the DVD. After an up swelling of complaints from the public they did release a better version. But even a few years after that I bought a copy at WalMart and it ended up being the inferior older BluRay version, even though it was freshly sent out stock. I damn well assure you that I'm not going to buy the better version now that I know it exists. This is not the only case of studios doing this.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
You should try torrents some time.
The FA says that Blu-ray disc sales are increasing, but overall disk sales are slowing because DVDs are contracting so quickly.
Quoting the article. "Last year, about 124 million Blu-ray discs were sold in the U.S., a 4.2% increase over 2012, according to IHS Technology. Even so, because of reduced pricing for the format, revenue only increased 2.6%. DVD sales, which have been plummeting for years, dropped 13.6% last year."
Blu-ray data rates are far higher than anything you can stream today, and people who care about that (not many of the commenters apparently :) ) apparently are still buying discs.
I do come from the movie business, so I surely have a different perspective; but to filmmakers quality is paramount.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I've stopped buying Blurays because the digital downloads you get with them and redeam on iTunes are of very low quality compared with iTunes 1080p. Almost unwatchable.
...maybe the predatory pricing has something to do with it. Cut the price more than a token 1-2% and then see what happens.
... hard drives are much cheaper and faster to backup data with than blu-ray discs. Blu-ray discs were too costly for the storage they offered vs hard discs and added only the most marginal improvement over DVD for video vs the size of the files. The cost, speed and size of hard drives far outpaced blu-ray. You get a 10 discs at 25GB a piece that is only a measily 250GB for roughly $12-16 bucks. You can get a 3 Terabyte hard drive for around $100, it's faster to copy and record things to and you can re-use it.
That's because streaming from Netflix or Amazon just works, on your TV, on your phone, on your computer
Unless your Internet is down. Or slow. Or a high-quality stream will saturate it (hello, DSL!).
Or you're HBO, beholden to the whims of cable companies, and the cable company has to approve any device which wants to stream HBO content. You want to use HBO GO on Comcast? That's fine, but you're doing it on your Roku or PC, not your PS3. There's a fully functional PS3 HBO app, but Comcast disallows it, for no other reason than they can. This happens even if your Internet provider is not Comcast and thus Comcast's servers are not involved.
Or you want to stream something not available through Netflix or Amazon. ( A good portion of things)
Or you don't want to be beholden to a company which can cancel your plan and lock you out of all the content they carry at any time.
Or you want to watch the decent extras.
Or you don't want to pay for subscriptions to 2+ online services just to get the content that you could get for $11/month from Netflix's dvd-by-mail.
The instant availability of titles is the only advantage streaming has. That's a nice feature, but shit, you give up SO MUCH to get it.
I'm an old fart (comparatively) on Slashdot, and so I still buy physical media. Streaming is great until the content provider yanks it from the service you use, or moves it to a competing service in an exclusive deal (cf. HBO's recent deal with Amazon; no more Wire on Netflix, I suppose). Do people really want to subscribe to ALL of these streaming services? Or, hey, go pirate it off some torrent and hope the DRM cops don't start sending letters with invoices for $2,000 in fines.
In contrast, you can buy the DVD or Blu-ray and (hypothetically) rip it to whatever format, or make a backup DVD or SD card for the family minivan.
You can also give it to someone else, sell it, or even bequeath it to your heirs.
I'm not a pirate, yarrr... but Blu Ray sucks. I've had issues with newer discs not playing on my legit player. The mandatory previews, etc are just bogus. The only reason for blu ray is because the netflix streaming catalog is so limited. This and the HDCP nonsense. DVI should have won, but as open source, it never had a chance.
Streaming from Amazon doesn't "just work".
It's pretty much as proprietary as iTunes is. Only Amazon brand Android devices support it. If you have any stuff bought from Amazon you are just SOL if you want to use it on your Android phone.
On the other hand, ripped physical media doesn't have that problem.
It's like an iTunes file without the DRM.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
He realized Blu-Ray wasn't the future, but a temporary stop-gap, and didn't want to waste his time and energy on it.
This summary has it wrong. Read the article and its BluRay sales that are still increasing, presumably due to the quality problems (both audio and video) currently inherent in streaming. Anyone with a 60" or better LCD and a decent sound system will notice the difference immediately. Despite the DRM.
It's DVD sales that are cratering, due to the following factors:
1. Streaming quality is competive with DVD.
2. Why buy DVD when BD is better?
3. Easy piracy due to non-invasive DRM.
i'm 50 and it doesn't seem just quaint, it seems so retrogressive as to be painful..as
if we were counting on vinyl records being hard to press in your garage to
keep sales up
I still buy DVDs and Blu-Rays rather than streaming media because I can always rip them (despite the DRM) and play them on any of my devices, vs paying the same price and only playing on Amazon/Google/whatever-compatible devices (read: not all of the devices I own that can play the video).
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It's all about control. The reason I want physical media (with DRM stripped) and/or a file on my hard drive is that it is hard if not impossible to take away from me. I don't want to "buy" something and then have to rely on someone else to be there and give me permission in order for me to use it (as is the case with streaming purchases). I pay for Netflix and use that; but it is just a fee to access their library - titles come and go and that's the nature of it. If I pay full price to "own" something; and in this case "own" really means "keep" then it would be foolish of me to rely on another party to do so.
See, and we thought that you weren't interested because there wasn't a lot of fag pr0n on blu ray.
Are these formats unsuccessful?
+ PlayStation Game Disc (CD-ROM based)
+ PlayStation 2 Game Disc (CD-ROM based)
+ PlayStation 2 Game Disc (DVD-ROM based)
+ PlayStation 3 Game Disc (BD-ROM based)
+ PlayStation 4 Game Disc (BD-ROM based)
+ PSP Game Disc (UMD based)
+ PlayStation Vita Game Card (BD-ROM based)
Until you get hit with the overages while trying to stream high-definition video outside of an urban area. Satellite and fixed cellular Internet have low monthly caps.
So here is the deal. When you place such idiotic DRM on the media as to make it nearly impossible to play with anything other than the latest bluray player that is constantly updating the encryption firmware this is the result. This will of course be used to support yet more invasive monitoring of ISP and their traffic and force yet more moronic laws for monitoring and removal of "Suspected" infringing content from sites. Just FYI, AnyDVD HD from Slysoft is awesome and works like a charm. Not cheap though! Fuck you Sony, glad to see you take it in the ass again. Stop being assholes and treating me like the one or two percent that actually steal content and give me my movies sans DRM and maybe I will buy a whole lot more of them.
Personally, I don't often have a desire to see a movie more than once.
Let me guess: you don't have single-digit-year-old kids who gladly rewatch a favorite animated film.
In fact usually I can rent a movie online a few times before it would add up to the cost of buying a hard copy anyway.
Unless you're buying the hard copy used at the local pawn shop.
and no you don't have to have an Internet connection to watch a movie you've previously downloaded.
Unless the player decides it has to "renew authorization" right now. And as I understand it, rentals are streamed, not downloaded.
What kills Blu-Ray is the DRM.
When DVD's CSS got cracked, they got cracked forever. You can buy a DVD and be sure that your existing player, as-is, can play it. There's no element of gambling (except the legal aspect: DMCA's illegality of playing the DVDs, but nobody ever gets caught breaking 1201a, and you only have to traffick in the player (1201b) once, so that's relatively risk-free too).
With Blu-Rays, before every single purchase, you have to research whether or not it's playable yet. You might have to get an update to your player to handle this month's DRM (so in addition to spending money every month, there's also the recurring 1201b violation). And if you don't get updated, then the disc simply might not work. Like anyone wants to go through That when they have some friends over. It's simply not worth the hassle to buy the unreliable discs; there are guys out there who are happy to spend their all their time keeping up with purchases, so that you don't have to. they make files you can depend on. Blu-Rays just aren't as reliable or as easy to keep up with, as Scene releases.
DVDs: can buy. Blu-Ray: have to pirate or else spend lot of time and money. With Blu-Ray, buying just doesn't make sense.
Blu-Rays can become instantly viable, if they just make a standard for them. Make it so that to have the logo on it, every Blu-Ray disc for sale starting June 1 2014, is un-DRMed. Then people would know, prior to purchase, that they'll be able to play it. Otherwise, who is going to buy them? It's just too risky. People want movies that Just Work.
Generally you stream once for a lower price than you pay for a bluray disc. For rental only, DRM is fine. For purchasing a product though DRM sucks. I laugh at the streaming stuff on Amazon where it ways "rent or buy" when it's obvious that the buy option does not mean that you own the product. Same with bluray, why spend $20 (or whatever they cost) for a movie that you watch only once or twice. Sure it's a bargain if you've got kindergarteners who want to watch Lion King every weekend but owning a disk outright doesn't seem that good a deal financially. (except for getting disks as gifts of course)
Funny, I've found physical media to be quaint SINCE i was 25. I only buy a physical copy of something so I can rip a copy for myself, and I only do that when I cannot find a non-physical copy of the movie or song. It's been a few years since I wasn't surprised when somebody buys a physical copy of something. I just don't understand why anyone keeps doing it.
So, it's like an iTunes music file since 2009?
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Even though I would prefer to buy digital download copies because:
1. I don't want to steal by pirating
2 It's cheaper to buy a blu ray than a download copy from somewhere like itunes.
3. A Streaming service going offline/bankrupt can't take it away once I've bought it.
4. There's DRM on downloaded movies.
5. I can get pretty much anything that exists as a movie (as opposed to itunes and netflix that don't have as complete catalogs).
If I could buy downloadable movies without DRM for cheaper or the same price as physical media then I would.
So far the main advantage of BluRay is that you can get a HD copy at a reasonable price where you can actually get rid of the DRM in most cases. Currently this makes using a BluRay just as illegal as pirating the movie. If they would stop adding DRM, they would not only reduce the production costs (DRM is expensive!), but also give the customers what they want.
Amazon streams just fine on a Roku player
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
The Blu-Ray market is small and shrinking because dvd's are 'good enough' for movies. I have a Blu-Ray player, but its never played a Blu-Ray disk because Blu-Ray disks are crazy expensive, and have not come down. Blank media is crazy expensive. A blank disk in reality costs about 5 cents to make, and costs $25 (each). It sells for 500x the manufacturing cost. Go ahead, gouge users, and watch media storage migrate to other devices. A multi-terabyte drive can cost about $100. That's the cost of 4 Blu-Ray disks (100GB). The cost differential is 2000x cheaper, and that's just for the media. I won't get into how much more convenient these other storage media are either. And Sony is asking "Why no more Blu-Ray?" Are they sober? Are they serious? Give me blank media for 10 cents per disk, and I will *consider* blu-ray. Anything more, and Sony can go the way of Beta.
People were upgrading their DVD's to BLU-ray's. We should be surprised sales stayed inflated this long.
3/4 U-matic was a huge success. Betacam was a huge success. 8mm was a big success. 3.5" floppy was a HUGE success.
DAT was a failure.
MiniDisc was not a failure. It was big in Europe and Japan.
DVD was partially Sony's work (split with Matsushita, just as CD was split with Philips).
A lot of the reason people think Sony has a penchant for failed formats is Sony creates a lot of formats. You can't fail if you don't try.
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Truths: "Cinavia DRM: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Blu-ray’s Self-Destruction"
But there is no legal alternative. AACS may suck in principle, but it has been broken. I can buy a Blu-Ray and rip it bit-for-bit. There is no other HD content you are offered you can do this for. Netflix? Nope. Amazon/iTunes/UltraViolet/etc.? Nope.
And HDCP? It sure is a pain in the butt. But it is on every other bit of legal HD studio content too. You cannot watch Hollywood HD content on any device in your house unless it has a built-in display (like a laptop, tablet or phone) or has HDCP. It's not just Blu-Ray, it's Netflix, iTunes, etc. So if you're going to put down Blu-Ray for that, you're just going to have to turn pirate or else watch in SD.
The thing that really gets me about Blu-Ray, which other systems don't have, is all those stupid forced previews before the movies. As long as the studios put that junk on their Blu-Ray discs, they are going to discourage people from buying Blu-Ray discs. And that's on top of the existing discouragement of having to buy a drive.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You used to build awesome products. After your DRM shenanigans (infecting your customer's computers with DRM viruses etc.) I wowed not to buy anything Sony. Ever. I stuck to it.
Hopefully many others did likewise.
for 99% of the movies I see. I rent them an see them once and that's it.
For some reason I don't feel like using money on getting a movie on Blu-Ray.
Perhaps it is my collection of VHS movies I threw out years ago or maybe my LaserDisc's taking up shelf space in my home office(specially those "invalueable" collecters editions). It could also be my smaller collection of DVDs in drawers in the living room that reminds me why I should not buy Blu-ray, but just rent it instead. :)
With HD digital projectors getting below $700 and Blu-ray players getting well under $100 and tons of classic movies on Blu-ray for $15 or less, it should be doing fine.
I can't imagine being dependent on streaming to watch the movies I want to watch. A lot of kids these days only care that it looks good on their phone or tablet.
If I get Blu-ray, it's for high quality shows/movies and I prefer to get a DVD with them. It's rare that I'll buy a Blu-ray only movie. I know that I in theory can back it up, but it's going to cost a bunch of money to get the software and hardware to do it. It's going to be a long time before I have a blu-ray collection that justifies it.
That's really all they need to do, they need to package DVDs with Blu-ray discs at no extra cost. I get my digital backup and if I want to watch the movie in maximum quality, I can.
Work Safe Porn
Half the time nowadays, when you go to a store, you might not be able to buy JUST the blu-ray. You get the more expensive package with the DVD and digital copy or with the (argh) 3D blu-ray wrapped in. Most stores don't seem to want to stock all of the variants. So they stock the more expensive ones.
Honestly, there are a lot of movies with people I don't know or that aren't blockbusters that I'd pay $5-10 to try if they looked interesting, but no way in heck I'm paying $20-40. So their increasing the cost of buying a story (which to some extent is what a movie really is) has reduced the number of stories I'm willing to pay for dramatically.
I have always hated Sony's attitude towards consumers (it thinks we're all thieves and that it is okay to sell us N copies of the same content just with different formats, even though the original actors and directors and so on got paid the first time). I have no interest in supporting their inaccurate judgment (and offensive too).
I used to buy lots of DVDs in the $5-15 range. But even with better graphics, I wouldn't buy the $25-40 blu-ray pkg (or even more expensive in some cases). You can put lipstick on a donkey, but its still an ass.
I can also easily rip a DVD for use with my Boxee and other media servers locally. The blu-ray is more of a pain.
Oddly, the crappy attitude of the labels and their ludicrous pricing scheme tempts me to use torrents. I'd pay them a moderate fee gladly, but their attempt to twist my arm into buying more expensive and poorly performing hardware and annoying to navigate, commercial laden disks is driving me into the camp of the pirates (or just away from TV and movies entirely).
As a business plan, that is idiotic. And frankly, they thus deserve to lose money. They deserve to keep bleeding money until they discover that treating their customers like crap is a money losing proposition.
Ultimately, blu-ray is probably a slightly more expensive media and has slightly more expensive content. But honestly, none of us think that's worth a 40-60% price premium on DVD.
Ultimately if the story sucks, you're out $10-25 more (if you bought the package with DVD, blu-ray, blu-ray 3D and the digital copy that is really DRM crusted).
I'll risk $5-15 on a DVD of something I don't know will be great (and often I have good results or at least mediocre ones) but I won't risk $30+.
The slow load (in the age of instant on PCs that can be streaming faster than a hardware blu-ray player can be running), the unavoidable BS of trailers and ridiculous numbers of warnings and disclaimers, and the compatibility issues..... all these things sink the format so that its better sound and image quality don't matter.
This is what Sony doesn't get: You can't 'upformat' a bad movie to a good one and you can't treat your customers like thieves without turning this into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I can backup ripped movies. How am I expected to backup a commercial blu-ray (they do get damaged...)? Buy two? At full price? And no format shifting for various devices?
Fail, fail, fail... but that's always been Sony. If they actually forced some of their CEOs to apologize the old fashioned way (costing a finger or a disemboweling), then maybe the next one would be better.
And yet the quality of a bluray is much MUCH better than any streaming of Netflix or HBO Go (at the moment).. And even 3D bluray's are really much better than any downloaded SBS/OU version, and the better detail is very important for better 3D (the higher the quality, the less eyestrain/headache (for people who have problems with that))..
It does only insofar as you stream something from a service. Rip it and stream it yourself (or torrent it and stream it) and you have ownership and convenience.
Frankly, most of us would pay companies a moderate amount for decent entertainment if the companies made highly functional hardware, cost effective media, allowed format shifting, and didn't treat us all like thieves.
They do the opposite and tend to turn people into 'thieves' or away from TV and movies entirely. They deserve what they get.
They have to pay for the streaming? Or you do?
If you have a physical disk, you can invite them over and watch it with them (often fun) or loan it to them.
I find introducing my GF to all the old movies she didn't see (and some newer ones she missed because no one invited her to those sorts of movies) is a lot of fun. She loves them generally and me having the disks (mostly DVD) is great. She also falls asleep in movies frequently so we watch them 3-4 times (partially) to complete one often enough. Streaming that could get nasty, especially cable company wise where you have a short term license - we'd likely have to pay again.
Is it quality to have players that don't load the disks, HDCP systems that can't keep in sync between the player and the TV, and so on? That's blu-ray....
Besides, quality isn't paramount to a lot of film makers if you've seen the scripts Hollywood and the media corps have been cranking out the last decade (mostly). They are remakes because doing something new is seen as risky. Reboot and re-reboot. Just an attempt to profiteer again and again off the same basic script/story.
Blu-disk also disadvantages small film-makers. They are the ones whose budgets strain to support BD production. They are also the ones I think that are most obsessed with quality. So the medium and the fee structures associated with it screw over the main people whose work ethic would most align with the higher quality.
I do have a certain fondness for a library of physical media, but there are specific issues with streaming.
Streaming services are not standardised. Sure, everything works with netflix, but what if I don't want Netflix or the other handful of services that are supported? Handing a few companies an oligarchy feels like a bad idea.
Movies that are available now may not be available next week.
I need an internet connection. Okay, my situation here is somewhat specialised, but I spend a lot of time not at home. Hotel internet connections are not perfect. I can rip a bunch of DVDs to my hard disk, or a portable media player, and plug that into a television. This even works in other countries.
DVDs have their own issues. I'm under no illusion about that, but streaming isn't an idea replacement for me.
The picture quality is excellent and puts the streaming alternatives to shame. But every time I play a film that I've bought legally from a reputable shop, they treat me like a dirty, stinking pirate. I get shown lots of warnings and there's lots of unskippable propaganda sequences, I've even seen unskippable ads. Even worse, the player shows an obnoxious "this operation is illegal" when I attempt to skip these things and this warning requires an extra click to get rid of. I love buying a real physical disc and watching proper quality video on my TV, it feels much more like a proper movie night, but they were testing my patience from day 1 and this patience has run out.
The lesson as I see it: don't treat your legitimate customers like criminals. The first thing pirates do is strip these obnoxious warnings.
Have you ever watched a BR or just a regular DVD after seeing the big-screen movie in a theatre?
Nearly all of the disk movies are missing scenes. Harry Potter, LOTR, Star Wars, to name a few,
all have been edited for home and are missing scenes. The packages DO NOT say that the disk movie
is missing anything. The disks are marketed as the movie... and are not. Clearly, there is a reason:
So that three years after the dvd or BR release, they can market a "Special Edition" version for 2X
the original disk cost - which may still not have all the original movie scenes.
1 - make a really good movie
2 - use creative accounting to claim zero profit, no taxes
3 - sell dvds with missing scenes
4 - sell later dvds at 2X the original cost to fans
5 - roll in the money and buy another golden parachute
This is actually so close to false advertising ( Juice labels MUST declare how much real juice is
in the package ) that I am surprised that there hasn't been a class-action suit over
the practice for false advertising. If car manufacturers advertised a car for $x, and actually buying the car
you found that it was missing a tire or the passenger seat, a lawsuit would happen, why not for missing
scenes and a label that says "THE MOVIE" when it is not... ???
I own legal BD disks, a Sony BD player. But yet, even through the
HDMI to HDMI from player to TV, the signal is still crippled. If I pause
the play, I can see many compression artefacts. I don't get it.
BD has lost its appeal.
CAPTCHA = 'distrust'
The problem with streamed media is they lose the rights and bam- you can't watch it any more.
This is my main problem with streaming, aside from the bandwidth issues.
Blu-ray and DVDs both have their irritations, but at least once I've bought a disk it's mine and I know I can rewatch it or lend it to a friend as often as I like. There are still potential problems with longevity but they tend to involve bad firmware updates and DRM-friendly connectivity rather than the disks themselves.
With a library model, it's great as long as what you want to watch is in the library right now, but if you get halfway through a season of your favourite show and then someone's licensing agreement runs out, bam, no second half of the season in the library any more.
I suspect the subscription/library model will have a kind of "golden age" as bandwidth gets good enough and there are only a tiny number of different libraries to subscribe to, but in the long run the most likely positions seem to be market fragmentation (you have to subscribe to several libraries, and your favourite shows might jump around between them) or consolidating into a near-monopoly (with the natural tendency to then push prices up). Neither is good for consumers, and as we saw with music, sooner or later you find people just want to download a permanent, DRM-free copy of what they paid for to enjoy on their own terms, and the world does not end if you give the customer what they want and charge a fair price for it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
BluRay often doesn't work
Liar. blu-ray sales are up yet again. They clearly work just fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Hollywood still hasn't figured out the two main reasons people don't stock pile movies at home, price and DRM. Netflix and Amazon make it so much easier to watch movies because of this. If new movies cost $5 a piece on Blu-Ray, I'd have a massive collection of BR's instead of 20.
I am still in the middle of my All Things Sony boycott, begun at the time of their unapologetic rootkit behavior, so I have no tears to shed for their plight. Since my personal campaign began, I have purchased two televisions, two laptops, a stereo, a camera, three portable music players and more, with not a Sony logo among them. No BluRay experience here, since these too have their roots at Sony (pun intended). On the plus side as Sony sees it, my BluRay demand has remained steady throughout this period. Steady at zero, that is.
The reason nobody's buying Blu-Ray isn't soley because of the annoying DRM and non-skippable content and other generally user-hostile 'features' of the format. The average consumer doesn't give a shit about that (and will have no idea what DRM even is.) The reason is that they don't care about the quality loss in streaming content. How they can't see (on a big TV anyway) that the Blu-Ray looks 100% better than what you get from Netflix streaming boggles my mind, personally. When there's a movie that I want to see in good quality (think Man of Steel, Frozen, etc, just to name a couple recent ones) I go to Redbox to get the Blu-Ray. It looks better. Unfortunately, people don't give a shit.
The war on picture/sound quality has, sadly, been won by the apathetic side. (Witness the demise of multichannel audio, DVD-Audio and SACD. Most people think a stereo 128-bit .mp3 file sounds fine. It doesn't.) I'll be renting Blu-Rays until streaming formats (and the necessary bandwidth) are available at the same bitrate as a Blu-Ray. But, the way things are going, BD will die and we'll be stuck with streaming movies that look like Tetris on a big screen. Another case of the consumer wanting 'cheap/convenient' over 'good', aka the Wal-Mart effect.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Unskippable menus and other issues are coming up but honestly, the only thing stopping me from loading up on more BD movies is that ~ $30 price tag for new releases. There's just no way I'm paying more than $15-20 for a movie, period, so I just don't bother anymore.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Hey bigmouth: You're being called out (why're you running, "forrest"?) http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Blue Ray takes too long to load, I'm not impressed with the quality, it has a bunch of popups and icons overtop of the picture, and we just want to watch the damn movie!
I'm not normally one to defend DRM, but in what way is the Blu-ray DRM "awful"? As far as I can tell it doesn't require an internet connection. Is CSS also awful? Because as far as I can tell the only difference is that AACS is more effective. The only way I can make sense of the statement is if you mean to say that all DRM is awful, and you're just being redundant.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Process audio separately: downshift pitch 40%, upshift pitch 56%, done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
After I just got done buying enough Blu-ray equipment to transfer over all of my Betamax vids... sheesh! I thought for sure that Blu-ray would win after Sony paid everyone off. Maybe if they paid the consumer to buy Blu-ray?
Dear Sony,
Please send me $50K USD every year for the next 10 years and I'll consider buying some Blu-ray material.
It's quaint until you want to watch something and discover it's been pulled from online availability because if a licensing dispute.
Amazon streaming works on my Panasonic Bluray player and my Roku.
The commentary tracks are the only reason that I buy DVD/BDs. It means that I'll at least watch it twice. ...and more and more often they aren't included any more on the optical formats either, because "commentary doesn't sell discs' apparently.
They aren't included in pirate rips.
While I can't say 'No Commentary, no Sale", it's a _very_ high priority as to whether I'll pay more than GBP5 for a disc.
I was asked once upon a time which would win HD-DVD or BluRay during the beginning of the disk standard wars. My immediate reaction was "neither". I said it would be about online content. When a friend ask he he should get a BluRay player, I said "No, unless you don't plan to use it much".
Not saying I am a futurist, a technological sage, or anything like that, only it was very obvious many years ago that this was the trend, and that it would easily win out over dead physical media. This was many years ago. Executives finally admitting that their business model that they have been trying to prop up is failing now is humorous. Though I suppose perhaps they thought they could make a quick buck, and stretch it out longer, and are now coming to the understanding that they can't totally control what people want.
That battle was won when HD-DVD's security was practically broken. Not that Blu-ray lasted much longer.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I have always maintained that Blu-Ray disks are far too expensive. Now, I'm talking about BR with movies not blank disks. The idea of paying $20-30 for a movie that I'm probably going to watch once is silly. And let's face it...if you're like me, the vast majority of movies are seen once and forgotten about. Even some of the classics that you might watch multiple times (Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, Scarface, Bond movies, etc.) are almost always available on the multitude of movie channels that I have available to me commercial free. For those, I can just DVR it and watch it whenever I want.
Contrast that with my NetFlix subscription. $8 a month with unlimited content. Including a lot of good stuff that you would never find on BR (independent movies, documentaries, etc.). And no clutter from all those disks lying around never to be played again.
You know the old saying? If it flies, floats or fu#ks then rents it - don't buy it. Well, I think we can add BR to that. BR is dead.
Only on slashdot would the DRM taking your time for unskipable things . . . my wife has ZERO problem with this. She sends me to the other room to 'get the movie ready' and I do so happily. Why? Because most previews ARE skippable (if you know how to use a remote hint: they come with a Fine Manual), and if I don't she'll want to watch the damn previews.
Reading the 'insightful' posts, looks like many of the DRM complainers don't own many discs; maybe it's the 'trade paperback' netflix movies-only blu-rays, but the stuff I own doesn't have commercials you can't get past.
The best part of DVD - at least to me - wasn't the resolution, but rather no longer needing to "rewind" (fast-skip also being a nice part).
This was offset by the irritation of some players which didn't let you skip the warning/ads. Luckily cheap players still allowed this, as they ignored the "don't skip" buts. I haven't seen equivalent cheap players in the BD world.
I've never purchased one of these BluRay players nor disks and I never will.
There was just no need for them. It's digital all the way starting about 5 or 6 years ago.
And as a big surprise to no-one with common sense, like all other gimmicks this expensive gimmick dies out earlier than expected. Honestly, it was a miracle it lasted this long...
Just the other night I tried to watch The Hunger Games: Chasing Fire on BluRay on my Windows 8 machine. It has legitimate software to play the disc and that software has worked well. When I tried watching this, I got the menu with no video or sound. I just clicked on the "Play" text on the menu (I was able to navigate features) and got a black screen after which I was returned to the broken menu. Fuck YOU Sony!
So I thought, "fine... I'll boot into Ubuntu and use mplayer which is making use of the MakeMKV BluRay decryption libs. That's worked fine for everything I've thrown at it. I ran mplayer with the br:/// URL and it started playing the movie (menus don't work in Linux reliably). About 11 minutes in, I get this big black screen with white text in the middle and some anthemic sounding music in the background essentially saying, "Aha! You're trying to play this disc in a way that WE deem to be theft. So, being the gigantic and useless money grubbing cock sucking tools that we are, we are preventing you from seeing the rest of the movie". FUCK YOU SONY!!!
The execs and people behind this format can all go die in a fire as far as I'm concerned. You're all a bunch of worthless dickheads. You need to fuck off. Immediately.
Oh, wait. I get it. You need the host files so that you can buy things over the darknet. That explains your host file hack, your complete detachment from the rest of humanity. So - those hostfiles your using keep the police from finding all your kiddie porn?
Last year I decided to build myself a nice movie room out of my spare bedroom. It's a small room but I decided to go with a ceiling mounted projector. If I recall correctly it was about $680 out the door. I also built a custom screen out of wood, staples, brackets, screws and blackout cloth. When I play a dvd and blow the image up to max size it looks decent. When I put a blue ray of the same movie in, it looks down right amazing in comparison. My screen is roughly 80"x50" and the viewable area about 75"x45", it would be bigger, but only 10'x11' room.
I don't buy a ton of movies, maybe 4 a year tops, but a lot of the BR packages I buy come with a br+dvd and some online thing I just don't care about. The cost is usually anywhere from $18 to $24 and depending what retailer I buy from, I may get some free junk food with a value of about $6. Sorry, but going to my local grocery store, grabbing a lately BR release and getting popcorn, fudge cracker things and some other item i can't recall for about $24 out the door is a decent little night in when you have a nice movie room.
Ironically I almost never go to the public cinema anymore and I find the movies are coming to BR faster then a decade ago.
I never got on the Blu-Ray bandwagon. I still buy DVDs (100% honest? I can't see difference on an up-sampling player!) or I go online.
X^D
Recursion. It's a beautiful thing.
Sorry, prefer the hard copy, had too many digital interruptions for streaming, if the movie is worth seeing it's worth seeing more than once. Buying the Blu-Ray the day(or sometimes depending on where)or week it comes out puts the price comparable with dvd, if the movie isn't that great I can either pick it up second hand or SELL it to the same place I'll buy them from used.
There's nothing "quaint" about being a collector and that's something Netflix can't compete with.....
Just another A/C.
do loop
Hey mmell: Yer bein' called out (why ya runnin', "forrest"?) http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Bring out Stand Alone Blu Ray Recorders at less than $200. Reduce the media price to a maximum of 50 cents. Blu Ray would explode.