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.

Comments

Blank Media

[webmistressrachel]

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.

Re:Blank Media

[lgw]

I'll always prefer the disc, so I can feel like I paid for my BluRay rip. I don't like streaming much - I want a real file on the filesystem on my HTPC, with instant seeking and so on.

For stuff to watch once, I still like Netflix by mail, but sadly Netflix doesn't - they seem determined to abandon the business.

Re:Blank Media

[Anonymous Coward]

br rips are great. on a local nas, totally great.

on opto discs, uhm, not so great.

files are ok. the player, its java garabage, forced watch segments, slow startup, screw that! the players are aweful and the whole architecture is ugly.

the only good thing is that they are decent sources for further compression back into normal file sizes. the native BR discs take up way too much room, but rips and compressions of them are a good balance of storage and quality.

I never owned a player and I think I have one disc (came with something). I won't help sony (et al) get rich from this by buying 'licensed' media and players. but I will enjoy the higher res files, thank you very much.

Re:Blank Media

[Tough Love]

Maybe it would have served Sony well to make the format less user-offensive. Slow loading, Interminable trailers with no bypass. Offsensive "FBI WARNING". Crappy slow inconsistent menus coded in Java. I thought this was the 21st century.

Re:Blank Media

[jedidiah]

I haven't used physical media directly for a rather long time. Any time I do, I remember why it is that I originally stopped. I can certainly see why someone might view streaming video as less bothersome.

Hollywood spends far too much time fixating on thieves while kicking their paying customer in the balls.

Re:Blank Media

[sremick]

I have a movie collection numbering in the many hundreds. All are on original physical media.

All the reasons that people have for streaming versus playing off discs I agree with... but there's one kicker: once you get past the annoying menus, notices, and previews, and actually get to the movie, the quality can't be compared. Not many people have a 30-50 Mbit/s internet connection that can handle the full bitrate of 1080p video with lossless 5.1 sound, and I can't think of any streaming source that would send that even if someone did. They're all horribly compressed up the ass with lossy compression... noticable even on my 40" TV but especially so on the 92" projector.

Unskippable menus suck, and online libraries are certainly convenient... but when it comes time to watch the movie, I do kind of want it to actually look good. But I guess I'm a dying breed.

Re:Blank Media

[mwvdlee]

This.
Media companies should understand that if a non-paying viewer has a better user experience than a paying viewer, viewers will prefer to not pay.
This has nothing to do with price, it has to do with the quality of a product.
To the media companies, a badly encoded movie is a quality problem.
To a viewer, being forced to watch anything he doesn't want to is a quality problem.

The "FBI warning" is the worst of all. Consider walking into a clothing store, checkout out a new pair of pants and have the store clerk tell you "I must warn you that you may not create your own pants that look like these pants. That would be criminal. No, you may not wear these pants you paid for until I'm done telling you this and you must read this un-detachable warning label every time you want to wear these pants. To ensure you read it, the label comes with protection that won't let you pull up the zipper for a minute every time you put them on.".

Re:Blank Media

[TheRaven64]

MiniDisc would have been massively successful if they'd pushed the MD-Data format. Back when they started talking about it, a Zip drive cost about £100 and the disks cost about £10 each. Portable MD recorders cost under £100 and the discs were about £1.50. I wanted one as soon as they were announced, but I never saw one for sale and the people in my local Sony shop didn't even know what they were. In 1997, they increased the capacity to 650MB, making them the same capacity as a CD, but smaller than a floppy disk. I'm not sure how much the 650MB discs were, but a CD-RW cost about £10 then and a CD-R about £1.

I still don't understand how Sony had a format that was better than anything else on the market, existing economies of scale that would have made it possible to sell it for less than anything else on the market, and still failed.

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[tlhIngan]

the real reason bluray ''won'' the hd format war wasn't the slightly higher quality audio or video possible due to the higher data capacity.... it was **THAT** -- region locking.. bluray has it, hd dvd did not, and hollywood chose the format that had it.

Blu-Ray also had two other features that Hollywood liked.

1) Mandatory AACS encryption. HD-DVD made AACS optional, which meant "amateur" videographers could publish their own HD-DVDs without paying for an expensive AACS key. This also meant that self-publishing via HD-DVD recordables was possible.

2) Profile Locking. A Blu-Ray movie uses the BDMV profile which gives you full access to interactivity features of Blu-Ray. This was only possible through pressed media enforced by ROM-Mark. People who burned their own Blu-Rays were forced to use BDAV instead, which meant you basically got a collection of videos. Again, it's not an attempt at the home videographer, but more for the independent filmmaker - because they couldn't make Blu-Rays as slick as what Hollywood could.

The whole point of it all was less about home videos, and more about locking out the indies - if you weren't part of the MPAA, you couldn't make your own Blu-Rays, effectively. Of course, many third party publishers eventually bought their own AACS keys and mastering hardware and have contracts with (highly-regulated, again, supposedly to limit piracy) Blu-Ray disc pressers these days, so it's no longer a limitation.

But back then, Hollywood used it as a way to block indie films from high-def. Heck, you couldn't put a burned BDMV disc into a commercial player other than a PS3 (because the players needed to read the key from ROM-Mark, and you couldn't burn that).

These days, most players don't bother anymore - all that excess protections aren't used or needed because the original goals have been defeated - we can rip Blu-Rays even with BD+, indie filmmakers have lots of publisher choices to make their own professional Blu-Rays, etc.

(And Blu-Ray took a couple of years for Profile 2.0 to come out - something HD-DVD had at launch).

The extra space Blu-Ray had was because the tools were immature (HD-DVD forced their hand) so the only format available for compress was... MPEG2, while HD-DVD used either AVC (h.264) or VC1 (WMV9), and HD-DVD also had the space advantage - 30GB on a dual layer disc while Blu-Ray only had 25GB because pressing dual-layer BDs wasn't available and yields were too low.

Contracting?

[Daimanta]

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.

Re:Contracting?

[webmistressrachel]

The problem has always been the price of burners and discs. Blu Ray seemed awesome when I first saw it, but I never could justify the cost, what with these cheap generic +R's and WinRAR to split stuff... oh not to mention cheap almost-disposable drives.

Re:Contracting?

[Frobnicator]

Ever try running blu-ray outside of a PlayStation?

I have a blu-ray drive in my media computer. (The one hooked up to the TV and sound system.) When I try to play a newer blu-ray disk, I am told it won't work and I need to buy a new player. Fortunately there are some free alternatives, coupled with AnyDVD, that will still decode and play the newer disks.

When I try to play a blu-ray in the dedicated blu-ray player, it simply boots up as unreadable and asks for a firmware update... but there are no firmware updates to be had for the device any more.

In my view, it is the over-zealous DRM that is killing the format. The video quality is great, and storage capacity is wonderful, and I would love to get a burner for my PC if discs were affordable. Right now its only use is HD movies that take 3-5 minutes to start playing thanks to DRM and other garbage on the disk.

Well duh

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Well duh

[captjc]

1) Wait a few months.Blu-rays come down in price. If it is an older movie, many come out at around $15 - $20 and go to around $5-$10 fairly fast. Check Amazon.

2) Currently the best way to watch Blu-rays on the PC is MakeMKV. Rip to an MKV (~30 -60 mins) and watch it on your PC or then use something like Handbrake and convert it to MP4 and watch it on practically anything (AppleTV, PS3, whatever). HDCP bypassed! Yeah, you could buy PowerDVD or some other program to play Blu-rays, but for the price you are paying, you could buy a PS3. Plus there are less than legal ways of getting VLC to play Blu-rays as well, though it's not as convenient as a DVD.

Sure, it would be nice if it had the support like DVDs have where you could just pop in the disc and it just plays but between the unskippable trailers and other crap they put on DVD's and Blu-rays these days, I just rip my discs.

They were so interested in DRM'ing the whole thing

[mmell]

They ended up pricing themselves into irrelevance. Unlike VHS and DVD, they didn't have enough entrenched market share to withstand the current breed of video distribution mechanisms, and their belief that strong DRM would let them set market pricepoint doesn't seem to have panned out quite the way they intended.

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.

BluRay isn't worth the grief

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Blame Hollywood

[JustNiz]

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.

Headline exactly wrong

[Thagg]

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 have a Sony Blu-Ray player

[GauteL]

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.