One of its killers - OPPO DV-980H
Posted on 10/29/2008 11:02:59 AM PDT by savedbygrace
Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product.
With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it.
16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose?
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory Delusional Sony exec Rick Clancy needs to put the crack pipe down and really look at the market dynamics.
In a nutshell: consumers drive the market and they don’t care about Blu-ray’s theoretical advantages. Especially during a world-wide recession.
Remember Betamax? SACD? Minidisk? Laser Disk? DVD-Audio? There are more losers than winners in consumer storage formats.
It’s all about volume. 8 months after Toshiba threw in the towel, Blu-ray still doesn’t have it.
The Blu-ray Disc Association doesn’t get it
$150 Blu-ray disc players are a good start, but it won’t take Blu-ray over the finish line. The BDA is stuck in the past with a flawed five-year-old strategy.
The original game plan
Two things killed the original strategy. First the fight with HD DVD stalled the industry for two years. Initial enthusiasm for high definition video on disk was squandered.
Second, the advent of low cost up-sampling DVD players dramatically cut the video quality advantage of Blu-ray DVDs. Suddenly, for $100, your average consumer can put good video on their HDTV using standard DVDs. When Blu-ray got started no one dreamed this would happen.
Piggies at the trough
The Blu-ray Disc Association hoped for a massive cash bonanza as millions of consumers discovered that standard DVDs looked awful on HDTV. To cash in they loaded Blu-ray licenses with costly fees. Blu-ray doesn’t just suck for consumers: small producers can’t afford it either.
According to Digital Content Producer Blu-ray doesn’t cut it for business:
* Recordable discs don’t play reliably across the range of Blu-ray players - so you can’t do low-volume runs yourself.
* Service bureau reproduction runs $20 per single layer disc in quantities of 300 or less.
* Hollywood style printed/replicated Blu-ray discs are considerably cheaper once you reach the thousand unit quantity: just $3.50 per disc.
* High-quality authoring programs like Sony Blu-print or Sonic Solutions Scenarist cost $40,000.
* The Advanced Access Content System - the already hacked DRM - has a one-time fee of $3000 plus a per project cost of almost $1600 plus $.04 per disk. And who defines “project?”
* Then the Blu-ray disc Association charges another $3000 annually to use their very exclusive - on 4% of all video disks! - logo.
That’s why you don’t see quirky indie flicks on Blu-ray. Small producers can’t afford it - even though they shoot in HDV and HD.
The Storage Bits take
Don’t expect Steve Jobs to budge from his “bag of hurt” understatement. Or Final Cut Studio support for Blu-ray. I suspect that Jobs is using his Hollywood clout from his board seat on Disney and his control of iTunes to try to talk sense to the BDA.
But the BDA won’t budge. They, like so much of Hollywood, are stuck in the past.
A forward looking strategy would include:
* Recognition that consumers don’t need Blu-ray. It is a nice-to-have and must be priced accordingly.
* Accept the money spent on Blu-ray is gone and will never earn back the investment. Then you can begin thinking clearly about how to maximize Blu-ray penetration.
* The average consumer will probably pay $50 more for a Blu-ray player that is competitive with the average up-sampling DVD player. Most of the current Blu-ray players are junk: slow, feature-poor and way over-priced.
* Disk price margins can’t be higher than DVDs and probably should be less. The question the studios need to ask is: “do we want to be selling disks in 5 years?” No? Then keep it up. Turn distribution over to your very good friends at Comcast, Apple and Time Warner. You’ll be like Procter & Gamble paying Safeway to stock your products.
* Fire all the market research firms telling you how great it is going to be. They are playing you. Your #1 goal: market share. High volume is your only chance to earn your way out of this mess and keep some control of your distribution.
Time is short. Timid incrementalism will kill you.
Like Agent Smith delivering the bad news to a complacent cop: “No, Lieutenant, your men are already dead.”
I have a wonderful up conversion DVD home theater from Panasonic. An entire system with excellent speakers cost $325. If there’s a difference in the picture of the upconversion and Blue ray I’d be surprised. I watched the 50th Anniversary remastered “The Searchers” and thought I was riding with the Rangers in Monument Valley.
Well, if you have a big LCD tv, the Blu-Ray gives you a bigger picture. We saw it with 27 Dresses. We wanted the Blu-Ray but it couldn’t be found. The girl at Blockbuster said she would call when she found it. We got the DVD and put on the subtitles to read the words to the “Benny and the Jets” sequence. The subtitles were in the letterbox. After the girl called and we picked up the Blu-ray, the subtitles were in the picture itself. The letterbox was reduced by half.
Also the Blu-Rays have the BD live feature that lets you hook with other users.
On Iron Man, you go to BD Live and play trivia games with people all over the world. On Hulk, you have a chat feature.
Also, where Blu-Ray used to SUCK when it came to special features (except Hairspray’s PIP and Enchanted’s D Files) they now have MORE features than three disk DVDs. Both Iron Man and Hulk give you more with Blu-Ray. The Forbidden Kingdom with Jackie Chan does it with the PIP and it’s really fun to watch them making the movie while the movie is playing. I can’t WAIT until Dark Knight comes out in Blu-ray. Understanding that the movie was actually filmed with an IMAX camera, you won’t get half of those scenes with an enhanced DVD.
The cost is prohibitive, but if one gets a PS3, it’s not so bad. On Amazon, most Blu-Rays are only 10.00 more. If you’re a special feature person (like me) that 10.00 is worth it. Add in that most Blu-Ray give you a digital copy to download on your computer and it’s a good buy.
Give me my shot of Captain America in Hulk and I’m a happy camper!!!
>>Also Blu-Ray movies are not necessarily released at the same time as their DVD versions.<<
I’ve had my PS3 for months and I have NEVER seen a delay in Blu-Ray.
I went to a local Meijier for Iron Man at 3am. They hadn’t put out the Blu-Ray. Down the street to Walmart and it was there.
No problem.
Most likely yet a different technology will have made both Blu-Ray and DVD obsolete, and bypassed “downloading” completely.
“The Blu-ray Disc Association hoped for a massive cash bonanza as millions of consumers discovered that standard DVDs looked awful on HDTV”
This guy is nuts, in fact I even question whether he really knows anything about DVD, HDTV, home theater, etc. Regular DVD has always looked very good on HDTVs (this is assuming a movie with a good transfer to DVD to begin with). I bought my first HDTV in 1999, a 56” Toshiba, along with a Toshiba progressive scan DVD player (very expensive back in ‘99), and was knocked out by the picture quality on such a big screen.
Blu-Ray will eventually become the standard as prices fall for players and movies.
>>On a 40” or better HDTV there is NO comparison. Blu Ray wins hands down on video quality, audio quality and copious additional content. It’s the author that is smoking crack.<<
Exactly!!!! I think someone bet on the HD-DVD and lost.
Also, we got the PS3 because we CAN upgrade. That’s the way to go. I’ll take my PS3 and 52” LCD High Def anytime. One must see them side by side.
My girls and I were addicted to “Hairspray”. Hubby wanted the PS3. We walked into Best Buy and I said to the kid, “Sell me on this and I’ll buy the PS3.”
We opened a Blu-Ray of Hairspray and put the DVD we brought with us into an enhanced DVD player. Skipped to “Nicest Kids in Town” Chapter two. The difference could be seen immediately. Little things like the patterns in the girls dresses or the wallpaper behind the characters.
We walked out with a PS3.
Yes. HD-DVD is dead.
Hope Santa brings you the PS3. It’s the way to go!
Downloads are not a viable source for Quality HD movies. With most broadband providers capping downloads or about to cap downloads, this is a pipe dream.
No, the ether will be the primary medium for movie distribution. Physical disks will be unnecessary in a few years for the vast majority of the population.
Downloading movies would be great but I don’t have the space to save a bunch of movies on my hard drive. I could probably keep 10 movies on there without cramping my other computer uses. I don’t want to download a movie, keep it on my hard drive for 6 months and dump it to make room for more.
What is needed is a way to “legally” record the downloaded movie to a (singular) cheap disk for long term storage.
Boys love their games, you know.
And what if the HD crashes? My hubby brought that up when I wanted to Download Iron Man straight from the Sony site.
Bad news. One crash and there goes your entire video library.
Good luck with that. See my post above for a reason why you are wrong.
I’m hangin’ onto my Beta and my 8-track. You guys are gonna come around.
“I have a PlayStation 3 (integrated Blu Ray player and Game Console)”
I renamed mine “Warhawk Disc Player” since that’s the only thing I play on that console. I’ve heard about all of the other features, but I cannot get away from Warhawk.
Somebody help me ;-)!!!!
In all seriousness, I don’t re-buy movies I have on DVD (except for Master and Commander), but I will never buy another DVD again....BluRay is going to be for those “big movies” (like the new Star Trek coming out next year assuming it is good) ... otherwise I am just going to download them since DVD quality is usually good enough for me.
Some movies like “Cloverfield” on BluRay have the neatest features...like you can watch where the monster is in NYC on a scanner while the movie is playing.
I doubt BluRay is going to die. To get true HD quality to a home, you need some significant bandwidth. If you don’t mind waiting for a download, this isn’t a big problem. I just think people are spoiled with stuff like “On Demand”....while you can get HD On-Demand, it still doesn’t look/sound as “pretty”.
Having said all of that, the majority of consumers really could care less about these things @ this time :-)!
I agree. The special features are the best part.
Iron Man comes with the trivia gave on BD Live but Paramount said that a game where one can get into the Iron Man suits and fly around shooting things, is in development and will be downloaded by BD Live.
They sure do!
One of its killers - OPPO DV-980H
BD is SO much better than HD, and can’t even compare with standard DVD.
Of course if you don’t have a large screen, you can’t notice it.
With the savings from producing and distributing disks the studio could easily pay for the download bandwidth.
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