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.”
Sony lost a format war with ONE format!
the sad part is this is not the first time.
I got the digital copy to work in Windows Media Player. I now have a copy running as we speak, right here on my computer!!!
I’m sure that being I-Tunes savy, you could get a digital copy to work there for you.
You’re dead right, the cost may never catch up.
Software packages will be distributed on CDs for a while yet, although some (such as the pain in the ass Ubuntu distro in the official guidebook) is done on DVD. The floppy has vanished in the face of other options, such as CD burners and (especially) flash drives.
The entertainment industry likes charging $30+ for a movie release again, but that won’t last, because DVD releases will continue at much lower cost and for similar usability and (for all practical purposes) capacity. Blu-Ray has started to hit one-third of the movie display space at the wholesale clubs, and is perhaps half that good at Best Buy et al. Unless this Christmas season is mighty good for Blu-Ray sales, the problem will remain, not enough machines to play the disks.
I’ve got a couple of Blu-Ray titles and no player, because I anticipate the same phenomenon I noticed in the mid-1980s when CDs appeared for popular music titles — the early releases were often titles which were pressed in small numbers, then vanished from catalogs for years.
One obvious one-time thing which probably will slow down acceptance of the new format, IMHO, is the US switch to digital broadcast in February. The earlier thing which has slowed it down is uprating DVD players. People are likely to spend the cash before February on big flat-screens which have the digital tuners built in. And those few flat-screen models with analog receivers, or with both analog and digital, will no doubt be fire-sale-priced after Christmas 2008. :’)
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.Newer DVD players are mostly not too good either, IMHO. But anyway, that's a good point about pricing -- the alleged entertainment industry prices CDs of classic titles higher than classic movie titles on DVD, and spent their spare time, which is more than ample, complaining about piracy and how they can't make any money.
LOL. The Betamax crashed and burned before I even knew what it was..... I do remember 8-tracks but never had one.
BUMP what you said.
And personally, I instinctively agree with post #29.
I think you are confused about this. The sizing of the black leterbox bars should be in relation to the aspect ratio of the film. Pictures are not "squished" on DVD in comparison to Blu-ray. You may be referring to the "zoom" features on players and TVs. If you watch the same movie on DVD and Blu-ray, there will be no difference in size of the bars and there will be no "squishing" in either format unless you do the squishing.
The only difference will be in picture resolution. Blu-ray will have a higher bitrate and higher resolution, but the picture size as it is shown on your screen will be the same.
No I’m not confused at all. It’s from personal experience.
I posted this before, but I’ll tell the story again.
We have a 52” LCD HD tv. A brand new DVD player (kids fried the old one) that has an up-converting feature to 1080i and an even newer PS3.
We went to Blockbuster on the day that “27 Dresses” was released. The girl there could not find the Blu-ray so we got the DVD. We put the DVD into the player and put on the subtitles for the “Benny and the Jets” sequence. The words were in the black of the letterbox.
The girl from Blockbuster called and said she found the Blu-ray. We got it and played the same sequence again. The words were in the picuture. The black frames were significantly smaller. Give it a shot with a movie in both DVD and Blu-ray. You’ll see.
BS Hit piece. Blu-ray is doing just fine. It has had less than a year as the sole HD format and is already ahead of where DVD was in its lifespan. The HD-DVD people are still simmering over their loss. Time to get over it.
The same article could have been written about DVD in 1999. Players too expensive. Incompatible disks. Few titles. DRM problems...
Blu Ray will eventually take over when the price drops. Since the players are also great upscaling DVD players, there won’t be any reason to buy a DVD player when you can buy a Blu Ray player.
The only time I have seen the subtitle issue you describe is on a nonanamorphic DVD. On nonanamorhic DVDs, the picture is in a sort of box (maybe the larger bars and squishing to which you referred? I know 27 dresses was released on DVD in both widescreen and fullscreen.). You then have to use the zoom function of either your TV or player to make it fill up the screen of your HDTV. However, when you do this, the subtitles "fall off" the picture and reside below the picture and are no longer readable.
Seriously, I post at several home theater forums, and the problem you describe (a difference betwween the way BR and DVD project images) has never come up.
I don’t know where these $150 Blu-Ray players are. I’m not paying the market price for Blu-Ray until they’re in the same ballpark as up-convert DVD players. This technology is 3-4 years old already and prices are still sky high.
I’ve seen the full 1080p treatment on display sets - the Costco by my house keeps showing the Pixar Cars movie as a demo and it’s stunning.
But still, it seems a bit like a 3D movie - very cool but perhaps more than most folks will deem necessary for day-to-day life.
Big fan of the divx codec. I use it often. Great compression and great quality. Too bad the studios view it as a pirate format and hardware support isn’t more universal.
I recently discovered software called PlayOn that lets me play online Netflix movies from my PC to my PS3.
It’s awesome!!
Thousands of flicks and old tv shows to choose from.
The one movie was my example. The only one I used subtitles on.
“Mr. Magoriums Wonder Emporium” have seen both formats. (because the DVDs are easier to rent. If it’s good we buy the Blu-Ray).
As well as
“Speed Racer”
“The Forbidden Kingdom”
“Night at the Museum”
“Spiderman 1-2-3”
“Hairspray” which I own three copies of
“Enchanted” own both formats.
Perhaps it would be wiser to compare my example to an actual Blu-Ray, which I am speaking of, rather than an HD-DVD.
I’m not speaking of a zoom feature, you are. If one zooms, one loses the sides of the film (which of course is WHY one letterboxes, to get a WIDER picture) Yes, it fills the screen, but you lose your resolution and the sides of the shot. A full screen addition of any movie would NOT give you a letterbox look. No matter what it’s played on.
Maybe the people on your forums don’t have a screen as big as we do. I have no clue. But people can judge for themselves.
And maybe the word “squishing” was the wrong choice so we are not on the same page.
I meant thinner picture and not distortion of that picture.
The reviews I read of Master and Commander on Blu-ray said it was no better than the standard DVD. I loved that film, BTW, and read all the novels. I thought its appearance on Blu-ray might sell me on the format, but I'm apparently in good shape with that film on DVD.
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