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 saw the price of a Blu-Ray burner and I thought, I can’t afford that!
Like the article said, up convert DVD players playing a widescreen standard DVD looks pretty darn good. Way cheaper. Also, there used to be a line of DVDs called “SUPERBIT”, looked great on a standard DVD player hooked to a HiDef screen. They used a higher sampling rate than most DVDs. SONY killed it off.
Who buys? The same movies are free at my library and with the software, I'm building my own library.......
I have a 32" plasma with an up-converting DVD player. That works just fine for me. With $0.99 Redbox DVD rentals, I'm a happy camper.
You'll have to sell me on Blu-Ray.
Not the divx you are thinking of. This divx is a new generation codec that allows video to be more efficiently compressed.
sbMKE, 1080p is more than a slight upgrade. I haven’t bought bluray but I’ve watched the same movie on DVD then HD, night and day difference.
Yes. Buying an upsampling player means that I don't need to replace my existing DVD library. I have well north of 500 disks. I know people who have libraries that number nearly 2,000.
Will the upsampling player be as good as Blue Ray? No. Will it be close enough? This is for each person to decide. But in my case it is a significant increase in quality for little money, and even less aggravation.
Let's consider what is involved in replacing a library. Forget the money for the moment. Let's just talk about the time and effort. I went through this once already with an audio library, moving from LPs to CDs. I am _not_ going through that again. In the first place, it wasn't worth the effort. In the second place the increase in quality is only incremental. In the third, some works just are never converted, and thus are orphaned.
And then there is the fact that many "artists" simply cannot survive the conversion to a more exacting format - many audio artists, particularly vocalists, just didn't have the pipes. Many actors and actresses don't have the looks to convert well to a higher resolution format - they don't age well, they have serious complexion problems, and so on. They are, after all, selling illusion.
Finally, let's consider the economy, both currently and going forward. How likely is it, under current economic conditions, that people are going to plunge for Blue Ray players, replace their libraries with Blue Ray disks (ignoring for the moment that Blue Rays cost quite a bit more), and just trash their current stuff? My guess is that there will not be nearly enough people willing to do this to make Blue Ray economically viable. I think that it is doomed.
The last laptop I bought for our firm had a BlueRay player, oh wait, it was a Sony. I told the CEO it had one and he said, “so what”, he gets his laptop movies from the iTunes store.
BluRay is dead to me. My Plasma is a 1080i and looks great playing upconverted DVD from my $100 Toshiba, why change?
Rip?
That you?
:-)
“Seriously. What Sony should have done is make DVD’s that would be read like a DVD on a DVD player, but read like a Blu-Ray disc on a Blu-Ray player. They had the technology years ago, but never did anything with it. Instead companies went with dumb double-sided discs or packaged a DVD with a Blu-Ray disc.”
BD has a different structure than DVD. You cannot combine BD and DVD. HD DVD had the option of putting DVD and HD layers on the same side of the disc but the option was not really utilized by the studios.
You wrote that “most Blu-Ray give you a digital copy to download on your computer.” What’s that mean? Would that mean I don’t have to rip the video in order to import it into my iPod; I could just drag-and-drop the video to my hard drive?
> Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product.
I think there’s an FR topic (and forgive me for not checking the rest of this one) regarding the recent statement by Sony that Blu-Ray will be the last optical format. Not only d/ls, but also the crashing price, better portability, and lower power requirements, and ease of reusing, of flash memory products will have some kind of impact. Also, hard drive densities have gone up and price has dropped. In the summer of 2007 I saw my first terabyte drive (external USB), which was around $400. Now, it’s trivial to find a 500 gig external for $100, making the price per gig $200, so the price per meg (which used to be a standard, heh)...
Flash drives (iow, not just the camera chips, but the USB gizmos with the RAM installed) have really fallen in that same interval. I think I paid over $40 for the 4 gig flash drive I carry. Those are under $20 at the wholesale clubs (probably in the big office supply chains as well), and the 8 gig drives are about $30 I think (I was in a couple of the clubs yesterday, but can’t remember exactly, the prices had fallen since the previous visit); WalMart has 16 gig (I think SanDisk) for under $60 I believe. Obviously this is tiny compared with the terabyte drives, but they use little power, are tremendously portable, and last I knew Samsung has a 128 gig flash drive coming out early next year (if not sooner).
JVC did it way back in 2004, but unfortunately it never caught on.
I still think what they should have done is used H.264 on standard dual-layer DVDs instead of sticking with MPEG2 and pushing blue laser technology (which turned out to be a nightmare). Actually, the studios were pushing for exactly that but Toshiba successfully lobbied for blue lasers.
The big, featured release of the week is probably going to have both available... but there are usually between 20 and 30 other DVDs released that do not have a Blu-Ray version released (either it's not planned or it's delayed) in the same week.
I just grabbed my digital copy of The Incredible Hulk.
When I put it into my dvd-rom drive on my computer it says that I can transfer it to I-Tunes or Windows media player.
Hope that helps. The I-tunes store actually says that your movie can be carried anywhere so I would say, yes, it will download onto you I-Pod.
Right now we are trying to get it to download but have run into an error. Hope this works for us!!
Existing pipes work if you plan ahead a little bit. You can use TivoDesktop to order a movie delivered to your Tivo from work in the morning and it will be ready when you get home. Legal peer-to-peer that enforces IPR solves the problem of the providers having to build even larger data centers. And progressive download allows you to start a movie before it is finished downloading to your box at home.
Optical is still king for distribution though. Even “broadband” requires a very long wait to download a highly compressed, standard-definition movie. High definition requires very high-speed internet, and usually streaming so that people don’t have to wait forever for it to finish.
Secondly, while a $10-per gigabyte flash drive sounds great, DVDs cost less than 30 cents per disc to press. And even early in its inception, Blu-Ray only cost $5 per 25GB disc to produce. Flash has a long way to go before it breaks 20-cents per gig.
Or I can swing by Target on the way home own it in a way that’s immune to hard drive crashes (accidental deletions, viruses and all the other risk inherent to rewritable data) and not have burned the electricity of having my computer on all day and won’t really care if I come home and find that the internet went down for a while.
Streaming is well on the way to killing rentals. I’m a big fan of Netflix live play feature. But download right now is quite simply not as convenient as DVDs when it comes to ownership. Downloading 4GBs of data at a time is slow, then once you get it down you have to decide if you’re burning it to a DVD (and hand burned DVDs don’t store that well) or let it sit on your drive with all the risks incumbent in that.
Today at lunch I swung by Best Buy and picked up the monster edition of Rob Zombies Halloween remake. 5 minutes, $20, and I’ve got 3 disks of stuff, 12 GB (maybe more, the third disk is 4 1/2 hours so probably double layer). Download can’t beat that on the ownership front.
The data layer for blu ray in on the surface. The data layer for DVD and HD DVD is on the label side. I suppose you could combine BD and DVD is a process similar to making a flipper but in the end, BD is not a DVD product and unless Sony can make nice with Toshiba, the DVD and BD will never live on the same disc.
I could be backwards but my memory is that the DVD consortium (Toshiba) wanted to go with Red lasers, Sony moved ahead with blue lasers and DVD (Toshiba) responded with their version of the blue laser.
As an aside, last year, I was recording HD material off TV and burning 3xDVD (mpeg4 compressed video in HD DVD format on a standard DVD) just like the movie companies originally planned. The quality is pretty good.
With the death of HD DVD, I’ve purchased two media players. I play my recorded files directly from a hard drive. No more spending hours converting and tweaking to get discs to work.
The data layer for blu ray in on the surface. The data layer for DVD and HD DVD is on the label side. I suppose you could combine BD and DVD is a process similar to making a flipper but in the end, BD is not a DVD product and unless Sony can make nice with Toshiba, the DVD and BD will never live on the same disc.
I could be backwards but my memory is that the DVD consortium (Toshiba) wanted to go with Red lasers, Sony moved ahead with blue lasers and DVD (Toshiba) responded with their version of the blue laser.
As an aside, last year, I was recording HD material off TV and burning 3xDVD (mpeg4 compressed video in HD DVD format on a standard DVD) just like the movie companies originally planned. The quality is pretty good.
With the death of HD DVD, I’ve purchased two media players. I play my recorded files directly from a hard drive. No more spending hours converting and tweaking to get discs to work.
I’ll sell you, because I was just like you and didn’t want to buy a Blu-Ray player.
Your letterbox top and bottom blackscreen are huge on a up-Converting DVD player. The movie may be clear but it is squished.
As for the cash, Amazon has Blu-ray for 25.95. Hulk, Iron Man, Wall-E and The Dark Knight are all priced at that amount. If you want to Redbox, it will still play on your PS3 and you get a nice game system out of it.
Redbox will go Blu-Ray as well. Netflix did.
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