nothingfails

Chicken Little much?

slowcloud

Nope. I do not.

nothingfails

well, I don't think DVD is going anywhere anytime soon considering DVD's are playable on BluRay players. This isn't like how VHS or the cassette became useless when DVD's and CD's took off. People who have bluRay players (and I will get one eventually but not in a rush) don't necessarily need to rebuy everything all over again. I'm actually holding off on buying newer movies like Star Trek and Harry Potter 6 until I get a bluRay player. For a lot of titles such as older movies, older TV shows (not the Lost/Heroes variety, but think shows from the 70's and 80's), older concerts and documentaries and the sort, most people I know who have upgraded to bluray don't feel any need to upgrade their DVD's. But it wasn't like how we were glad to get rid of those bulky VHS tapes once the DVD's came out.

I do think Blu is becoming a more dominant format but I don't think DVD is going anywhere in the near future. At places like Best Buy, it's still a 80/20 ratio on their shelves between DVD's and Blus

Silverscreenvid

DVD isn't going anywhere, but keeping hundreds of low selling catalogue titles in print is. Lots of VHS titles were released once, briefly, then went out of print due to lack of sales, and DVD is no different. It costs money to keep things in print and Walmart and Best Buy only have so much shelf space to devote to catalogue titles.

More and more of the major studios will go to the Warner Archive model... providing much of their catalogue on demand, at prices they can control, while only keeping a few classic titles in print. You'll always be able to get Gone with the Wind or Casablanca, but most other things will be available on an "on demand" basis only. The studio limits its costs and gets a much higher profit that way.

And if catalogue titles won't sell in conventional DVD, they won't sell in Blu-ray either. When the techonology develops to the point where you can get Bluray-R's, you'll see them released in that format as well.

kintnerboy

Guess again.

$1 dvd rental kiosks are costing Hollywood a billion dollars a year in lost revenue.

At this point the only thing Hollywood can do to save the home video market is start discontinuing standard dvds (which are way too cheap) and switch over to Blu Ray and burn-on-demand dvd-r's. And raise the MSRP's on both so that they become cost prohibitave to Red Box and Netflix and all the other companies that are killing the industry.

dx23

I read that report yesterday on the Home Media Retailing and that statement is just ludicrous. Hollywood wants you to believe that they are actually losing that kind of money so that you feel pity for them and so that the judge decides on stopping all those rental kiosks that found a way to make money and are cutting into the retailers market.

kintnerboy

Nope. It's not some media fabrication. I used to buy 2-3 new dvds every Tuesday for 8 years. I stopped buying completely about a year ago, except for used dvds and the occasional $3-4 dvds on sale. I have to assume there are thousands of other people like me tired of collecting movies they will watch once or not at all.

That, plus the rental kiosks, plus the closure of thousands of dvd rental and retail stores, plus the discontinuing of the thousands of catalog titles listed in this thread spells the beginning of the end of the sell through market.

You can deny it, but that doesn't make it not so.

slowcloud

The studios brought it on themsleves by being greedy with Blu-Ray, dropping prices on DVDs like crazy and encouraging consumers to re-buy the catalog on the new format. The format was not nearly the revolution of VHS to DVD (slightly improved image quality and more space on the discs big deal), which leads to the conundrum we are in now. If anything studios sped the on-coming demise of the DVD. I still haven't bought a Blu-ray player, but I have started getting Blu-Rays when they are on sale for less than $15. I am getting the player because now Blu-Rays certainly have more special features than DVDs. However, I am selective, as, adding to the troubles, some Blu-Rays are getting awful reviews as far as picture quality (one example is the Truman Show. I'll keep the DVD.).

nothingfails

if they actually do this, they will be making the same mistake the RIAA made with pure greed. It was their greed in raising prices on CD's and discontinuing CD singles that eventually led to the rise in illegal downloading that has damn near destroyed the industry. They had a good thing going for years but as the 90's progressed, progressively got greedier and greedier to the point that a lot of customers got pissed off and began to balk at the idea of paying $20 for a CD and started downloading for free. The industry has begun to charge people for downloads but more people download free because so many people refuse to give the music industry another dime. If it wasn't for the label's greed, we'd probably still see cd's that sell 10 million copies, but they wanted to milk the consumers for every dime they could get and they lost, and then they cried victim when people started fighting back by downloading.

If this happens with movies, don't think for a second people won't just start downloading on torrent sites. Times have changed so much, this isn't the 1980's where people didn't mind spending $79.99 on a VHS tape of Back To The Future, anything over $20 is considered insane to todays market.

And if Hollywood wants to cut costs, how about lowering the salaries of the actors out there.... does Tom Cruise really need $30 million per movie? It goes both ways.

If this succeeds, the movie industry will wind up digging the same graves for themselves that the music industry did in the late 90's when they decided to max the price of cd's and kill the single off so people have to spend $15-20 to get one song they like. Don't underestimate the consumer, they don't like being screwed with.

TheDuke

Agreed. If what "kintnerboy" says happens, the industry is out a customer right here, and probably fucked in general.

nothingfails

Yea, The Dark Knight just grossed $530 million last year, Transformers 2 grossed $400 million. There have been many other $200-300 million grossers in the past year or two. Considering we are in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, to cry victim over this just makes them look like a bunch of whiny crybabies. It sounds like when Sony publically said "we sold 7.5 million copies of Mariah Carey's last album, we might've sold 9 million if we withheld the singles". Those poor guys at Sony, only selling 7 million copies of an album

Anyways, Netflix rents out BluRay's as well, so the argument is moot.

dx23

Your first mistake was assuming. Rule of business is that just because something happens to you doesn't mean that it is happening in general. Blu-ray right now doesn't have even half of the market pentration DVD does. Catalog titles are going to go OOP because that is the nature of the business. Right now, the market is saturated with those low selling catalog titles, so they are taking them OOP until the demand for them is enough to warrant them coming back to print.

The only reason studios can actually blame for the reduced DVD sales is that the economy hasn't recuperated to the point people are willing to spend on luxuries like DVDs.

Silverscreenvid

"People" always minded spending $79.99 for VHS tapes. Other than a handful of collectors and diehard fans, the only people paying those types of prices were video stores, who rented them.

It was only when the studios came up with the idea of pricing VHS tapes under $20 and selling them through mass retailers that they began to sell to the general public.

Lastdaysofrain

The other aspect of this is that even though there are a ton of titles still sitting in studio vaults with no DVD release, most of the material that's widely "sellable" has been released. For some of these catalog titles pretty much everyone who was going to purchase it has already, so why keep it in print?