And an X. Don't forget the X.

I don't know. Unless you have some information that I don't, I can't see those studios making the same exact mistakes on every HD DVD release that they did for BD. And for arguments sake, let's say that all of the titles are affected by the same BD problems on HD DVD. Now that doesn't mean that every film that the studios have yet to release on either format will look just as bad. By that point they will fix things and start releasing like Warner, with each film having different specs on each format. So I don't want to damn any of those studios until I know for a fact what their HD DVD releases will look like if/when they come out. But that's just me. I guess I like to see proof before I make up my mind.

Bottom line is having more studios on HD DVD is a good thing no matter how you spin it. It will only make J6P have an easier decision to make when he looks at both formats and the only big difference to him is price. If the encodes/extras are the same poor quality, that will only affect us HT nuts for a short while.

J6P won't know which format has more studio support, all he/she is interested in are the titles that are currently available in each format and will base his/her decision on that (as well as price).

He will when he sees a bunch of Disney, Fox and LG titles sitting next to each other in the BD section and then does not see them in the HD DVD section. Then when he asks a employee why he doesn't see the latest Disney film on HD DVD, he wil find out that HD DVD is not supported by Disney.

Yes, the idea that for studios not releasing on HD DVD “there is actual money being lost” IS entirely debatable. The idea that the tiny numbers of HD DVDs being sold are actually generating profits is a stretch. How many copies of a typical HD DVD are manufactured? 5000 is probably a generous overestimate (How many copies of Constantine or Blazing Saddles, or even Seabiscuit do you really think they sold?). You may be buying almost every title offered but I can assure you that you are the rare exception.

And how much of the wholesale price goes to the studios? $10? $15? Say they get $15 per disc. For a typical title of 5000 copies that would be revenue of $75,000. That’s all. And that has to pay for encoding, manufacture, packaging, marketing, shipping, and returns (I’ll assume that the HD transfer would be done anyway for the DVD and future uses). And you think they are making a profit? Are you serious?

Even if one assumes that WB sold 50,000 copies of Batman Begins, their gross revenue might be in the $750,000 range. Perhaps they made a profit on that one. But they probably sold upwards of 1 million copies of it on various editions of DVD. If they made $5 per DVD that would be $5 million. And sales were probably twice that on DVD and their margins were likely higher than $5 in the initial months of release. So, that $5 million number is probably a gross underestimate of DVD revenue.

The studios that are supporting HD DVD are doing so as a loss leader with an eye toward future revenues if the format takes off. Perhaps when there are a million players sold they will be able to make a bit of money on an average title. But it will still be a drop in the bucket compared to DVD. So, Fox, Disney, et al. aren’t losing money by not supporting HD DVD yet. Quite the contrary.

First, the slowing of the SD market. You can throw in a bunch of different words on what you actually call it but the bottom line is that in order to continue getting the same growth that the movie studios have been seeing year in and year out they are going to have to venture into different markets. I dont care if the proper term is reduced margin, the bottom line is when your sales slow down you start to lose yearly income. If you made 1,000,000 last year in sales and then then only made 800,000 this year due to a slowing of sales, it is money lost period. I am not talking about money out of their pocket, I am talking about lost income. Either way its a loss of income and a loss of money and it is a corporations job to ensure continued growth. I am not an economics major so I apologize if I dont use the proper terms but what I was referring to was as clear as day.

As for the SD market being a cash cow, absolutely yes it has been a cash cow for all of the studio's. The SD DVD market is the most successful home theatre market in history dwarfing everything else. My point was that all of the signs are showing, and it has been reported on quite a bit, that this so called cash cow is starting to run out of milk. It has maxed out. Who said anything about the movie studios not giving a crap or not caring about the millions of SD DVD users? Dont put words in my mouth as Inever said anything even remotely like this. My whole point was about sales growth period. The movie studio's know that HD is the future of home entertainment and the HD formats allow them to resell their entire catalog of titles. If you think even for a second that the studios are shrugging off the HD formats right now because of the small numbers associated with the beginning of a new format then you are severely mistaken. The HD market is an opportunity for the studios to make a butt-load of money on their entire catalog on top of the SD market. The fact that HD brings renewed interest in a ton of titles that are basically dead on the SD market is just another huge reason why the studios will stick with HD till the end. The HD market allows the studios to have the continued sales of the SD market and at the same time open up an entirely new market for all of their existing titles. Bottom line the studios know that the HD market is the future, it just seems like you dont realize that.

I have no clue what your even arguing here. Are you trying to argue the fact that movie arent rolling out right now and that they weren't rolling out 4-6 months ago? lol. I dont even know how to respond to this. Bottom line is they were releasing movies. I never said they were releasing the flood gates and tons and tons of movies were being released. Bottom line is that they have been releasing titles on a consistent basis for the last 4-6 months, more like 4 months. If you want to argue that fact then dont even bother replying to this thread as I am not going to debate what you think is a proper number for me using the terms I did. Its ridiculous to even argue this stuff. They are releasing titles consistently period.

Now how are they losing money? Its very simple, I really dont understand how you cant understand this and why you would need me to explain it. If a said movie company doesn't release a said movie on a particular format then they are losing the sales that those people would have given if they had released on that format. Is this really that difficult to understand? Again it is debatable just how much money they are losing by not releasing on HD-DVD but the fact that they are losing sales is not debatable, it is a common sense fact.

I dont know where you have been but the war has started, in fact its been going on for almost 6 months now. Either that or I had a really strange dream last night where different companies were competing and slandering and doing all of the things associated with a format war. You can think that everything up until this point has been absolutely meaningless and that the war really hasn't started yet but you couldn't be more wrong. HD-DVD has gained an incredible amount of respect in the last 6 months. This is a format that most people brushed off and thought would be dead in 6 months and at the same time Blu-Ray has been an absolute mess while they were supposed to shine like a star from the get go. No, the war has been going on and everything that has happened so far has been extremely important. Anyone who doesn't see that is deluding themselves. The war hasn't started, god how many times are we going to hear stuff like this. Its kind of like Sony hasn't had a true launch yet. Its completely ridiculous.

As for the sales numbers being low and meaningless, Ill bet WB has made a decent amount of cash so far on all of their titles combined so far. I guarantee its in the millions of dollars range so while you may think that money like that is simply unimportant, you would once again be wrong. Sales will continue to increase and along with that increase in sales will come the increased amount of money lost by the studios refusing to support HD-DVD. Its a simple analogy and one that cannot be debated. Again you can debate just how much money is being lost but again the fact that they are losing more and more money the longer they hold out is simply not debatable, its just economics plain and simple.

PS...

As I said before, you can debate just how much money is being lost by them not releasing on HD-DVD but the fact that they are losing money, and will continue to lose more and more money as the format grows is not debatable. It may well only be a couple hundred thousand dollars for a certain title at this point but its still money being lost. This is economics plain and simple and you can argue until your blue in the face but it wont change anything. They are losing money period. And while you can sit there and say that some titles have probably sold poorly so far you can also make the exact opposite statment and sy that some titles have sold extremly well like Batman begins which if I am corect sold like 25,000 copies after the first week.

I dont have the sales numbers for each individual title and I dont have the profit margins for all of the studios so I am unable to give you an exact figure on anything and again its all up for debate but for the last time, the studios are losing potetial sales by not releasing on HD-DVD and that is the same as saying losing money. This is not a hard concept to grasp, it is really mind boggling that some people just dont understand what I am saying. Did they drop economics as a required course in college recently or something? Not sure why people are having such a hard time understanding such a basic economics principal.

PS...

Why are we having a serious debate here? I thought this thread was for namecalling and format bashing.






Just kidding, please continue.

Those major titles (ie. Pixar titles, Star Wars, etc) on BD aren't sitting on store shelves right now, so the support from those studio's aren't much of a threat. The same goes for HD-DVD - Universal's only supporting HD-DVD isnt a big deal until they release the major titles on that format.

That's true.

I had enough economics to understand a basic econ principal such as this. you can keep your econ minor cause what we are discussing was covered in the first semester of intro to econ.

I will also drop this as its not my job to try an teach someone the basic principal of lost sales.

PS...

Sure they're losing potential sales. But is the return on the investment to release those titles on HD or BD, worth the [current] potential profit? I think that's the main question. Some studios are releasing on HD or BD, even though it might not be as profitable as SD, for various reasons; some think those lost sales aren't worth the costs of making them.

That's not what's happening though. DVD sales are increasing, not decreasing. It's the amount of the increase in sales that's decreasing.

To use your numbers, two years ago someone makes 800,000, last year they made 1,000,000, and this year they made 1,200,000. The amount of money they're making increased, but at a lower rate than it did in the previous year. last year sale increased by 25%, but this year it only increased by 20%.

So bottom line: studios aren't making less money on DVDs than they used to. They're making more money, but less more money than they used to.

King Kong is a great start...

If you believe that HD is the future of home entertainment then yes because that potential profit is only going to go up and up. Sales are only going to continue to increase so the longer they stay out the more money they will lose. As for the costs of making them, its already been shown that manufacturing HD-DVD's is only slightly more than SD discs. It is one of the main selling points to the format. You can take existing equipment and do a few minor upgrades and wholla.

PS...

Your looking at SD sales too one dimensionally. Overall growth is coming to a halt, Prices for SD discs are plummeting and demand for alot of titles has gone down to absolutly nothing. I wish I could find this article I read a few weeks back that really went into depth about it. It discussed like 10 different aspects of the current DVD market and every single one of them was either slowing down or in decline. Ill try and find it and post it up.

Bottom line is that Corporations are always looking for sales growth. There isnt a single corporation in existance today that says, were doing fine, lets just stick with this and not try and grow. When corporations dont have sales growth the stock goes down. The SD DVD market is on its way down which means that movie studios must do other things to supplement that growth of income and its with the HD market that they are looking to make this happen.

Just look at the price of SD discs today. You can get basically any title in existance for under 8 bucks if you wait for a sale which is like every week. Th vaue of SD discs has really plummeted in the last year. Again combine that with the slowing of the growth and your looking at smaller profits for the studios in the home market.

PS...

In the corporate world, that's a loss. If they made 800k, then 1 million, their goal for next year might be 1.2 or 1.25 million--anything less than that means they're not meeting their goals; and many times those goals are tied in with other goals. Or, as you say, their goal is X% increase.
I agree, they're still making money, but they 'counted on' making X, and making X-Y isn't good enough.

Very true.... even though I didn't care for the movie, it's definitely a major release that sells.

I'd be interested in knowing that too. According to Digitalbits, it looks like it took DVd players 3 years to hit 10 million [standalone] players. 10 million BD units in one year is an awfully ambitious goal, unless they were including PS3 [which isn't even out yet].

I have an order in for the PS3 at TigerDirect. Don't know if it will go through or not but I feel dirty ....

AFAIK most of the initial HD DVD titles were pressed in quantites of 50,000 and several titles have been repressed including Batman Begins.

Blu-ray titles were initally pressed in lots of 10,000 for the first 20 releases, I don't know about later releases.

The studio break even point for a catalog title that was sitting with few sales has to be pretty low. Even if the HD DVD titles are not selling a lot, they may already be marginally profitable from a studio software (authoring production replication) side. Hardware profits on player sales is a different manner. HD DVD authoring and replication costs are probably similar to DVD, much less than the selling price per disk. Even considering the startup authoring cost, there is a low volume breakeven point, if advertising is not used. Blu-ray probably has similar breakeven points for the studios if SOny is help subsidizing the early replication costs.

By all accounts, the HD DVD studios have been pleasantly surprised on HD DVD sales relative to their investment and based on sales expectation based on the numbers of HD DVD players in the marketplace. Even more so with the old catalog releases such as Robin Hood, Dirty Dozen, Gran Prix and some box office bombs such as Serenity.

The HD DVD movie attach rate per player is probably much higher than the studios expected for the catalog titles. It is still unknown for the day and date releases. The Mission Impossible HD release is teh first real advertising supported test.

The HD DVD releasing studios are probably pleased with the initial results and the Blu-ray studios are waiting until the PS3 ships in quantity to make any adjustments.

Welcome to the site Kosty.

Bah, that holiday season is overhyped anyway.

I 2nd that. This board will be a better place with you here...having read your posts and met you in person.

Thanks, just wanting to gather information and find out what the truth is and to share what I know when it helps.