Gizmo

Why are you posting in this thread? It's for a discussion in sales - good and bad. If you can't handle the bad news go join Blu-ray.com and everything will be dandy.

I own well over 500 Blu-rays. Very few DVDs left. Your love if Blu-ray won't suddenly make other people give a damn. People are not buying.

Brooklyn

The problem with your posts is that you've become a living version of Peter And The Wolf. For years you've done nothing but bash, through the positive and now the negative. So forgive us if when we see your avatar that we can't shake the years of you belittling the format unnecessarily, it's become ingrained (that's the bad kind of grain) in our minds.

Gizmo

That's nice.

In the mean time, as I've mentioned Blu-ray has been down for 9 weeks now and everything points to Blu-ray peaking this year.

If you want some positive spin you can go over to Blu-ray.com where they all think Blu-ry is doing wonderful and selling a brand new release like Brave for under $10 is genius (which infact it means Disney sent too many copies to stores and they now have to find a way to dump them).

As I mentioned to the other poster, you can feel free to steer clear of this thread and believe that Blu-ray sales are doing amazing and that retailers are not shrinking space devoted to DVD and Blu-ray. Live in your bubble if you wish. For other people, we actually like the discussion - good and bad. Because selling Blu-rays for $4 a pop isn't a good thing. Seeing them at the dollar tree for $1 isn't a good thing. Getting them packed with a DVD, Digital Copy, Ultra Violet Code isn't a good thing. It means Blu-ray has ultimately failed to sell by itself.

Brooklyn

I believe you missed something. You're chastising me about how well blu-ray is doing, yet I agreed with you (notice the part in my 2nd sentence where I wrote, "and now the negative"?).

By the way, I erred as well, I wrote the wrong fable, I meant The Boy Who Cried Wolf. In that fable someone cries foul over and over when there is no foul, then when there truly is, everyone is so annoyed with him that they don't take him seriously. Believe me, there's no bubble here, I just see your avatar and know exactly what's coming next. ...And to paraphrase your misdirected 'schooling' above, 'that isn't a good thing', whether you're now correct on the subject at hand or not.

Coral

Yeah, it sure does look like Blu-Ray has peaked... and it never really had a lot of penetration either.
Is Bill Hunt running around like Baghdad Bob trying to defend and spin this thing?

Hope we get to see ridiculously low BD clearance prices in Canada. $10 or less would be sweet for me. While I don't want/need to own EVERY title I like, there are probably 15-20 must-have titles I'd like to pick up for dirt-cheap. I'll continue to hold off until the price drops to within my range.

milo bloom

You know, even if every title gets down to the $10 range, there's still not going to be that many things I have left to pick up. The majority of my current wishlist is the classic Doctor Who, which is all standard def. I'd love to have all the new Star Trek stuff on Bluray, but as long as it's on Netflix, it's hard for me to justify the expense (especially the way Paramount has consistently overpriced their Trek products).

Like I said above, the majority of my DVDs still look very good with upconversion. No matter how the message is being presented, I think physical media has peaked.

big e

I think a combination of the HD formats launching too early and the format war did more to muddle Blu-rays chances than anything.

bunkaroo

I'm just glad that BD has endured long enough for me to get just about every movie I want on the format. I have serious doubts that other format would have had the same penetration Blu-ray has experienced. Hey maybe it would have done better though.

I will never convert to streaming. Might use it for some rentals where I don't care about quality.

If Blu-ray goes into a niche market like laserdisc and costs twice as much as it does now to own, I will still buy it. For me it's about film ownership, not film accessship.

Gizmo

I think HD/BD launched too late. By 2006 DVD had been out for nearly 9 years.

The format war did nothing but help Blu-ray (or HD DVD if they won). It pushed more catalog titles to be released, it pushed the standards up, it pushed lower prices (BOGO!) and it pushed the CE's the make better, faster equipment.

Without one of the formats we would have been likely stuck with more expensive hardware with less features. Some are forgetting that when Blu-ray launched it didn't have internet access, it didn't have PiP and it was slow as shit. Thanks to HD DVD, Blu-ray got all those features. They had to match the competition. Without Blu-ray, HD DVD would have likely had lossy audio and 1080i hardware (back then, nit such a big deal when 1080p TVs were still a premium. In 2008, 1080p should have been the standard - period - for any HD DVD hardware to be released)

Gizmo

HD DVD was packing a DVD inside the case back in 2006. Blu-ray didn't until after HD DVD was gone. Now nearly every new Blu-ray release comes with a DVD (and Digital Copy, UV etc.). HD DVD was, oddly enough, ahead of the game in that respect. Disc space means little when a lot of films have smaller encodes and Blu-ray still has multiple discs. HD DVD died in 2008. We don't know if 50GB discs would have every arrived. We look at things now, nearly 5 full years later, and forget that HD DVD stopped production while Blu-ray has had time to grow and change.

It's always fun to speculate, but you can't really deny that Blu-ray has taken a few pages out of the HD DVD handbook. But no one really knows if HD DVD would have been a bigger success had it won over Blu-ray. Doesn't really matter anymore.

bunkaroo

Well, I don't consider a DVD glued to a glitchy HD disc a good thing. At least Blu figured out not to do that (stubborn Universal not withstanding).

Something tells me triple layer would have been a fiasco. I doubt the first few generation players would have been able to handle it. But you gotta remember lossy was *good enough* anyway and we didn't need more than 30GB. That's a big reason I was against that format. You don't sell a next-gen format on the concept of *good enough*. You put the best quality you can on there.

Blu-ray might not max out 50GB every time but at least it's there to use for the studios who will take advantage of it. We could have been handcuffed to 30GB all this time. Would that mean LOTR:EE's on three discs each, no DTS-HD MA or overcompressed? Glad we didn't find out.

We're obviously taking a step backwards in quality with streaming as I can't imagine we'll see lossless audio streamed anytime soon. And let's face it - people who stream probably don't give a shit about it anyway. Just like mp3 before it, convenience and price will eventually trump quality. I'll be happy to ride the wave of disc-based HD content as long as it's around.

Alan Smithee

Enough about 'low' Blu-Ray sales figures- does anybody have sales figures for 'digital' movies like on Vudu? I can't believe anyone would pay the prices asked for most of those, and then being tied only to watching them on equipment on your account. While the quality is admittedly pretty good for what it is, it can't beat Blu-Ray, and I've watched a number of movies on it (99 cent rentals only) where the compression basically spoiled the movie for me.

I've already given several reasons that may be turning people off from disc purchasing, but nobody seems to want to address those. Also if studios think under $5 discs are 'devaluing' their product, then why do they allow them to be sold that low to begin with? With laserdiscs it was a miracle to find anything for less than $20 (and a likely reason that format never made it big).

BTW I have hundreds of CDs, and have purchased ZERO mp3s.

JTH182

Well your posts are even more confusing now... so you've embraced BD, but seem to be wishing for it to die?

Anyway, to answer your question: I'm posting in this thread because I haven't bought a DVD since 2006 and want BD to succeed (which it already has in my book).

I just don't understand how so many shitty quality DVDs are still being sold, especially since on Black Friday all I saw were people looking at BDs, leaving the DVDs alone on their shelves.

In the end it doesn't matter since I'm happy with what I have, and good films are being released on BD all the time.

TheBang

No, no, those features were always on the table. Blu-ray was pushed to market prematurely in order to compete with HD DVD, which is why they decided to stage it into Profile 1.0, 1.1, 2.0. If HD DVD hadn't forced BD to launch prematurely, we probably wouldn't have gotten Blu-ray until 2007 or 2008.

I would have to say the format war hurt the market, overall. It stunted adoption on both platforms for 2 years when they needed it most.

BuckNaked2k

The 90's called....thay want their reference back.

Gizmo

You don't consider it a good thing? Studios don't care about you not liking that. The reason they cared about glueing it to the back of the Blu-ray was because consumers couldn't sell the "bonus DVD" they got and further help the decline in profits. I sell every DVD and DC I get inside a Blu-ray package. Those that get purchased are one less (potential) sale the studios will get. Not to mention the Mom & Pop stores who get to buy a Combo and get 2 copies of a film to now rent instead of one.

The first few players not reading a triple layer didn't matter. It certainly didn't matter when the BDA introduced 1.1/2.0/3D etc. making many players irrelevant. Consumers would have simply replaced their players like they have already possibly done several times with Blu-ray.

Lossy is good enough for 99% of consumers. Most people can't tell the difference. We still have people saying DTS MA is better than TrueHD/PCM all because DTS MA is "louder". Uninformed.

HD DVD died in 2008 as did anything potential with it. You can't compare a 2010 (IIRC) release to a format that died 2 years prior. It's just a silly argument.

People who stream don't care about Picture and Audio quality. But we are certainly the minority who do. As Blu-ray sales have shown, it's not selling as well as they had hoped and nearly every studio has farmed out catalog titles to other studios as they don't see enough (or any) profit to do it themselves.

I'm happy with riding the wave as well, but I'm not foolish to think things are all dandy like other people.

Gizmo

Few consumers "buy" digital movies. It's more of a rental thing - which is exactly what the studios want. You pay each time you want to pay. $6 to rent today, $6 to rent next year. It's certainly better than $4 to own Blu-ray today, $0 tomorrow.

Gizmo

No, Blu-ray was already delayed. It was supposed to arrive with the PS3 in 2005 and was delayed to 2006.

At best, you might get away with the BDA pushed Blu-ray a few months earlier (in the form of shit players like the Samsung 1000) to compete with HD DVD in June/July 2006, but once the PS3 hit in November, that was it. Sony couldn't keep delaying a game system.

So what you want is Sony to release their PS3 in 2007 or 2008? And let Microsoft have 2-3 years on the market? Or Nintendo 1-2? Sony is currently in last place this generation solely for the reason of supporting Blu-ray and having their console priced at $500/$600. Delaying it any further would have been horrific.

bunkaroo

Well then why isn't every disc released like that? How many BD combo discs were actually released? Not many at all. Seems to me studios don't in fact care about it, or aren't using combo discs to fight it.

Ahh I see. So basically either format would have been dinged for abandoning early adopters.

I didn't care about network features so the profiles didn't bother me on Blu. But I sure has hell would have care about my 2nd-gen HD DVD player not playing certain discs at all. At least Blu could play the discs with new features - it just couldn't use all the features. Big difference in my book.

I'm going to have to ask for a link on the 99% figure. Whether most people can tell the difference is certainly subjective. But you're proving my point that the HD DVD folks took the "good enough" position, which frankly is a cop out IMO. That's not what I want to hear from a company who wants thousands of my dollars for new hardware and software.

You can't? Why not? Let's say LOTR was ready to go on HD DVD or Blu in 2007. What then? I'm pretty sure BD would have handled it the same way it did in 2011 - 2 discs per movie with lossless audio. The encode might have been handled differently but the capacity was there. HD DVD would not have been able to do the same with 30GB, unless the encode in general was gimped to fit on HD-30.

bunkaroo

And meanwhile, MS obviously rushed the 360 to win the console war, as evidenced by the utter hardware catastrophe that was the launch 360. I guess they knew their fanbase though - I still can't believe people willingly bought 2 or 3 consoles just to make sure they had one working at home at any given time. Unbelievable.

But even if PS3 launched with Blu-ray at the same time as the 360, I don't think it wins the console war. Xbox Live is the key there and the big reason why people put up with the trash hardware released to them in the first year.

I have nothing against the 360 platform and it's obviously a success from a software perspective, but the hardware release was a joke.

Alan Smithee

But it seems like studios want to push "sales" on 'digital' movies, since a number of titles have been available for purchase but NOT for rent on Vudu and similar services a few weeks before they've come out on disc. (Funny that when the discs finally did come out, you could buy them for less than just the digital purchase, but still got that free with the disc! I've added all the ones I've gotten that way to my account, but of course would never watch them as long as I have the disc.) I would never rent a movie twice- I only use the 99 cent rentals on Vudu (that's all they're worth to me, since there's too much compression) and if I like the movie enough, I buy the Blu-Ray. If it were only available for rent, I'd just rent something else I hadn't seen before instead.

Qui Gon Jim

Wow. Are people really still bickering about the format war? I like to think that BD won and adopted the parts of HD DVD that they were lacking to make the best product possible. Maybe they already planned on these things. Maybe they are no brainers. Who cares?

I was an early adopter of HD DVD, still have my player and a handful of titles, but I am very happy with BD and how it has matured, and I have a couple hundred titles to show for it.

bunkaroo

My fault - I made a minor reference to the dearly departed format.

Sub-Zero

November 17:

orangerunner

One thing that still puzzles me about HDDVD were the lack of good titles out of the gate.

Universal had the biggest stake in HDDVD of all the participating studios. They have a great 100 year history of titles and yet the best titles they could come up with were The Sting, Animal House, Sparticus, Born on the Fourth of July, Dazed and Confused and Cartito's Way. Even these titles are so-so in some opinions.

They brought out titles like American Me, Mobsters, Timecop, Streets of Fire, The Getaway (1994), Waterworld etc. These are not titles that were going to attract the early adopters nor the average Joe.

Warner probably put the best foot forward by offering some genuine classics but they were (if I remember correctly) on both formats.