mig0

Hard to say. Roku hit 10 million units sold lifetime earlier this month and Apple tv hit about 20 million. There's an article on CNet I can't post the link to since I need more posts.

Keep in mind so many devices support netflix, amazon, vudu and the other services, there's not really a good reason to buy just a streaming device when so many tvs, consoles and blu-ray players all support it, nevermind tablets or phones.

Sub-Zero

September 20:

Alan Smithee

The thing is, if most people had done that, it's likely the studios would have at least tried pricing DVDs the same way they had with VHS tapes- price them around $100 the first year or so they were out since most copies would be sold to rental stores. I did NOT want to see that happen, so I purposely did not ever rent any DVDs and made many purchases as a way to "vote with my dollars" and support low-priced new releases. Thankfully the rental-priced thing never happened here, though I heard it did in the UK for a while. Fox was somewhere in the middle, pricing most of their movies at $34.99, and some Buena Vista titles went up to $32.99, while Warner, who advocated moving the market towards buying rather than renting, had a limit of $24.99 and even priced some movies at $19.99 which hadn't done well theatrically (such as Soldier, Why do Fools Fall in Love, Sphere, and a few others) to encourage blind buys.

morriscroy

Wonder how much of the downward pressure on dvd prices was due to Walmart.

Alan Smithee

I remember Best Buy in particular spoke out against studios going to rental pricing- that was back when they actually carried a decent selection. Most Wal-Marts didn't have a whole lot of DVDs yet- usually just a rack or so near the players (same with Target.)

PhantomStranger

Best Buy really pushed the DVD format in stores. They were always very aggressive about expanding its size in the format's early years. That Best Buy is long gone these days.

Josh-da-man

I think "rental pricing" was on its way out by the time DVD hit. I sort remember that some VHS movies were released "priced to own" and skipped rental pricing entirely.

Also, by that time, Blockbuster and other rental chains had rental sharing agreements with most studios, so they would buy their VHS films from the studios at a large discount, split the rental revenue, then sell the cassette when interest had died down.

The idea behind rental pricing, at the time, was that the studios did not want consumers to own copies of their movies so they charged exorbitant prices for them, around $100. As the Blockbuster model, which kept new releases stocked in depth, this pricing scheme was no longer practical.

morriscroy

Were laserdiscs exempt from "rental pricing"?

Back in the day when I was briefly into laserdiscs, I remember many then-current newer titles were less expensive on laserdisc in comparison to the "rental pricing" of the VHS versions of the same movies.

davidh777

I think Smithee was referring to rental pricing for DVDs, which was thankfully short-lived. Studios saw their rental-price revenue disappearing and thought they could sell indie-type titles for closer to $30 than $20 on the theory that people wouldn't want to own them, but rental outlets would pick up a few copies. It didn't work, partly because of industry resistance, partly because online unlimited inventory and discounts ruined the pricing model, and partly because no one wanted to see those movies anyway.

Josh-da-man

I don't remember anything resembling rental pricing in the early days of DVD. The closest things would have been Fox pricing some new releases at a $35 MSRP like X-Files Fight the Future and Hope Floats, which was about $5 over their regular MSRP. Disney also had their collectors series line that charged $40 for certain special editions like Scream, Clerks, and Halloween H20. Ah, yes, Disney, Fox, and Paramount and their shitty, non-anamorphic releases priced higher than everyone else.

At the time, most studios had more or less standard prices for all releases. Warner and New Line titles all had $25 MSRPs, and other studios like Disney, Fox, and Paramount had $30. All titles were priced at these levels, both new releases and catalog titles. I think Warners was the first one to drop the prices on catalog titles, I remember titles like Sphere being released with $20 MSRPs.

morriscroy

(On a tangent).

When did the $5 dvd dump bins started appearing?

davidh777

It was, as I said, very short-lived, and with minor titles. I think MGM had a few of them, including some romantic comedy about a girl and an alien monster or something. I worked retail at the time and thus probably saw a lot of titles that 99% of people wouldn't give a crap about.

Alan Smithee

Laserdiscs were aimed more at collectors than renters, since not many stores even rented them. The prices on them were still frustrating- I don't know how many of those B-movies from Image priced at $40 actually sold at full price, those usually turned up later in the cutout sections! I still didn't want to see DVD become more of a rental format than one for collectors.

PhantomStranger

DVD benefited greatly from the emergence of the Internet as an actual retail platform. Laserdiscs probably would have had greater consumer acceptance if it had come around five years later.

JimRochester

I agree. It was the perfect storm. A revolutionary product in home entertainment, priced to sell instead of rent, at the same time there were tons of internet retailers whose business model involved selling at a huge loss in order to garner advertising dollars and sell customer lists.

DVD Polizei

I remember buying one of my first DVD titles, The Thing, for $29.99 on my $1200 Sony DVD player. That nice gold strip on the DVD made me feel so special. I bought a lot of Universal titles for that price, initially.

davidh777

I pre-ordered Titanic from reel.com for 50% off and got The Shining as a throw-in. And then Amazon's "all pre-orders at 40% off" really put a hurt on my wallet.

morriscroy

Was this the Titanic dvd version that was non-anamorphic and bare bones?

davidh777

Yes, that was back in '99-ish when we were waiting for titles to get released, and a lot of people didn't have widescreen TVs to tell the difference. But hey, it was one DVD instead of two VHS cassettes!

morriscroy

The first dvds I purchased back in the late 1990's, was stuff like Terminator 2 and Total Recall. But unfortunately, that copy of T2 was defective and froze within the first 20 minutes into the movie (which I ended up returning). I didn't even open up the Total Recall dvd, and returned it too for a refund.

This pretty much killed off any potential interest I had in collecting dvds in those days. I didn't purchase any further dvds until years later, when decent catalog stuff was starting to show up in the local dvd bargain bins at prices below $10. (Stuff like Cheech and Chong, Star Trek, Terminator, Dirty Harry, etc ...).

davidh777

There were some DVD editions of T2 that pushed the technology so much that a lot of people couldn't play them without upgrading their equipment.

morriscroy

Any specifics? (Besides the double-sided flipper disc version of the "Ultimate Edition" of T2 ).

morriscroy

The defective copy of T2 that I came across, looks like it was the first dvd release that was originally released back in October 22, 1997.

http://www.amazon.com/Terminator-2-J.../dp/0784010188

As far as I could tell at the time, it appeared to be a bare bones release.

davidh777

I don't recall offhand. I know Ultimate Edition caused problems, and then there was that HD digital file that was a real headache.

hanshotfirst1138

Wasn't HD fairly new at the time?