How many Blu-rays have been "sold in the millions"? How many were catalog titles?

I find it funny that LD is niche compared to Blu-ray, but Blu-ray is not compared niche to DVD. It's pretty clear Blu-ray dropped the ball DVD was carrying in several ways.

Apparently it's a fresh encode, not the "4k" that's making it nice.

It's also only taking up 32GB of space compared to the previous 28GB.

So 18GB is wasted on nothing. Couldn't even be bothered to put proper extras on the disc (which would have been what, 3-4GB?).

Superbit 2.0!

IF the $5 Upgrade and Save was still going on I'd probably grab it for $10 at Best Buy. The current BD is pretty dreadful and Sony never made good on that Double-Pack release.

ALL the other titles...pass. Really, The Other Guys? Surprised we didn't get Fifth Element or Ultra Violet.

Fox is the distributor for MGM, but MGM still owns and controls its own catalog. The board at MGM decides what to release and when, then Fox authors the discs and sends them to retailers.

Disney is a bad example, as they were letting titles go out of print (aka "putting back in the vault") even at DVD's peak.

Blu-rays are not as popular as DVDs were in their heyday, but DVDs themselves aren't as popular as they once were, and Blu-rays are still selling much better than Laserdisc ever did.

Getting a bit off the 4k topic, but being an LD fan, I've always thought that as long as Blu-Rays are selling better than LDs, then they're doing OK. Market support for laserdisc was AWFUL- I still remember crappy VHS's being pushed everywhere, but having to go out of my way to find LDs. Then they'd usually be overpriced too. Most people said "VHS is good enough!" Funny thing is now a lot of those VHS tapes are at Goodwill stores, while laserdiscs have been held onto or at least passed on to people who appreciate them!

I remember when DVD was first announced, many stores stopped carrying LDs just because DVD WAS GOING TO BE COMING OUT SOON, not that it had already come out and outsold LD! That made me resent the format greatly and delayed my adoption of it. Maybe they should've done the same with DVDs when the HD formats were announced? Maybe they'll drop Blu-Rays when a real 4k format is announced?

The only Time I remember seeing LDs was either at school or the video rental store. I don't recall Kmart or Target carrying them.

I remember Camelot music stores selling them. Other than that, it was mostly higher end A/V stores around here.

Circuit City carried them for long time. That's where I worked and got my first LD player. Also, Camelot, Sound Warehouse, local stores here in town, and Blockbuster near the end of its run. And of course the first online retailer I used, Ken Cranes. I amassed over 100 LD's in that time.

Laserdisc was always a videophile format. Discs were expensive as I recall, the cheapest discs available were some bare-bones Warner Bros. titles that started at $34.95.

They rarely went on sale because of low volume. The special edition of Platoon was $129.95. When the SE DVD was released a few years later it was $19.99 with the same content on it.

The whole electronics business was completely different during the Laserdisc run. Things were still made in Japan and were relatively expensive. Cheap electronics didn't really occur until the very late nineties when things started coming from China.

In the eighties and nineties a Laserdisc player was minimum $500, a good 36" "big screen" Sony TV would set you back $3000. A Dolby Pro-Logic sound system would be another $2000.

What would have cost you $5500 back then, one could purchase something equivalent today for under $1000.

People just stuck with VHS because it was relatively cheap, looked fine on an average 21"-32" 4:3 TV and had the ability to record.

Circuit City carried LD players, but I never saw them sell any discs. When they added media in 1993, it was just CDs and VHS tapes. I repeatedly put notes in their comment boxes during that time saying "So now you sell VHS movies, but NO laserdiscs? What the hell is wrong with you??" When I bought my first "big" 31-inch TV from them where they repeatedly screwed things up (long, horrific story), the store manager apologized by letting me pick out a VHS tape in the store. I had to laugh at that. They were actually a decent place to buy DVDs though in the early years of the format, even when they were pushing DIVX.

LD could have been a lot more popular if the companies behind it were willing to push it harder. Instead, it was marketed as one user on the alt.video.laserdisc newsgroup stated "with the intelligence of baboons."

I remember Best Buy carrying Laserdisc Players but no Laserdiscs...

I have four players and a couple hundred LDs. I haven't had much luck unloading them. It's been (and was) a lot easier for me to sell my VHS collection at a decent price over the last ten years.

My favorite Laserdisc retailer and rental shop here in Boston shuttered its doors a year before the debut of DVD at the mere threat of the format coming.

Tower Records was the largest chain to carry an extensive selection of Laserdiscs. However, most Suncoast Motion Picture Company mall stores had at least a small assortment.

Camelot Music (which I think was more of a Southern/Midwestern chain) had a pretty enormous selection too. That's where we bought all our LDs that we didn't mail-order. They had a fairly extensive $12.88 bin, and when I was in high school, my father and I would sift through it and buy the first one whose cover made us laugh. So, when most people talk about Laserdiscs, they reverently look at all these lavish special editions and timeless classics, and I just had stacks and stacks of stuff like Dr. Alien and Night of the Demons. Out of the 85 or so LDs we owned, I don't think I watched any that were letterboxed, despite the format's reputation for that sort of thing.

Outside of a bin at a Blockbuster Video in Phoenix in 1992, I don't remember seeing LDs anywhere else in the wild at the time. To be fair, I lived in South Carolina and north Florida back then.

Suncoast! Now I remember seeing them (in the back of the store). The only reason I ever went there was to look at the cool movie themed toys as their DVDs were MSRP.

Laserdiscs had a lot going against them when they first came out. They were the size of LPs, at a time when people were switching from LPs to smaller cassettes. They didn't hold as much video as VHS, necessitating flipping the disc or even swapping discs several times while watching a video (the shorter time of Betamax is often cited as a reason it lost to VHS). LD wasn't as durable a rental format as VHS (smudges on disc, more likely to break from a fall, etc.) and renting was big in this era. And possibly most importantly, there was never a recordable consumer version, compared to video tape which many people used for time shifting TV, etc. When households were looking to buy their first, and likely only, home video format, they went with VHS.

So LD lost to VHS and then got stuck in a vicious cycle. Software and hardware remained expensive because of low demand, and there was low demand because of the high costs.

Lol, me too...good times.

Viscous cycles are the grossest kind.

+1 on Suncoast. That's the only place I ever saw an LD. This was before the dawn of DVDs, and I in no way had enough money to even consider getting an LD rig.

I can remember Camelot having a small selection of LDs. They had, maybe fifty or sixty titles in a small area of the store. I think Suncoast might have carried a few as well.

Those are the only places I ever saw LDs.

I might be inadvertently exaggerating it in my mind, but the store in Charleston, SC had the more prominent titles on wall racks and everything else in bins. I feel like they had a lot -- I mean, their selection was extensive enough for me to see everything from big draws like The Abyss all the way to Killer Tomatoes Eat France -- but I'm too awful at estimating to guess at a number, especially based on memories from twenty years ago. Their $12.88 bins were 3 or 4 slots deep. I feel like their LDs went all the way across one of those long rack units, plus the ones on the wall. (I'm pretty sure it was only on one side, though.)

What was that? Laser Craze on Boylston? I only found out about the store's location about a month after they shuttered, I think. I came out of Tower Records and saw the closed store across the way.

I never made it to Sight & Sound either. Though I did manage to visit Ken Crane's in Anaheim a couple times. The first time I stepped in there, I was in awe, because it was like a Mecca of laserdiscs.

Yeah, only the ones w/ new transfers might be worth picking up. I could see them doing a 30th anniversary release next yr (along with the sequel), so I'll prob just hold off for now.

We had QED Laser in Westmont IL that had a huge selection of laserdisc movies, and occasional 20% off everything sales. Ah, the memories...

I was spoiled because I lived close to Ken Crane's. All LDs were 20% off there, and the selection made everything else laughable... Still, titles were in the $30-$40 range even with the 20% off, but there were a lot of cutouts from $9.99 to $14.99. Of course the majority of my collection was those cutouts! And some great used finds in the early days of shopping alt.video.laserdisc in the newgroups... The Pioneer CDR-704 player that I still own today was the bomb! I still have all my titles, around 250 LDs.

Granted only a very few Blus have sold "in the millions", and no catalog titles, but LDs were often pressed in the 100 to 250-range. Nobody would bother releasing a pressed- Blu in only 100 copies, but it was done with the niche format that was laserdisc.