Quote:
Originally Posted by FinalEvangelion
I was noticing someone definitely outside the young male category buying a Blu-ray player the other day at Best Buy. The format is slowly taking hold, but I think the studios are going to have to speed it up a bit by not selling the DVD version by itself / delay the DVD only version of a film. Some are doing that, but I think more will need to follow suit.
|
You "noticed someone..." buying a Blu-ray player? Great research.
Why would the studios delay a DVD release in favor of Blu-ray? That makes no business sense whatsoever. You can't take a fanboy approach to business strategy. The studios want to generate revenue by any means possible as quickly as possible (which is why theatrical windows are getting shorter and shorter). In the U.S., by dollars, through 12/12, Blu-ray has only 14.5% market share of physical video media. It's grown 29.26% over 2009, but it's still an overall small piece of the pie. The only reason the studios are paying attention to Blu-ray is because DVD was starting to die (down 10.66% this year in dollars) even before Blu-ray started to see some meaningful market penetration.
Blu-ray is a victim of DVD's success. Even though there are many Blu-ray players being sold now at an amazing $99 price point, there are millions of working DVD players in homes and most people don't care enough or aren't aware enough of the difference in PQ to make the investment in Blu-ray, especially in a poor economy. Also, recent stats show that big screen TVs, especially 3D TVs, haven't done well during this holiday selling season.
As people replace their DVD players, they will replace them with BD players. And as BD software prices fall, as they have been, especially for many catalog titles, people will start to phase out buying DVDs in favor of BDs.
But you don't force the market by discontinuing access to DVDs. All that will do is drive consumers to digital downloads. Meanwhile, for the average Joe who doesn't care all that much about PQ (the kind of person who thought their projection TV was great quality and hated it when widescreen movies played back letterbox on their 1.33 analog TV) and plays audio back through the TV, Blu-ray provides no benefit to them and why would they start paying $20 for Blu-ray titles they could buy on DVD for $9?
And all that doesn't include the impact of online and on-demand access to video. In spite of its benefits, Blu-ray has a hard road in front of it. There are many alternatives and as we've seen with audio, for better or worse, people are moving away from physical media. Even though I still have very large collections of physical media (books, journals, LPs, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, even still some reel-to-reel prerecorded tapes), the fact is that a) "I'm old" and b)if everything is always available online, one really doesn't have to own personal collections of physical media anymore.