[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

But I'm also realistic about Blu-ray's prospects, I've been in the industry for decades and I understand business analysis.

but you are not realistic and you don't do any real analysis you just harp on what you believe are negative numbers

People talk about the supposed success of BD without backing up their comments with sales figures. The FACTS are that through 5/28/11, BD is only 10.75% ahead of last year to date and only has a 20.3% share of physical media.

I don't know where you get your numbers from, but

It's also a very hit-driven business with the fifth best-selling title typically selling only 6-10% of the top title in any week and the 20th best-selling title selling only 2-3% of the #1 title. That's not good enough performance and does place the future of BD in danger.

this shows you don't understand anything. Like you say BD is hit driven, but if you looked you will see the exact same is true for DVd and any movie. That makes it different then the music business that you said you worked in. With movies they are advertised before they hit the market, then they are in theatre for a few weeks months, then they are advertised "soon on BD and DVD" and everyone and their dog knows if they want it fast and run out and buy them when they come out. In contrast with music, unless you read music centric sites you don't know what new stuff will be out that week and usually if you go to the store to buy something particular it is because you just happened to hear it on the radio or a friends or something and that can be when it was released or a week later or a month or a year later. The other difference is that if I am at the store (real or on-line like i-tunes), and I want to know if XXXX has something I don't own, I go to his name and see what there is and I decide to buy or not. With movies that does not exist, I can't go and see what did XXXX direct or YYYY acted in or ZZZZ wrote the screen play for, so unless someone is looking for a specific title people look at new arrivals or garbage bin. It will just take too long to go through all the movies available to pick a few to buy.

Now why do I bring this up? well you are assuming that BDs growth this year is not big enough, but look at what has come out. You admit titles make sales and good titles mean big numbers and bad titles low numbers but you fail to take that variable in your analysis, last year there where a lot of good movies that came out including the largest grossing movie of all time, while this year there where no good movies.


Since you realize that it is the top individual titles that drive sales, why don't you look at that and you will see that last year around this time BD was getting close to 50%, while now titles routinely surpass that and sometimes by a lot.

BD has to have broad-based sales and have catalog titles that sell healthily, otherwise the studios will lose interest and move on to something else that has greater returns. People on here always complain about some great classic title that hasn't been released on BD yet. But the reason why is that if the studios don't think it's going to be a top-5 title, the sales are so small, it's frequently not worth the bother as compared with other efforts.

no, the reason is that movies have a shelf life, the person that is willing to pay full price for a particular movie will buy it when it comes out, if he did not think it was worth paying full price then he will wait until it is on special or in the garbage bin. Let's say Joe goes to the store and there are 100 catalogue movies released that week, maybe he will buy 1 or 2 or 3 or even 4 but the guy probably can't buy all 100 even if they are worth getting. So what happens. The next time he is in the store he does not look at the rest of the 100 he looks at the new ones for that week, so now the other 90+ will remain until they are in the garbage bin and then the guy might get a few more, but instead of let's say 20$ the title will sell for 5$ and that is not good for the studio.

It also misses that it takes time and money and personnel to make a BD master, replicator lines to replicate it and shelf space to display it, it would be way too expensive for studios to dump titles (i.e. make 100 available for that week like the example above). With many 10's of thousands of movies it just makes sense that not all of them would be on BD already, and so there will be lists that we all hope