Amazon - consumers need wider title selection, better blu-ray pricing

[Batman1980]

During yesterday's Blu-Con 2010 conference in Los Angeles, Bill Carr, Amazon's Vice-president of music and video, said outright that "consumers love Blu-ray." However, he also noted that the format needs a wider title selection, and would benefit from easier Internet connectivity. Carr also mentioned pricing and bundling as factors for Blu-ray adoption.

Carr revealed that, once a consumer adopts Blu-ray, the amount that he or she spends on software increases fourfold, and spending stays high afterwards. However, Blu-ray customers still buy as much as 50% of their movies on standard-definition disc, due to Blu-ray's limited selection and price premium, Carr said.

Regarding selection, Carr explained that five years after the introduction of DVD, there were more than 20,000 titles available at retail. By comparison, there are fewer than 5,000 Blu-ray titles available today. Nowadays, Amazon carries 150,000 individual titles on DVD and just 4,000 on Blu-ray. "It will be a great day when those numbers are the same, or Blu-ray is higher."

As to price premium, according to internal Amazon data, if the Blu-ray is priced $10 higher than the same title on DVD, it may only account for "a little less than half" of sales for that title; but if the price differential is $5, then the BD could get more than 70% of the sales. If DVD and BD were to be priced equally, Blu-ray might account for 90% of Amazon sales volume.

The movies most requested on Blu-ray by Amazon customers include the Star Wars original trilogy, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (presumably the extended versions), Finding Nemo, Lawrence of Arabia, and Pulp Fiction.

Source - http://mesalliance.org/blog/2010/11/...th-at-blu-con/