20th Century Fox Blu-ray TV shows?

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by AgentOrange

I just can't believe people still buy DVD's, and apparantly in numbers that the blu-ray is cancelled/non-existant but the SD DVD lives on. Crazy.

I get that the overall lanscape is shifting towards digital, but I just would have thought DVD would be approaching zero faster than blu-ray. I guess they figure that the "techies" have moved from HD to digital, but there is still an audience of poor souls that can't do either HD or digital - so they still need DVD.

In the U.S., Blu-ray has only a 22% physical market unit share and a 31.7% revenue share. Now that includes the fact that there are many more DVD releases than BD releases, but if you look at the sales charts, only a few releases per week sell more on BD than on DVD.

For the week ending 3/15, it was only "Whiplash" and "Hunger Games - Mockingjay" that sold more on BD and that was only by a very small margin, 51.51% and 51.64%, respectively. I'm actually a bit surprised by "Whiplash" doing so well, since while it's a great movie, it's not one that particularly benefits from a BD presentation.

Overall, as compared with last year (which was also a down year), BD is down 3.43% in revenue and 2.5% in units, although last year at this time, it was down almost 10% in revenue and 5.54% in units compared with 2013.

The big question is where streaming has the biggest cannibalization: is it TV watching (whether OTA, cable or satellite), DVD or BD? The problem is that no matter how you analyze the market, the future doesn't bode very well for BD. It's large enough that without significant additional erosion, it's not going to disappear, but since it's in slow decline, studios will make decisions not to bother with certain releases. We're already seeing TV advertising where they promote that streaming is available "weeks before" the BD release and the vast majority of consumers, who if they're watching on a TV at all are watching a terribly adjusted picture and at best, have a sound bar, can't perceive the difference between a BD release and a streaming release.

We can cry all we want about studios not releasing certain product on BD, but if it doesn't sell, it doesn't sell and in spite of some people on sites like this one who are incredible collectors and own hundreds of titles, the reality is that BD is a hit-driven business - very few titles actually sell well and even when they do sell, they sell well for a very short period of time (this is true for theatres as well). It would be healthier if consumers bought deeper. Unfortunately, we have very short attention spans.

The one thing that might help BD in the future is 4K, since 4K broadcasting over the air or cable is decades away, if ever. That means 4K will have to be delivered via either streaming or physical media. And going forward, except at the very bottom of the range, almost all TVs will be 4K. So in a few years, after replacement cycles set in, we might see consumer demand for 4K Blu. Or maybe I'm being too optimistic.