European BD sales...

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by richieb1971

You Canadians and Americans are missing one vital point.

In Europe internet speeds are vastly superior (on average) compared to the US and Canada. 10 Megabyte connections are the norm in the UK, 50megabyte connections are becoming increasingly popular for not much more money, approx £25 a month. The infrastructure is already there. If that £25 became £15, a hell of a lot of people would download movies either legally or illegally as their main source.

In the USA you have crappy speeds (on average) and rely on B+M shops to supply your movie content. In Europe, there are none to speak of. You have supermarket chains which rip you off and online vendors that people don't associate with movie buying because they always bought them in shops.

There is so much wrong in this post that it is hard to know where to start.

I guess a good place is that it is BITS and not BYTES, there are 8 bits to a byte and so if it was 10MB then it would be 80Mb when it is really 10Mb.

Now lets talk about US/Canada, I have 10Mb, I can also have much higher, so this idea that the BW in the UK is much higher then what is available in the US/Canada is wrong.

Also I find it funny that you think we rely on B&M when places like Amazon and Netflix started off in the US and because they did extremely well in the US they expanded or got adopted elsewhere. On the other hand what is wrong with B&M? I don't get the whole rant.

As for 10Mbps being the norm in the UK, that is just not true http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/

the average for the UK is 7.91 Mbps and places it 36 in the world. Since this only looks at broadband, it might not be the best way to compare, but US is 24th with 10.53 and Canada 32nd with 8.54.

Now that it shown you have all your facts wrong, let's move on to the analysis (since even if the facts would be right the analysis part would still be wrong.


What your missing is.
1) who has internet, might seem a bit nuts but in the end Just because someone wants to watch a movie does not mean that they are interested in the net (I know a lot of older people that can't be bothered with computers and the net)

2) what is available, yes in the cities all over the world high speed might be available (like the 10MBps you have) but that is far from meaning it is available everywhere. Remote areas, are more limited, that is why even with your 10Mbps and others with 50MBps the national Average is much lower, also with remote areas things might not show up in the statistics. For example my BIL, I am sure, has the highest BW available at home, but he also has a cottage, at that place in the GR he has a 42" TV, Sat and BD player, in the basement he has 42" TV , Sat and PS3. ON the other hand through the phone he has only dial-up, and recently he added a cell amplifier so now he has a USB-cell stick which is around 3Mbps if I am not mistaken but would a DL player work with it?

3) that it is easy to say 25 GBP and could be 15 GBP but people have to be willing to pay it. If something cheaper is offered that is obviously because enough people would rather save the $ and live within the limits. So the LCD is what you need to look at and not the highest available.

4)you don't understand BW. When your carrier says you are paying for 10Mbps you don't actually get 10Mbps, they sold that same BW you are using to your neighbours. This is how it works, I come to Blu-ray.com and I click on this thread, the very little data that is in this thread gets DL to my PC, then I take a few minutes to read the posts and a few more to respond. While that time passes I am not DL anything, but my neighbour might be DL a page on the forum he is visiting. This is what is known as burst speed and what is offered. So as long as I don't use it (which is how the internet mostly works now) we can all get 10Mbps, but if we all start using for large continuous DLeds like streaming or DL movies that model brakes and that 10Mbps acts more like 8 or 7 or 6 depending on how many people are doing and what is available downstream.

5) DVD was 10.08 Mbps so you might think 10Mbps is enough for DVD quality, but TCP-IP needs a lot more extra headroom, 1.5x-2x for overhead and error correction. That means that to stream that DVD you would need 15-30Mbps sustained. And if you are talking BD it is 48Mbps and now with 3D it is 60Mbps. so even your 10 that is the norm or the 50 that you think will be there soon it is hard for it to have enough BW, and that is just for the movie, imagine if two people in the house want to watch something different (that is why most homes have more then one TV) or someone wants to surf while the other person is relaxing with a movie....

6) like someone else mentioned what about the idea of limits which are becoming more and more implemented (X GB a month) I am allowed 75GB, that is one BD, or 5-7DVDs (depending what else you use it for)

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by BillieCassin

Hey Pro-B :

I really respect your reviews and opinions, but I have to ask - what evidence is there of this out there? Because right now, BD has been stagnant for about a year. We are like .86% above last year at this time

how does 86% growth and stagnant work together? One of them is practically doubling while the other means there is no growth.

[BillieCassin]

Originally Posted by Anthony P

how does 86% growth and stagnant work together? One of them is practically doubling while the other means there is no growth.

The week I quoted it was .86.

POINT EIGHT SIX.

As in less than 1 percent up over the same week the year before. The week before that, we were actually -8% under last year (that's minus eight percent).

The next week saw a big jump because of "Lost", which was great. Blu-ray revenue was at 16.3m because of the high price of the complete series set, so over the same week a year ago it was up about 50%.

There are good weeks and bad weeks. If you average out all of August, Blu-ray sales were up about 10% of the year before. That's not very good growth at all. At that rate, it will be many years before it overtakes DVD. For three plus years into the format, much, much more was expected.

With one glaring exception (the week Avatar came out), Blu-ray has struggled to maintain the 10ish% market share it has (Avatar got it to 22% for that brief time). Most months it averages 12 or 13% of DVD.

Summer is always a hard time, but this summer has been especially tough on Blu. We actually had some great strides earlier in the year, but this summer Blu-ray sales were down most weeks over last summer. That's not "down because it's the summer", but down from the SAME weeks of summer LAST YEAR.

Blu-ray just isn't growing the way a technology should be in it's third year. A lot of people are simply apathetic to it. Hopefully this will change. It may take awhile.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by BillieCassin

The week I quoted it was .86.

POINT EIGHT SIX.

As in less than 1 percent up over the same week the year before. The week before that, we were actually -8% under last year (that's minus eight percent).

The next week saw a big jump because of "Lost", which was great. Blu-ray revenue was at 16.3m because of the high price of the complete series set, so over the same week a year ago it was up about 50%.

There are good weeks and bad weeks. If you average out all of August, Blu-ray sales were up about 10% of the year before. That's not very good growth at all. At that rate, it will be many years before it overtakes DVD. For three plus years into the format, much, much more was expected.

With one glaring exception (the week Avatar came out), Blu-ray has struggled to maintain the 10ish% market share it has (Avatar got it to 22% for that brief time). Most months it averages 12 or 13% of DVD.

Summer is always a hard time, but this summer has been especially tough on Blu. We actually had some great strides earlier in the year, but this summer Blu-ray sales were down most weeks over last summer. That's not "down because it's the summer", but down from the SAME weeks of summer LAST YEAR.

Blu-ray just isn't growing the way a technology should be in it's third year. A lot of people are simply apathetic to it. Hopefully this will change. It may take awhile.

Thanks for clearing up what you meant. I look at the weekly charts but they tend to be mostly immaterial because, like you pointed out, they depend a lot on what comes out that week. So I don't understand why in your last post you made a big deal about the .86 growth in a given week.

The correct way is taking extended periods and you can't use the weekly % from HMM and average them out because not all weeks are equal. And their % might not be accurate.

The reason I thought you meant 86% and not .86% was that DEG (Digital entertainment group) calculated that for the first 1/2 of 2010 BD grew by 84% (and I did not remember the exact #).

http://hollywoodinhidef.com/2010/07/...-through-june/

even if you meant .86 and you do think the last couple of months where duds, it still remains valid, with over 80% growth how can you call it stagnant?

[dboyle]

Agree with many of the reasons stated in this thread but I think a lot of people lack the depth of titles available on BD in stores. Thus, it is the same Monsters vs. Aliens, Meatballs, Transformers that run in stores and quite frankly it is not all people that love that sort of content. IMO More classic movies in BD and odd indy-movies shown in-stores will help the format gain a new audience.

I know most people purchase films online but the inspiration still come from watching movies in-store...

[buggerlugs]

I think the first problem is hardware being too expensive and secondly the cost of disks.
I'm the only person I know who even owns a bluray drive - and mine is an internal computer drive which i use to make isos of my movies for storage on my server and viewing in media center.
I literally do not know one person who owns a set top blu ray player.