Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Yaya]

Blu-ray is dead - heckuva job, Sony!

Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product.

With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won�t save it.

16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose?

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

Delusional Sony exec Rick Clancy needs to put the crack pipe down and really look at the market dynamics.

In a nutshell: consumers drive the market and they don�t care about Blu-ray�s theoretical advantages. Especially during a world-wide recession.

Remember Betamax? SACD? Minidisk? Laser Disk? DVD-Audio? There are more losers than winners in consumer storage formats.

It�s all about volume. 8 months after Toshiba threw in the towel, Blu-ray still doesn�t have it.

The Blu-ray Disc Association doesn�t get it

$150 Blu-ray disc players are a good start, but it won�t take Blu-ray over the finish line. The BDA is stuck in the past with a flawed five-year-old strategy.

The original game plan

Two things killed the original strategy. First the fight with HD DVD stalled the industry for two years. Initial enthusiasm for high definition video on disk was squandered.

Second, the advent of low cost up-sampling DVD players dramatically cut the video quality advantage of Blu-ray DVDs. Suddenly, for $100, your average consumer can put good video on their HDTV using standard DVDs. When Blu-ray got started no one dreamed this would happen.

Piggies at the trough

The Blu-ray Disc Association hoped for a massive cash bonanza as millions of consumers discovered that standard DVDs looked awful on HDTV. To cash in they loaded Blu-ray licenses with costly fees. Blu-ray doesn�t just suck for consumers: small producers can�t afford it either.

According to Digital Content Producer Blu-ray doesn�t cut it for business:

Recordable discs don�t play reliably across the range of Blu-ray players - so you can�t do low-volume runs yourself.

Service bureau reproduction runs $20 per single layer disc in quantities of 300 or less.

Hollywood style printed/replicated Blu-ray discs are considerably cheaper once you reach the thousand unit quantity: just $3.50 per disc.

High-quality authoring programs like Sony Blu-print or Sonic Solutions Scenarist cost $40,000.

The Advanced Access Content System - the already hacked DRM - has a one-time fee of $3000 plus a per project cost of almost $1600 plus $.04 per disk. And who defines �project?�

Then the Blu-ray disc Association charges another $3000 annually to use their very exclusive - on 4% of all video disks! - logo.

That�s why you don�t see quirky indie flicks on Blu-ray. Small producers can�t afford it - even though they shoot in HDV and HD.

The Storage Bits take

Don�t expect Steve Jobs to budge from his �bag of hurt� understatement.

Or Final Cut Studio support for Blu-ray. I suspect that Jobs is using his Hollywood clout from his board seat on Disney and his control of iTunes to try to talk sense to the BDA.

But the BDA won�t budge. They, like so much of Hollywood, are stuck in the past.

A forward looking strategy would include:

Recognition that consumers don�t need Blu-ray. It is a nice-to-have and must be priced accordingly.

Accept the money spent on Blu-ray is gone and will never earn back the investment. Then you can begin thinking clearly about how to maximize Blu-ray penetration.

The average consumer will probably pay $50 more for a Blu-ray player that is competitive with the average up-sampling DVD player. Most of the current Blu-ray players are junk: slow, feature-poor and way over-priced.

Disk price margins can�t be higher than DVDs and probably should be less. The question the studios need to ask is: �do we want to be selling disks in 5 years?� No? Then keep it up. Turn distribution over to your very good friends at Comcast, Apple and Time Warner. You�ll be like Procter & Gamble paying Safeway to stock your products.

Fire all the market research firms telling you how great it is going to be.

They are playing you. Your #1 goal: market share. High volume is your only chance to earn your way out of this mess and keep some control of your distribution.

Time is short. Timid incrementalism will kill you.

Like Agent Smith delivering the bad news to a complacent cop: �No, Lieutenant, your men are already dead.�

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365

[brento1138]

Who with half a brain didn't see this one coming?

Umm...

internet... memory sticks... itunes...

wake up DVD pushers!

[Teelo]

VHS vs Beta

DVD+R vs DVD-R

[bassexpander]

Blu-ray is not dead. You're posting your opinion and a blog post as if it were industry fact.

The actual "dead" issue is downloads. People are generally only interested in downloading as long as its free. So far, in Korea, the paid downloading services are struggling seriously. Same in the USA. The download idea isn't catching on because most people don't want to wait for the video to download. They'd rather use on-demand cable, which is instantaneous. That's been out for years and has done little. Also, people want hard media in their hands that they can play whenever they want.



Interesting this comes out a few days after netflix announced they are no longer even renting HD-DVD.

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/16005.cfm

Ever since HD-DVD "lost" the HD war, many of its zealots have been saying that downloads are the winner. It was an almost overnight transition for them -- out of bitterness. The article reads like someone who is spewing HD-DVD bitterness after a final death rattle.

[Bigfeet]

It's not dead, adoption is just slow due to various factors. It'll catch on when people are ready to use it.

[I_Am_The_Kiwi]

Most people dont really notice a huge differnce between bluray and dvd. sure they are trying to advertise it but to the naked eye its not that huge, certainly not big enough to justify spending a few hundreds more on a player, then starting the movie collection all over again buying $50 movies.

I think one there is a bundle blu-ray/dvd/dvd upconverter player then sales may increase, and prices need to drop too....

Another thing i think is responsible for the slow down....
The change from VHS to DVD was amazing, before all movies were big tapes, then this new-age futuristic thing of movies on a little disc. but now there still selling me soemthing on a disc, and i think alot of people see the same kind of thing, sell a new product, not just new technology on the same piece of material.

I wouldnt think of buying blu-ray for at least 3 or 4 years.....

[eamo]

I know I'll probably never use a stand-alone Blu-ray player and go out and buy Blu-ray discs.

Sony et al must think I'm crazy to go out and buy last years action flick for 50 bucks. They're living in the past if they think that's still possible. I think the article writer is correct when he says that cheap discs and players, combined with huge turnover, is the only way to combat downloading. If blu-ray players were $100 and movies were $5......I might just go for it. Or a downloading service where a full-quality download at high-speeds was a couple of bucks.

But I will probably use a blu-ray writer at some time for storage. When the discs are cheap enough.

[Jeff's Cigarettes]

Sux I bout a PS3 primarily for playing bluray. I game mostly w/ my xbox.

[Ukon]

[SHANE02]

I agree about True HD audio being awesome. Shame I can't really crank it up with a baby around and all.

[bassexpander]

[I_Am_The_Kiwi]

Aaahhhh..........ok, let me explain.

I think were thinking in different dollars mate.

http://search.dse.co.nz/search?w=bluray&site=&sessionid=4923875c040c90ca2740c0a87f3b06b3

NZD. Not USD.

And yes, i dont own a 50" TV. And dont know anyone who does. Most people i know have either 29" standard TVs and a few now getting flatscreen which are at max 42", most between 30 and 40.

[bassexpander]

I wouldn't bother with blu-ray unless you have at least a 40" TV. Or a 37", if you sit close.

I think that, by and large, people in smaller countries (and some European countries) get royally screwed by movie prices.

Newer projectors are in the pipeline now with bulb lives lasting in excess of 30,000 hours between changings. That's several years for most of us (longer than you're likely to own it). That's where blu-ray really shows a massive difference. Just waiting for prices to come down on projectors like that before I buy one.

[Ukon]

I can see blu-ray looking quite good on a 30 inch...the problem is the quality of the television....My parents own a 2002 big screen HD tv and a new 2008 top of the line 60 inch DLP.

The difference in quality between the two is striking even though they're both running the same HD sources.

Plenty of folks are buying HD tvs, but buy the cheapest POS hd tv out there...or more commonly they don't set it up right and end up getting non-hd quality, but assume it's HD.

Plus the instore demonstrations often times do not use HD sources since they don't want waste their blu-ray players as display models...

[ernie]

ever heard of FLAC audio? neither have most people because 99.9% of people 1) listen to music on crap ass speakers or (god forbid) ear buds and 2) those people probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference even on a decent stereo, and 3) people want their downloads to take a few minutes, not a few days.

high resolution blue ray discs will lose to convenient downloadable files every time, for the same reason that FLAC doesn't stand a chance against regular old mp3s. why spend $30 on a blue ray disc when you can download it for free? besides, you can't appreciate the difference without taking out a second mortgage to finance your home entertainment system. 90% of movies these days are utter garbage, anyway.