With the DVD market in overall decline, those who supported Blu-ray in its victory over HD DVD aren't cheering as loudly as one might expect.
The New York Times
The story "Studios try to save the DVD" published February 25, 2008 at 12:17 PM is no longer available on CNET News.
Micro$oft is going to eliminate the HD-dvd from their X-box
It seems a shame to eliminate it when it would do a fine job of storing info without Hollywood clamering for a tax on the media. it would still store a huge amount of files on a disc.
what prevents the studios from making the quality of regular dvds look very inferior? I mean if they want to push BluRay they should easily be able to mess with the image, sound quality of DVDs. Kind of a conspiracy theory thing but makes since and I wouldn't see how it would be illegal.
And all you get is the movie, none of the "extras" people have come to expect from movies delivered on discs.
Yes, in the long run, I think downloading will be the norm.... but with the USA's 3-world infrastructure, and the studio's demand for DRM, it's going to take a while.
For our family, there's been less decent stuff to buy recently. I would guess that a majority of the DVD's we bought were 5-10 years old by the time they were released, classics that we hadn't seen in a long time, but figured if we had the DVD's, we'd watch 5-20 times in the next few decades.
And now we've grown accustomed to all of the extras, so if the DVD has crummy extras, we'll wait, we know additional releases (Disney is really bad) of the super ultimate final director's cut of the editor's brother's cut re-release will finally have the extras we want. (And by then, it'll be a "classic" in our minds as well and we'll buy it for the nostalgia factor.)
That said, Fox is on to something. We still buy CDs because we can play them in the car without plugging in the iPod. We still buy DVDs because they play just about anywhere. And where they don't, Fox is bridging the gap with the online version. Very smart.
We've got four DVD players in the house. Two of them cost around $30 a piece (the other two are in computers). When the standalones die, we'll chuck 'em and buy a few more. When Blu-Ray players are that cheap, we'll replace a broken DVD player with a Blu-Ray.
DVD's cost too much, going to the movies cost too much.. If Wal-Mart can not sell them for 6 bucks, you folks need to wake up.. The only way you will be able to compete with the Internet is to have the DVD's cost around 2 bucks. That way folks will buy 5 at a time... Think quantity! No way for Blue Ray....
free digital copy? I think they're missing the point
People aren't going to buy more DVDs just because there's a digital copy with them. They want the digital copy so they don't have to go to the store. also, they don't want to pay $15-20 for a movie, it's not like they're going to watch it over and over (except for kids, who will watch the same thing 100 times).
I think some studio should do a remake of Clueless, except instead of being about teenage girls, it would be about the studio executives themselves. Not that people would buy that DVD, but maybe the process of making it might open their eyes to reality. Not reality like they know it, as a scripted TV show, but as in why things work they way they do. The reality of an economy where food and energy costs are rising, and income isn't, where buying DVDs to build collections becomes a low priority. Renting movies becomes a much more affordable option. Renting movies without paying for plastic disks, transportation of those disks, and profit margins of distributors and retailers, becomes a viable profitable option. Does some fruity computer company have to show them how to do it, just like they showed the music industry?
To me it seems only logical that DVD sales have dropped so much.
Most people only purchase movies at a moderate rate. One here, another there. Usually they prefer to rent over purchase.
Then there are collectors (like me) who aggressively purchase a lot of movies. Sometimes I'll walk out of a store with over $100 worth of movies.
This has been occuring more often as the price of DVD movies has been falling.
Now, I can find movies at 2 for $10 or less. The problem is I can't find a lot that I still want to buy.
I have between three and four hundred at the moment. Now when I go to local stores, I find my self taking longer and longer to find something I consider worth buying. The number of titles I have bought over the last year has steadly fallen.
So, the problem seems to be that collectors have pretty much bought everything they want to collect from previously available titles, and are now just purchasing new titles as they come out.
Of course, new collectors come along every day. Maybe it will just take a while for younger people to finally get the income to fully support movie collecting.
It makes sense to me that DVD sales would surge at first, and then decline to a point and steady out.
What's really funny though is studios and distributers that actually think I'm going to repurchase all these movies in Blueray. That's halarious! Heard of "Good Enough Computing"? This is a term coined to explain why so few people upgrade their computers now. Seems to apply to the DVD/Blueray thing. How about "Good Enough Video". High Def is really nice, but not nice enough to get me to spend 1 to 2 grand on the same movies I already own.
Now, if there was some kind of trade-in deal, where you could bring in an original movie on DVD and get the Blueray movie for 1/2 price...
Looks like the downfall of DVD sales is tied to the current recession. If you want to have vibrant DVD sales, give us some jobs that pay enough to buy the DVD's! It's not that people aren't interested in buying them, they just have other more important things to buy: like food, gas, heat, medical, etc.
You all want "Globalization", now learn to live with it.
Consumers are comfortable with $10-$15 for most DVD's. Especially since anyone clever can get the content for free in digital format... Charging $20-$30 prices on Blu-Ray discs makes consumers feel taken advantage of. If Sony et al sincerely want a quick transition to Blu-Ray, they should begin issuing all future releases as DVD/Blu-Ray hybrids at the same $10-$15 price point. As DVD users began to collect hybrid discs, they would be drawn to buy Blu-ray players or PS3s. If sony could let go of the the idea of gratuitously overcharging consumers for the new format based on perceived value (their perception, not ours) and start selling only Blu-ray/DVD hybrid players (at the same DVD player price points), they could quickly move everyone to Blu-Ray and start counting their money as everyone began replacing their entire movie collection one last time before the switch to non-physical formats.
Sorry, but I stopped buying DVD's as soon as I got a copy of "anydvd". This software has allowed me to build a catalog of over 400 titles. Between netflix (before they started throttling shipments) and now RedBox at $1.00 per rental, I have all of the DVD's I could ever want. So much of the new content(90%)coming out of Hollywood is total garbage that I have no qualms about acquiring what little quality there is using these methods. I laugh now when I think about all the times I'd go to a movie and it would be crap and I'd be out $20.00. Now the shoe is on the other foot and Hollywood can kiss my big hairy n*t-sack.
DVD manufacturers and the studios will go to any length to make a case for the "increased" demand for purchasing DVDs. How is it these people are smart enough to develop and run a business and yet seem to run behind the cow when it comes to understanding their customers and the market dynamics of customer demand and satisfaction.
I consider my family an average middle class family. I have already collected all the DVD titles that I am really interested in. Why would I want to buy these in a new format. I use an HD-DVD player that upscales to 1080P. I believe most people already have built their libraries. That is; when the DVD's came out, we had a backlog of movies to put in our colllection. Once we have reached that threshold the demand for DVDs fell off. And to your point, so much of what is being produced today is void of any meaningful content. So having built my collection, I have no desire to buy more DVD's. It is the law of satiation and saturation. When A person is totally satisfied a point of saturation is reached where no more motivation will get him to be more satisfied. How many copeis of the "The Mission" do I want to buy? So DVD sales will continue to decline because customers have bought from the backlog, and now will only want to purchase new DVDs having content they desire. So as one would expect this need to buy decreases.
It is not just DVD's, I do not buy much computer junk or computers or anything already. I bought it , used it or threw it in the basement. Computers used to be tinkering devices. Now they are fast enough(good enough computing from above). They are now appliances. I can open my own store with all the stuff siting in my basement. Nearly all my DVD purchases were TV shows. I bought almost of them.
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I mean if they want to push BluRay they should easily be able to mess with the image, sound quality of DVDs. Kind of a conspiracy theory thing but makes since and I wouldn't see how it would be illegal.
And all you get is the movie, none of the "extras" people have
come to expect from movies delivered on discs.
Yes, in the long run, I think downloading will be the norm.... but
with the USA's 3-world infrastructure, and the studio's demand
for DRM, it's going to take a while.
And now we've grown accustomed to all of the extras, so if the DVD has crummy extras, we'll wait, we know additional releases (Disney is really bad) of the super ultimate final director's cut of the editor's brother's cut re-release will finally have the extras we want. (And by then, it'll be a "classic" in our minds as well and we'll buy it for the nostalgia factor.)
That said, Fox is on to something. We still buy CDs because we can play them in the car without plugging in the iPod. We still buy DVDs because they play just about anywhere. And where they don't, Fox is bridging the gap with the online version. Very smart.
We've got four DVD players in the house. Two of them cost around $30 a piece (the other two are in computers). When the standalones die, we'll chuck 'em and buy a few more. When Blu-Ray players are that cheap, we'll replace a broken DVD player with a Blu-Ray.
I think some studio should do a remake of Clueless, except instead of being about teenage girls, it would be about the studio executives themselves. Not that people would buy that DVD, but maybe the process of making it might open their eyes to reality. Not reality like they know it, as a scripted TV show, but as in why things work they way they do. The reality of an economy where food and energy costs are rising, and income isn't, where buying DVDs to build collections becomes a low priority. Renting movies becomes a much more affordable option. Renting movies without paying for plastic disks, transportation of those disks, and profit margins of distributors and retailers, becomes a viable profitable option. Does some fruity computer company have to show them how to do it, just like they showed the music industry?
Most people only purchase movies at a moderate rate. One here, another there. Usually they prefer to rent over purchase.
Then there are collectors (like me) who aggressively purchase a lot of movies. Sometimes I'll walk out of a store with over $100 worth of movies.
This has been occuring more often as the price of DVD movies has been falling.
Now, I can find movies at 2 for $10 or less. The problem is I can't find a lot that I still want to buy.
I have between three and four hundred at the moment. Now when I go to local stores, I find my self taking longer and longer to find something I consider worth buying. The number of titles I have bought over the last year has steadly fallen.
So, the problem seems to be that collectors have pretty much bought everything they want to collect from previously available titles, and are now just purchasing new titles as they come out.
Of course, new collectors come along every day. Maybe it will just take a while for younger people to finally get the income to fully support movie collecting.
It makes sense to me that DVD sales would surge at first, and then decline to a point and steady out.
What's really funny though is studios and distributers that actually think I'm going to repurchase all these movies in Blueray. That's halarious!
Heard of "Good Enough Computing"? This is a term coined to explain why so few people upgrade their computers now. Seems to apply to the DVD/Blueray thing. How about "Good Enough Video". High Def is really nice, but not nice enough to get me to spend 1 to 2 grand on the same movies I already own.
Now, if there was some kind of trade-in deal, where you could bring in an original movie on DVD and get the Blueray movie for 1/2 price...
You all want "Globalization", now learn to live with it.
Consumers are comfortable with $10-$15 for most DVD's. Especially since anyone clever can get the content for free in digital format... Charging $20-$30 prices on Blu-Ray discs makes consumers feel taken advantage of. If Sony et al sincerely want a quick transition to Blu-Ray, they should begin issuing all future releases as DVD/Blu-Ray hybrids at the same $10-$15 price point. As DVD users began to collect hybrid discs, they would be drawn to buy Blu-ray players or PS3s. If sony could let go of the the idea of gratuitously overcharging consumers for the new format based on perceived value (their perception, not ours) and start selling only Blu-ray/DVD hybrid players (at the same DVD player price points), they could quickly move everyone to Blu-Ray and start counting their money as everyone began replacing their entire movie collection one last time before the switch to non-physical formats.
I consider my family an average middle class family. I have already collected all the DVD titles that I am really interested in. Why would I want to buy these in a new format. I use an HD-DVD player that upscales to 1080P. I believe most people already have built their libraries. That is; when the DVD's came out, we had a backlog of movies to put in our colllection. Once we have reached that threshold the demand for DVDs fell off. And to your point, so much of what is being produced today is void of any meaningful content. So having built my collection, I have no desire to buy more DVD's. It is the law of satiation and saturation. When A person is totally satisfied a point of saturation is reached where no more motivation will get him to be more satisfied. How many copeis of the "The Mission" do I want to buy? So DVD sales will continue to decline because customers have bought from the backlog, and now will only want to purchase new DVDs having content they desire. So as one would expect this need to buy decreases.