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Blu-ray Disc Prices not Dropping Any Time Soon

10K views 48 replies 25 participants last post by  sonoyuu 
#1 ·
#2 ·
Nothing meaningful
theres no reason for a company to ever say prices will drop soon

all it does is kill sales until the prices do drop
its better to surprise people anyways
 
#3 ·
Frankly high prices, not talk, is what kills sales.

I think this is significant because it suggests the manufacturers and studios think the consumer will cave before they do and that little relief is in sight this holiday season.

The result is that it might be Christmas 2009 or 2010 (or never) before we see the Blu-ray breakthrough.
 
#5 ·
I agree that prices are high currently, and that lower prices would help sales. Thats a no brainer.

But unless the price reduction is essentially immediate, theres no reason to allude to that months in advance. Your consumers will just stop/slow their buying until the price reduction occurs. I believe its better to deny price cuts, keep sales steady, until you're actually ready to announce significant sales/cuts and benefit from the buzz those produce.

Also lets not forget how many companies deny their intentions until they are ready to announce them, even if that means denying something the day before you announce it. I fully expect something this holiday season.

Thats my point. I think the article is meaningless because I dont believe that that is their true plan. You believed that I meant prices themselves are meaningless, which is rediculous.
 
#10 ·
Couple of weeks ago I bought Payback and Kingdom of Heaven with the same deal at HMV. Both look great in Blu Ray, but I remember feeling a bit of buyers regret afterwards cause of the price, when so many DVDs are in the $10 range. Not sure I'll be buying any more till the price comes down a bit.
 
#9 ·
- What else is the Blu association going to say?

- Every new technology starts at high prices, and the early price insensitive adopters are going to be milked for all they are worth.

- Prices will drop in response to growth slowing or demand dropping.

- As stated, cracks in disc prices are starting to show up.
 
#11 ·
with the exception of the pillaging of the remaining HD-DVD inventory I don’t think I can remember any other product that was intended to be mainstream that has been met with more public indifference than HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

I know people who were early adopters of virtually every other consumer electronics product of the last 15 years who have shown virtually no interest in Blu-ray or HD-DVD.

The thing that alarms me most is people keep comparing Blu-ray to where DVD's were at the same point in the curve - the problem with that rationalization is I was as early a DVD adopter as they came and things were very different.
 
#16 ·
with the exception of the pillaging of the remaining HD-DVD inventory I don’t think I can remember any other product that was intended to be mainstream that has been met with more public indifference than HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
Marginal return on investment... that's always the question. DVD was orders of magnitude superior to VHS. VHS was far more convenient than going to the theatre and made watching movies at home an option. Blu-Ray, on the other hand, is an incremental upgrade to DVD. The convenience is the same. The quality is better but the quality of DVD is already very good. There is no upgrade in the audio quality (not of significance anyway). The benefit to consumers is just not that large.

We saw similar things with SACD and DVD-Audio. They are markedly superior to CD but they are no more convenient and they did not succeed. (In fact, we are regressing with the more convenient but lower-quality digital download.)

I think the marginal return on Blu-Ray is higher than that of DVD-Audio, but probably not high enough that the public will go crazy over it. I'm sure it will become the standard for movies before very long, but it is still very much competed with by standard old DVD.
 
#12 ·
I don’t think I can remember any other product that was intended to be mainstream that has been met with more public indifference than HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
Closest would be SACD and DVD-Audio. Having said that, I think BR will have more success than SACD and DVD-Audio.
 
#14 ·
I just bought 3 movies for $52 total

Run Lola Run
Reign over me
Almost Famous

from amazon.co.uk

and from Tower.com
Dark city AND Shinobi for $32 total

Prices arent bad when you know where to look. Theres a great section at bluray.com thats all about "hot deals"

In stores as well ive seen some $20 or less titles recently. Even bestbuy routinely has 2-for-$40 deals. But as I said, im positive they'll do something for the holidays.
 
#15 ·
Also saw on a webite for a Toronto store with Blu's at $10.99 each if you buy 20 or more, $12.99 for 10 mor more, or $14.99 each. Point being that the association can proclaim all they want but downward price pressure is on.

Rental outlets are also starting to stock decent size Bluray areas and the cycle of selling old stock is competition too because those are newer titles. Most people don't have a big problem being previously viewed.
 
#21 ·
Whether mos people have the hardware or not isnt relevant. In the original post it said theres NO upgrade in audio. I just pointed out that for some of us, theres a significant upgrade.
 
#20 ·
No significicant upgrade in Audio? Have you ever listened to an Uncompressed True HD soundtrack or DTS Master Audio directly compared to Dolby Digital. My opion is that there is a significant difference (an option shared by many of my friends)
__________________
Wow is all I can say with the difference between DD5.1 and DTS HD Master Audio. Hereos Season 2 Blu-ray the main episodes are DTS HD MA, while the extras are DD5.1. We played them and even my wife said what happened to the sound quality. That is a wow for me, she never notices stuff like that.
 
#27 ·
To not get too off topic.

I think to clarify the argument of whether VHS to DVD and DVD to Blu-ray has that "improvement factor" you need to understand this.

Originally to jump from VHS to DVD you would buy a DVD player pop in the desk and see a big improvement in picture/sound/functionality. The cost wasn't as significant.

Now to jump from DVD to Blu-Ray, you need to buy a new player, Receiver, AND HDTV. This is a huge cost to see a big improvement.

WHile I agree with lots of you that BD are a great improvment over DVD. IMO most people don't want to go that route simply because of all the perephials that you have to buy to see the difference. Me being one of them.
 
#28 ·
Basically true toybox, but over time the cost of electronic equipment goes down. I believe the price of BD will continue to fall as well. I remember in 1967 when colour TV came out in Canada your average set sold for between $800.00 to $1000.00 and in some cases higher. Remember that's in 1967 dollars. That was a huge amount back then. But eventually prices came down and people started buying. The same will happen to BD and BD players. I suspect that around Xmas time or just after, you will notice a decline in prices. However, one unknown is the financial crisis that is plaguing the US and now the world. We shall see.
 
#29 ·
Not really true though is it? Many people are buying new TV's anyway because it's time to get into HD for everything, not just disc media. Cable and satellite companies are adding more and more HD channels every day. Even reality TV shows are being filmed in HD now.

As for the receiver, you really don't need to buy a new one either. I've got an older Sony receiver and I have my BD player hooked up via digital optical. That's good enough sound for most people I would imagine. Sounds great to me anyway. I want to upgrade down the road to a new receiver, but not right away. It's not really needed instantly.

You can go to BB right now and pick up a Sony 300 for $229. Most models are under $300 now to get into Blu-ray, so the cost is nowhere near as bad as it was previously.
 
#31 ·
There is no upgrade in the audio quality (not of significance anyway). The benefit to consumers is just not that large.
You're either not taking advantage of the lossless tracks, or not a BD owner. The difference is noticable, a DTS track on DVD is 768kps, some lossless tracks are as much as 6.9mps. I have compared back and forth with BD and DVD's of the same movie, a noticable heft in the lfe, better overall clarity and more seamless pans between channels on BD.
How about menu access during movies, nice to pick a new scene without returning to the main menu, or change the audio track.
There are many benefits of BD over DVD, some peeps just need to justify to themselves why they are not upgrading by spewing 1/2 truths on forums.
 
#32 ·
There are many benefits of BD over DVD, some peeps just need to justify to themselves why they are not upgrading by spewing 1/2 truths on forums.
I'll give you some advice - when you're trying to persuade someone, insulting them at the end isn't very effective.

I was wrong, apparently, and I admit it. I would call this a greater failure in the Blu-Ray industry than a failure in myself. I know a thing or two about audio, more than most people (and not as much as a few), but I certainly didn't know there was a significant improvement in audio quality.

As for self-justification, I was justifying why the average person doesn't upgrade. The marginal return isn't perceived as being sufficient. For you, it obviously is. Despite your rudeness, you've convinced me that the marginal return is greater than I thought it was, but I still don't know if it's large enough to justify yet.
 
#33 ·
After having read every one's comments I would like to point some things out.

Blu-Ray is a storage format, so really the statements of "higher quality" video and audio are not accurate. Those factors are more a matter of compression and encoding.

Blu-Ray offers a very minimal increase in storage for an outrageous jump in price.

Lets do the math here:

People can debate media quality, but you can buy one hundred 4.7GB DVD-R disks for $27 CDN, that's 174 GB per $.

Blu-Ray disks range from single 25GB disks for $20 (that's 1.25 GB per $), to a five pack for $40 (that's 3.125 GB per $)

I see alot of 1TB Hard Drives available for about $130 CDN

That is approximately 7.7 GB per $ and the access rate will put any optical medium to shame.

With Seagate coming out with HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) there is a new "barrier" of 50TB/Square inch. Optical mediums will not be able to keep up.

I used to back my data up onto CDs (I have thousands) then on DVDs (also over a thousand). Now I find I am buying hard drives to back up my data as it is easier to work with than DVDs and when factoring burn times, access rates and how fragile the media is. (Do you really believe those Blu-Ray disks will last 30 years unless you wear silk gloves when handling them and always put them away?)

I have both Blu-Ray in my laptop and a burner in my main entertainment center, but these were features included by the manufacturer as opposed to being purchased independently by me. I do not buy Blu-Ray titles and I consider the storage medium to be a rediculous cash grab. Is the Audio/Video stored on Blu-Ray disks high quality? Absolutely, but that has nothing to do with the storage medium other than capacity.

I do not believe that DVD will be so easily replaced. VHS fell out of grace because it is tape, not just because there was a quality increase. If it was a measure of quality and paying the extra buck, Betamax would have been the standard and DVD would have taken MUCH longer to be adopted.

All the Blu-Ray manufacturers have acknowledged poor sales, but most of them are blaming it on the economy instead of thier rediculously inflated prices.

Regardless of how people wish to view it, copying for personal use is what drives the medium industry. Tape replaced vinyl because people could record thier own selection from thier music collections at home.

We saw 8 tracks then standard cassette. We saw VHS and Beta and before to long we saw CD. CD took a long time to be adopted but once people could burn them in thier computers we saw DVD come out to try and provide a storage medium we couldn't easily copy. This is why we saw the failed attempt to put music to DVD. Now that DVD is an easily accessible medium, the recording industry has come out with another new standard ~ Blu-Ray.

Every time they come out with the new standard they sell the recording medium at smaller capacities than the industry distributes thier product on. I am not condoning piracy, I am pointing out that the industry combats piracy by changing medium types.

Let's not confuse quality of the product with quality of the storage medium. You can put High definition Audio and video onto alot more than just foil and plastic.

Just my 2 cents.
 
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