Steve Jobs on Blu-ray, ouch!

[Ail]

HappySqurriel said:

Ail said:

Kasz216 said:

heruamon said:
There seem to be very little enthusiasm from people other than Sony and disney about brd...if different, please provide data.

Movie companys in general are enthusiastic.

Why wouldn't they be.  It means they get to sell extra copies of movies they've already sold.

 

 

Not only that but this last year or so the profit they make per DVD copy sold has slowly diminished as DVD prices slowly went down and I doubt they like that fact...( DVD market total revenue isn't growing anymore).

Years ago, when the RIAA was suing Napster, I remember reading a pretty indepth analysis of record company profits which argued that it wasn't piracy that was cutting into music profits.

The argument was (essentially) that every time the music industry created a new format people replaced their existing copy of an album for the same version of the album in the new format. As the format of choice switched from CD to MP3 people had no need to buy a new album because they could simply convert a CD to a collection of MP3s. This resulted in fewer old album sales, which were generally very high margin (because the production and marketing costs were far smaller), and noticeably smaller profits and hurt labels' bottom lines ... The analysis was fairly effective in demonstrating that new music sales had not been impacted, and the decline in sales was focused around older albums.

With that in mind, I think that companies (in particular Disney) require the high margin sales of older movies that are released to a new format to maintain their profit margins and will do anything within their power to force people to upgrade.

 

I don't think that's the only issue.

One of the problem the movie industry is facing is that about 1 years ago retailers ( with the agreement of the movie industry I guess) started slashing heavilly DVD prices in expectation of a new format taking over.

Now that this has been done and they can't go back on DVD pricing, they really need that new format to succeed to sustain their revenue...( cheapest I ever saw a DVD at Best Buy was 8$ till one year ago, now every week they have a list of 50 DVDs or so they sell for 5$ and those aren't trash serie B movies, there's actually quite a few decent movie in the pile every week).

 Blu-Ray in itself isn't going to raise the revenue of movie companies the same way as DVD did though, even when it succeeds people won't buy more Blu-Ray than they did DVD in the past ( whereas DVD exploded their business as suddenly a huge amount of people started buying movies whereas in the past with VHS people mainly rented them to due to poor longevity of the VHS medium).

The only gains movie companies stand to make is they won't need to put out 2-3 DVDs special collector editions but can fit everything in 1 Blu-Ray but the gains there are negligible...

The other advantage I see is that if Blu-Ray takes off, movies companies probably expect it will slow down digital pirating of movies as the larger size of the medium will make it more of a pain to pirate on huge scale ( upload limit for most ISP will prevent the casual user to offer his collection on the net the way people did with MP3).