| selnor said: Although you say many, I'd say for 80% of people out there DVD is still good enough. And because people aren't adopting it like they did DVD, the price just isn't coming down. By the way your prices are different. New DVD films here come out between £9.99 - £12.99 normally. Blu Ray can be anywhere between £17.99 - £29.99 for a normal film. But the worst part is Hard Rain new on DVD is like £2.99. On Blu Ray it's £21.99. That's a massive issue. I accept there is people who like the Blu Ray in their hand and love the HD thing. But by the time Live has implemented this, many people wont bother with Blu Ray and the price will not get a chance to hardly drop due to non adoption. Even now the Blu Ray section in HMV is about 10% of the size of DVD section. It's literally one row at my local. And Plymouth is now classed as major city with over 300,000 living here. |
Amazon.uk shows it different, with new movies coming out at 17.99-19.99 on DVD and 24.99-27.99 on BD before discounts. After discounts it's something around 11-12 for DVD and 16-17 for BD (I checked ten or so newish movies).
As I said what's really absent at the moment is the budget tier. Btw, "Hard Rain" came out in DVD in 2001. It's hardly a good example. Try anything that hasn't been out forever and the price gap will be much smaller.
And again, you speak of the future: "by the time Live has implemented this" and obviously "by the time everybody interested in movies has a good enough internet connection". But BluRay is not something that will happen in the future. It's here and has been for years and is slowly going to be the natural evolutionary upgrade of DVDs. It's not like people will have to "bother" with it: in a few years you won't be able to actually buy a mid-range DVD player in major stores, it will be relegated to dirt-cheap tier.
Today and for the last eight months BluRay provided an excellent way for me and my friends to watch our favourite movies in HD, with multiple audiotracks and subtitles and commentaries and extras, every time we wanted. For a price difference from the DVD that was less than the chips and beers we were having while watching them.
Today, digital distribution is not nearly there for cases like mine, and for a reason or another it will take years to get there for the majority of the world.
Meanwhile, what should we do?
