kars said:
You are wrong about the influence of the BDA. They can try to suggest an action (which in reality always have to come from some of its members...) but they are in no position to do anything against members that act against their advice. Although they are members of the same association they are direct competitors and do what they think is best for their own company. You are right that 6they only have limited control about their market prices. They have direct control about the prices that the big distributors have to pay to them. But if you try to compare it with VHS: It will not work. The end of the VHS Tapes had a combination of several elements: 1. The reproduction costs were quite high and set a lower boundary of the prices hat you always have to earn per tape. 2. In the place of one VHS tape you could put 2 DVDs aqnd after some adjustments theyx were able to put even more DVDs in the space that they previously used for VHS. At the same time tapes wer heavier and more expensive to ship. Both factors were HUGE advantages to retailers. So they were interested to push DVDs a bit more and lowered their ßprices in the hope of a higther turn around rate. DVDs that stay in the store don't earn money. Blu-rays don't have these advantages compared to DVDs |
Again, you underestimate them, also you dont tend to read what I said. I never said that they can do anything against the others, the others are just left behind because they fail to adapt. But once one member starts to do something that is beneficial, the others will follow. Digital copies of movies are a great example of this.
I am going to compare it with VHS vs DVD, because its basically the same thing. Plus comparing the end of the VHS vs DVD format war to the beginning of the Blu-ray vs DVD format war is a little ridiculous since there is no correlation.
The points you mentioned are valid, sort of.
The part about the sizes is true, it made sense from a logistics standpoint because you could get more product on the shelves. But the same can be said for Blu-ray as well. Blu-ray cases , while the same width, are shorter and much thinner. Which means more shelves and more product on those shelves.
As for the costs of shipping, that is something that is passed onto the customer because it is figured into the cost of the product on the retailers side. Its not like the cheaper shipping was passed onto the consumer for DVDs, especially not early on
And here is why it is a great comparison. DVDs when launched were around $40-50 a peice, they didnt come down to an "affordable" stage until about year 4, which was the $20-25 range. Which is basically identical to Blu-ray. Plus in order to really make a dent into VHS, they had to start making exclusives to DVD.
