| Vetteman94 said:
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Again this comparison can't work. In fact the pure production costs of DVD-5s were no problem. It were the mastering costs that made DVDs expensive, as long as the production numbers were small. When they were able to produce higher numbers their production costs dropped sharply below the normal VHS tapes. And this was clearly visible in german department stores.
Although there were other additional costs involved. Most DVD have several Audio and Subtitle tracks. At that time the mastering process was also done mostly by hand, they had to check everything. It took some time till they developped trutworthy automatic workflows. But these costs also had a major advantage, especially in Europe. One DVD for most of western Europe. With VHS tapes totally impossible.
The Blu-ray never had to start so primitive. In fact in the mastering business they are more or less on the same level, but you have to check the basic materials more, to really show a better quaolity. But Blu-ray has in fact an other major problem:
Much higher expectations.
No one knew what to expect from the DVD. It was at first targetted to replace the Laserdisc. But the situation of the Laserdisc in Europe and especially Germany was: "What are you talking about? What is an LD?" and even the german VHS market was pretty small. It was prertty uncommon to really buy a movie. It was very normal to wait till one of the many free TV channels showed the movie and recorded it. With the DVD there was a major shift, that no one really expected.
The Blu-ray was more or less designed to replace the DVD. Originally to move the public to a copy protected format and this objective was later shifted to allow bigger margins. The problem: everyone wanted to get a share of these higher margins. This is even a problem inside of a company . Nowadays departments take care that they charge each other competitive prices. Everything that contains HD in it simply contains a bonus. For VHS it was not really possible to compare the prices. Their foundation was to different. But they know what they charge for DVD and they know that they want to charge more for HD. On the other hand the DVD now totally redefined the prices that people describe as fair. If you look at todays prices. Two years ago it was difficult to get DVD for the prices that they ask for the Blu-ray but they have to compete with much lower prices.
It simply doesn't work so easy to replace a medium. It happens or it doesn't happen. You know it afterwards. If I remeber back to the DVD, I simply didn't care. But after I bought my first DVD I never bought a tape again. Now I would normally tend to prefer to buy Blu-rays but there are so many attractive offers for DVDs, while there are some titles that I would buy on DVD but the prices simply don't match.
