Rumor. Disney to drop BR.

[TheBigFatJ]

Aj_habfan said:

TheBigFatJ said:

carlos710 said:
why would they drop their BR support now that BR looks like the clear winner?

DVD outsold BR nearly 200:1 last year. DVD is the format winner.

The other thing to consider is that BD players also play DVDs. So you have 100% of your market if you sell DVDs only and it costs you nothing extra. Rather than selling BDs to about one percent of your market and DVDs to 99%, you sell DVDs to all of those people (since few people will buy a movie just because is BD).

 

Yea, and DVD beat VCR right when it entered the market. BD will have a harder time beating DVD then that, but what you just said makes no sense.

You're saying it doesn't make financial sense that you can just sell DVDs instead of  BDs, especially since BDs are only a tiny fraction of the market?  

DVD had a variety of tangible advantages over VHS for both home users and movie studios that BD simply doesn't have over DVD. It had surround sound for the first time, it didn't lose image quality upon repeated viewings, it supported widescreen in many iterations, color and resolution was noticably better for 100% of the TVs in living rooms. DVDs were also much, much cheaper to produce. It was also clear that DVD was the technology going forward, whereas BD has online delivery as a huge competitor.

DVD was also not VHS backward compatible.  So if a person had a DVD player, you could not also assume they had a VHS VCR.   

At this point, Sony has taken a gamble with BD and they've basically gone all in. And it looks like there is a chance the gamble will pay off but there is also a very real chance that they'll never recover the money they put into BD.