ssj12 said:
well considering LDs never sold 7 - 9 million dollars worth of media a week or took 8% of the DVD market I believe it already passed any chance of that position.
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Not quite. quite. At that time the number of sold videos was much smaller. What I mean is more in the way: A High Quality medium for the fan market. In fact this situation has for the indeustry bigger advantages, than acomplete replacement of the DVD. You want more money from the fgan market. These guys are ready to pay more money for this film. If you have replaced the DVD the mass market release is more or less the same quality at a smaller price.
In the mass market a smaller price means more movies are sold and you get a higher revenue, but you want to get more money from the fans of the film. If you release the mass market version on DVD and the special version on blueray you have in fact maximised your profit! The production of a blue ray is not cheaper than the dvd especially if you consider the necessary licenses.
This is one reason for my doubts. Another: How many titles of your DVD collection will you replace with the BluRay Version? In my case the answer would probably be in the maount of 10%. Another problematic observaation I have made: there are a lot of films where the difference doesn't really matter to me. There are films where I bought the BluRay and I was impressed by the film, then my sister bought the DVD and after I made a comparison: Yes I can see the differences, but in fact I don't care about them in any way. It is the movie that I like, not the picture itself. I think in the long run there will be a lot of people that simply won't care about the difference, if they can get the film cheaper.
And third: I now spend significantly less money for movies than in the time, when there was only the DVD. Now I alweys struggle "Well, there might be a BluRay coming.", but when the "Blu Ray is available: "I am not ready to spend so much money for this film...".
In a way, I don't even know WHO is really interested in a total domination by the BluRay, if you ignore the patent owners for the audio and video standards used on the BluRay?
For the movie companies a BluRay is more expensive to produce than a DVD. You have to guarantee that you maintain a higher quality in your workflow, there are significantly less companies that can produce BluRay and even if you would ignore these costs (for a BluRay dominated scenario) you have to pay money for every encryption and compression technology that you you use and better technologies normally request higher fees! So if you would sell the BluRay for the same price as a DVD (otherwise there will always be a lot of people who buy the cheaper version!) you would earn less money! Not really attractive.
And as a normal consumer: "How much money would I spend for the better quality?". In this situation I don't care how much money the producers have to spend. I would be ready to buy the movie for lets say 8 Euro, for a better picture I might spend 2 Euro more, but when the film is released the DVD will at one point in time drop below that mark, while the production of the BluRay might cost 3 Euro more and still miss my mark.
And for people who don't care for the difference ort who don't really see the difference with their equipment, they are simply not ready to pay more money! Scratch the DVD and less people will buy this movie!
The reason why the DVD really crashed the VHS in the mass market: They are much cheaper to produce, so at one point in time they will fall under the VHS price and still earn money.
In fact even now there are people who still buy VHS tapes, although there is really no sensible reason behind it. The DVDs arte cheaper, offer a better quality and more features.
And now you declare that the BluRay will dominate the DVD? With video on demand there is in fact a significant risk that the market itself will get smaller. While I don't think that it will really crush this market it will certainly limit the size of the market. There will be people who prefer this medium. But why do you expect that the BluRay will surpass the DVD? At least in my opinion there are much more people in the mass market, who don't care for the picture quality so much and who don't have an equipment where they can hear the difference. Sure, when they have a new player they will be tempted to buy the new medium, but if they get pass the early rush they look more on the price and why should anyone offer a BluRay for less money than the DVD if their production is more expensive and they offer a better quality?
As far as I know the movie industy is an industry and this means: They want to have profits..
In a way all these sale numbers are founded on these reasons, but the interaction is so complicated people tend to think on the sales graphs, but these graphs are in fact not produced by themselves but by the compülex functions behind the scenes and you should always take a stop and ask if this expected graph has really a reason behind it.
In a way you have the same problem in the games industry. Ports between the Xbox 360 and the PS-3 are rather cheap while the PS-3 is the potentially more powerful machine but it is much more difficult to release these powers and as a software developper I have severe doubts that these problems will get easier (the same problem crushed companies in the 70s) instead the costs and therefore the risks will rise exponentially. This would mean that the PS-3 won't be able to really surpass the Xbox 360. It doesn't matter for the game developers if they sell 100.000 games more on the Xbox 360 and the PS-3. With such numbers they simply have the same priority in the development process but it is easier to change things on the Xbox 360 so that the game developers have a new feature to play around with. This would mean that the Xbox 360 will in fact be the inofficial lead plattform and have more time to find bugs and solve problems. Statisically this would mean that more Xbox 360 versions might have an edge against the PS-3 version. Due to fundamental differences in their design the Xbox 360 should be significantly cheaper to produce than the PS-3. If the games are more or less the same the Xbox 360 will probably get an advantage while the PS-3 will loose its position as the best BluRay Player (there is nothing they can do about it). So I think that it is unlikely that the PS-3 will be in any position to win against the Xbox 360. Its Cell processor simply isn't best equipment to develop real time application simply because its SPUs are developped for stream processing, while games normally have to act as Random Access machines due to interactions with the player.
In fact Sony paid for the development of an architecture which might earn IBM and Toshiba a lot of money but what they got wasn't even second grade quality.
Sure, you can doubt any of my words, but I think that I have quite good reasons for my theories. I only own a PS-3 (a gift from my boss) because I don't really find time for games, but I use it as a BluRay player, so I should have a bigger emotional attachement for the new standards, but in fact I have severe doubts that they are really in a position to win. In fact in the gemes industry I don't think that the Xbox 360 and the PS-3 are even in a position to really compete with the Wii. Its development costs are much smaller and in my opinion the real Hardcore gamers are more a niche market, as the real film fans compared to the mass market. And how will they grap the mass market? The Xbox 360 probably with its price. And the PS-3? I expect every very succesfull game will be ported to the other plattforms. We are no longer in the position of the PS-2 where the PS-2 had very advanced libraries, when the Xbox and the game cube had to start from scratch.
The brand names don't really matter in my opinion. In fact I have alreadfy seen sales people that lead customers to the Wii, when they asked for a Playstation. Not because they wanted to sell them somethink they don't want to buy, but simply due to the fact that many people still remember the name playstation even if they want to buy a Wii...
But as you see I don't really believe in number games. I know that our brains are fascinated by the idea to find patterns, because this functionality is the main reason for their existence.But what do sales graphs really say? In my opinion noithing. It is quite difficult to predict the true behaviour of people but you can always check for plausibilities and probabilities, while a sales statistic on itself doesn't say anything.
