akuma587 said:
As long as Blu-Ray gets support from the studios and I get to watch the movies I want (and eventually pirate them when the cost isn't prohibitive, you didn't think I cared about Blu-Ray THAT much did you...), then I am happy. It doesn't really matter if it becomes as big as DVD was as long as it still passes DVD.
I have bought probably over 50 Blu-Ray movies, so I don't think I would feel that bad about pirating in the future.
@Aiemond: Who adopts any kind of new technology first? And Iron Man on Blu-Ray had 500,000 sales in the first week, which I think is safe to say is no longer in the niche category. Hell, a lot of big 360 and PS3 exclusives don't even sell that much in their first week.
But you are right that early adopters/technophiles are still a large part of the market. This is made pretty clear by the fact that the Iron Man Blu-Ray numbers get so much higher when you look at online sales only.
But sales are sales, and the studios can't really complain when they get sales numbers like this, especially because they have to sell around 1.5 to 2 times the number of DVD's to make the same profit as they would on a given number of Blu-Rays. Obviously the more Blu-Rays that are sold the better the margin becomes as the higher replication costs are offset.
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What I am saying is that they are the target market for this release and thus other realeases will not be as high. Lets look at demographics: DVD is good for all types of movies. This is disney, chick flicks, horror, drama, action, comic book, etc. Low end customers will buy DVD, many high end will as well. The whole broad spectrum. But, with Blu-Ray only the technophiles are a sustainable market atm. Thus, only movies they like will have acceptable sales. Remember, LOTS of money was put into this, so it will take a significant amount of sales to recoup not only the research losses, but the amount of money it took to "win" the format war.
Now, to recoup this money the technophiles cannot be the only market. Blu-Ray must expand. Here are the factors that are against it:
1) Blu-ray does not have the quality/feature upgrade of vhs vs dvd. Blu-ray is sharper and can hold more data. Picture and audio quality are better. But, in VHS vs DVD it was a much larger change in video and audio quality. Also, you had the beginning of the movie menu: Extras, scene selction etc. You did not have to rewind. You did not have to mess with annoying tapes that sometimes blew up in your VHS (not literally, but had the tape spool out). So, the convience of DVD over VHS is significantly higher than of Blu-Ray vs DVD. Not only that the quality between upstremed DVD and Blu-Ray is less than even DVD vs Blu-Ray.
2) $$$. Blu-Ray costs much more money. This is true of the movies and of the players. You can get a dirt cheap Upconverting player for what, 20-50 dollars? Compare that with Blu-Ray who I believe has the least expensive player at what, $250? $300? And it is the Ps3 I am sure. Having a game system as the cheapest player is not the best way to drive mainstream sales, especially when the adoption of Ps3 is signifiantly lower than the adoption of the Ps2. People are not going to buy it at these prices when they have perfectly good DVD libraries.
3) Economy. Economy is in the crapper, we have talked about this in other threads and I know we are in agreement over this issue. We agree it is going to be awhile till recovery. Well, what is the first area that gets cut in bad times? Luxury items. Blu-Ray falls into this catagory. The core audience, technophiles will still buy. But, mainstream adoption will be negatively impacted in a SIGNIFICANT manner based on this. People are scared about their 401k, their job, their mortgage. Times like these are not when they use credit to pay for expensive, high ticket items. This will not only affect Blu-Ray though, it will affect HDTV adoption as well. Which is a pre-req of Blu-Ray.
So overall, the picture is grim for the mass market appeal of Blu-ray atm, and it will not get better in the near future. People complain that digital downloads are at least 2-4 years away, but do you think the economy will fix in that time? We have a big recession coming on, and this may be the true killer of Blu-Ray.
This is the pattern I expect for the next few years. I expect that Titles like the Dark Knight, Iron man, Hulk, X-Men etc to have higher sales on Blu-Ray than any other type of movie realeased on Blu-Ray. Significantly higher. Until the gap in movies like these closes with other genera of popular movies Blu-ray cannot succede.
