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Topic: DVD vs BR-DVD -- live together 4 how long?

Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 10-27-2008 08:20 PM

Hey! I was wondering what the hell happened to my CD label stamper!

Damned Nigerian 419 scammers strike again!

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David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

posted 10-27-2008 09:32 PM

I just found out today that you can install Linux on its own partition on the PS3 and turn the console into a general-purpose computer.

I just placed my order with Amazon. PS3. [uhoh]

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 10-27-2008 10:23 PM

Be sure to plug in an ethernet cable, go to System Update and let that mofo update itself so you can enjoy the rich BD-Live features which enhance many discs. There is a drawback to the PS3, however... you won't be able to complain about Blu-ray any more since it is literally the best player out there and plays everything... even DVDs! DVD players weren't backward compatible with VHS. DVD sux.

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David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

posted 10-29-2008 06:14 PM

My PS3 arrived today.

Meanwhile... [uhoh]

Blu-ray is Dead - Heckuva Job, Sony!

Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product.

With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it.

16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose?

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
Delusional Sony exec Rick Clancy needs to put the crack pipe down and really look at the market dynamics.

In a nutshell: consumers drive the market and they don’t care about Blu-ray’s theoretical advantages. Especially during a world-wide recession.

Remember Betamax? SACD? Minidisk? Laser Disk? DVD-Audio? There are more losers than winners in consumer storage formats.

It’s all about volume. 8 months after Toshiba threw in the towel, Blu-ray still doesn’t have it.

The Blu-ray Disc Association doesn’t get it
$150 Blu-ray disc players are a good start, but it won’t take Blu-ray over the finish line. The BDA is stuck in the past with a flawed five-year-old strategy.

The original game plan
Two things killed the original strategy. First the fight with HD DVD stalled the industry for two years. Initial enthusiasm for high definition video on disk was squandered.

Second, the advent of low cost up-sampling DVD players dramatically cut the video quality advantage of Blu-ray DVDs. Suddenly, for $100, your average consumer can put good video on their HDTV using standard DVDs. When Blu-ray got started no one dreamed this would happen.

Piggies at the trough
The Blu-ray Disc Association hoped for a massive cash bonanza as millions of consumers discovered that standard DVDs looked awful on HDTV. To cash in they loaded Blu-ray licenses with costly fees. Blu-ray doesn’t just suck for consumers: small producers can’t afford it either.

According to Digital Content Producer Blu-ray doesn’t cut it for business:

Recordable discs don’t play reliably across the range of Blu-ray players - so you can’t do low-volume runs yourself.
Service bureau reproduction runs $20 per single layer disc in quantities of 300 or less.
Hollywood style printed/replicated Blu-ray discs are considerably cheaper once you reach the thousand unit quantity: just $3.50 per disc.
High-quality authoring programs like Sony Blu-print or Sonic Solutions Scenarist cost $40,000.
The Advanced Access Content System - the already hacked DRM - has a one-time fee of $3000 plus a per project cost of almost $1600 plus $.04 per disk. And who defines “project?”
Then the Blu-ray disc Association charges another $3000 annually to use their very exclusive - on 4% of all video disks! - logo.
That’s why you don’t see quirky indie flicks on Blu-ray. Small producers can’t afford it - even though they shoot in HDV and HD.

The Storage Bits take
Don’t expect Steve Jobs to budge from his “bag of hurt” understatement. Or Final Cut Studio support for Blu-ray. I suspect that Jobs is using his Hollywood clout from his board seat on Disney and his control of iTunes to try to talk sense to the BDA.

But the BDA won’t budge. They, like so much of Hollywood, are stuck in the past.

A forward looking strategy would include:

Recognition that consumers don’t need Blu-ray. It is a nice-to-have and must be priced accordingly.
Accept the money spent on Blu-ray is gone and will never earn back the investment. Then you can begin thinking clearly about how to maximize Blu-ray penetration.
The average consumer will probably pay $50 more for a Blu-ray player that is competitive with the average up-sampling DVD player. Most of the current Blu-ray players are junk: slow, feature-poor and way over-priced.
Disk price margins can’t be higher than DVDs and probably should be less. The question the studios need to ask is: “do we want to be selling disks in 5 years?” No? Then keep it up. Turn distribution over to your very good friends at Comcast, Apple and Time Warner. You’ll be like Procter & Gamble paying Safeway to stock your products.
Fire all the market research firms telling you how great it is going to be. They are playing you. Your #1 goal: market share. High volume is your only chance to earn your way out of this mess and keep some control of your distribution.
Time is short. Timid incrementalism will kill you.

Like Agent Smith delivering the bad news to a complacent cop: “No, Lieutenant, your men are already dead.”

Comments welcome, of course.

Robin Harris has been selling and marketing data storage for over 20 years in companies large and small. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 10-29-2008 06:41 PM

That article is a pot-stirring crock of shit. The guy who wrote that piece of very obvious flame-bait likely did so to attract a flurry of visitors -mainly to pump up those page visit stats so ZD Net could go laughing all the way to the bank with the extra ad money.

Blu-ray is doing just fine and will be doing even better towards the end of the year as a steady supply of hit movies from this past summer arrive on Blu-ray. Iron Man moved over 500,000 copies in its first week and accounted for 20% of all discs sales, despite the relatively small install base of BD players in ratio with DVD players in service. Online retailers said as much as 50% of their Iron Man disc sales were going to Blu-ray. The Dark Knight is poised to smash those records.

The fact remains that Blu-ray is growing faster in market acceptance than DVD did at the same point in its life. Same goes for the price drops.

One of the main cornerstones these "journalists" keep using is the whole iPods/movie downloads analogy. If watching via the Internet was truly going to take over, why aren't we seeing the DVD format reeling from this already? Why aren't we seeing TV audiences en masse abandoning their TV sets for a computer screen? Right now I can watch episodes of quite a few network and cable TV series FOR FREE on my computer anytime I want. It's "Internet downloading," so why isn't it taking over?

The reason why is the general isn't going to abandon traditional ways of listening to music or watching movies just because they have a computer or a portable device like an iPod or Sony PSP.

Everyone I know who owns an iPod also still listens to music on the big stereo systems in their living rooms. They still use the CD players in their cars. The iPod just adds another way how they can enjoy their music.

I have a decent number of music video and concert DVDs in my collection. I can see the same videos on YouTube or some other portal anytime for free. According to those "journalists" I should be shit-canning those discs. But I'm not. The damned discs are a lot better, even if the alternative is free.

quote: Flame Bait Article
Don’t expect Steve Jobs to budge from his “bag of hurt” understatement. Or Final Cut Studio support for Blu-ray.

Steve Jobs is certainly putting a smile on the face of executives at Adobe Systems. The company's new Production Studio CS4 suite is the 2nd version featuring BD authoring capability.

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Michael Barry
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 584
From: Sydney, NSW, Australia
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 10-29-2008 09:23 PM

I don't understand the mentality of people who declare Blu Ray a 'failure' in light of the fact that 8 months has elapsed since the demise of HDDVD and Blu Ray STILL hasn't taken over the entire planet.

Blu Ray hasn't yet taken over the world therefore it must be a complete flop. Wow.

Hasn't anyone heard of patience? Is everything now about instant gratification?

As for Apple, I'm confident that as Blu Ray takes hold (and it is taking hold, looking at statistical trends) they will include Blu Ray burners in their machines and include full software support, too. [Smile]

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David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

posted 10-29-2008 09:36 PM

What about Microsoft? Why can't they just say Oh hell, we're adding Blu-ray to the xbox-360? [Confused]

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 10-29-2008 09:50 PM

The problem with Apple's apparent strategy of waiting until Blu-ray becomes a fully mainstream item before supporting it is they'll have a lot of ground to make up with rivals.

Apple didn't wait until 50 some-odd million DVD players were sold before doing much to pioneer the enthusiast DVD authoring market with Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and iMovie. Apple did much to define the DVD authoring market for both casual users and professionals with those tools. With placing so much emphasis on the iPods, iTunes and iPhones business, the company's executives seem willing to wait for others to take a big lead on Blu-ray.

It's more than a little odd none of the enterprise level Blu-ray authoring systems run on OSX. They're all Windows based. Obviously, Sony's Blu-print and Blu-code systems would be PC-based. I expected Sonic Scenarist to feature both Mac and PC versions, but was surprised to find none for OSX. But that's a very specific, high priced niche industry.

Blu-ray movie playback on a computer is a more basic thing. Lots of Windows PCs can do that now. Although you can now buy BD burners for Mac towers and notebooks, there doesn't seem to be any BD movie playing applications for Macs.

IMHO, that's going to grow into a serious marketing issue if Apple sticks to its guns on refusing to incorporate Blu-ray into Mac product lines.

quote: David Stambaugh
What about Microsoft? Why can't they just say Oh hell, we're adding Blu-ray to the xbox-360?

I think it's about them saving face and not appearing to give up any ground to Playstation 3. There's always some rumor buzzing on how Microsoft is going to release an add-on Blu-ray drive or something. I doubt if that will ever happen, especially if standalone BD player prices drop significantly lower over the next few months. If that happens even the PS3 will seem like a really expensive choice for Blu-ray playback (even though the PS3 has more uses).

Microsoft recently updated Windows Vista and WinXP to include OS-level support for Blu-ray disc drives (even though companies like Dell, Sony, Acer and others already worked around that issue).

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 10-29-2008 11:04 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
Steve Jobs is certainly putting a smile on the face of executives at Adobe Systems. The company's new Production Studio CS4 suite is the 2nd version featuring BD authoring capability.

Adobe's Encore is awful, absolutely horrible. It is a complete joke, even for normal DVD. It is sad that it is one of the few BD authoring options.

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Michael Barry
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 584
From: Sydney, NSW, Australia
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 10-30-2008 04:32 AM

Has Steve Jobs ever elaborated about his 'bag of hurt' when it comes to Blu Ray? Is there a valid technical reason for his unhappiness?

I'm sure that it's not going to be a priority for Apple while he feels this way...but why does he feel this way? Anyone know?

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 10-30-2008 07:15 AM

It's called "Apple TV" and severely compressed 720p HD movies downloaded into it. Steve Jobs thinks everyone is just going to get an Apple TV device and not do anything with Blu-ray...or at least he's betting a lot on it.

quote: Joe Redifer
Adobe's Encore is awful, absolutely horrible. It is a complete joke, even for normal DVD. It is sad that it is one of the few BD authoring options.

Encore and Toast is about it for OSX. There is a wider variety of choices on the PC platform, which seems kind of strange. It doesn't fit the usual stereotype.

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Joe Tommassello
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 547
From: Coatesville, PA, USA
Registered: Jan 2008

posted 10-30-2008 09:58 AM

quote: Bobby Henderson
Iron Man moved over 500,000 copies in its first week and accounted for 20% of all discs sales, despite the relatively small install base of BD players in ratio with DVD players in service.

20% is an impressive number but compared with the 4% overall statistic it proves that except for a few selected titles people aren't buying BR movies to play on their PS3. Hollywood makes money on catalog...movies that have already been paid for and don't need a lot of promotion. Movies they have sold again and again every time a better delivery method becomes available. Movies for which they don't have to pay royalties. These are also titles with which they can make a better margin with each sale vs. widespread discounting to mass merchandise stores. Movies for which they don't have to offer huge return allowances.

Movie collectors are going to make or break BR and so far the numbers aren't impressive.

quote: Bobby Henderson
The fact remains that Blu-ray is growing faster in market acceptance than DVD did at the same point in its life.

DVD wasn't backwards compatible with VHS and collectors (again, the true consumer base we are talking about) had 20 years of catalog titles in VHS. They were indeed reluctant to adopt a new format until it was proven because it threatened to make their previous - and in many cases substantial - investment obsolete. Not so with Blu-ray. With proper marketing it should have taken off by now. HD-DVD had multiple times the installed base of set top players. The short-sighted studios (Warner in particular) opted to compare sales of the Spiderman, POTC, Harry Potter and comic book-based movies (kid's movies in effect) as their deciding factor. They would have been smarter to count the number of people who bought "Rio Bravo" and "That's Entertainment" in each format as that is the demographic with more disposable income.

Bobby - I agree with you on this...no one who is interested in Hi-Def will settle for lossy compressed downloads or any inferior quality. Nor will they pay out money for downloads that they can't own. On the other hand I feel that Sony and Fox and individuals like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg could have launched Blu-Ray through the stratosphere by pricing the hardware reasonably (which is only starting to happen) and releasing "irresistable" titles. It's too late now...they should have done it a year ago or at least early this year after the demise of HD-DVD.

The article draws a correct conclusion...Blu-ray will be a high-end item and the software will remain double the price of standard DVD. It is the Laserdisc market all over again.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 10-30-2008 11:51 AM

quote: Joe Tommassello
20% is an impressive number but compared with the 4% overall statistic it proves that except for a few selected titles people aren't buying BR movies to play on their PS3.

That 4% number of BD to DVD sales isn't accurate anymore. Starting with No Country for Old Men, BD unit sales in ratio to DVD have been closer to 10%. Iron Man opened a new plateau. The neg-head BD haters out there cherry pick statistics of movies like Baby Mama and compare its BD numbers to DVD. Very nice way to spin the argument.

The claim that people who own Playstation 3 consoles don't watch Blu-ray movies on them is a silly, tired myth.

Look back at the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray. The Playstation 3 is the very thing that won the way for Blu-ray on the hardware front. Standalone BD players were hardly selling at all during the format's first couple of years. Yet Blu-ray disc sales numbers were consistently running 200% to 300% better than disc sales of HD-DVD. Much of that business is all thanks to those Playstation 3 owners who don't watch movies on their PS3 devices.

This myth about the PS3 is often repeated by disgruntled "red ants" or anyone else rooting for the failure of Blu-ray. Certain people, particularly "journalist" bloggers at ZD Net, have nothing to gain from Blu-ray being successful. They're hoping online movie downloading takes off in popularity because it could improve computer hardware sales and possibly improve business for ZDNet. They also like posting the occasional "Blu-ray is going to die" article to generate flame fests. It results in lots of page visits and ZD Net makes money from that.

quote: Joe Tommassello
On the other hand I feel that Sony and Fox and individuals like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg could have launched Blu-Ray through the stratosphere by pricing the hardware reasonably (which is only starting to happen) and releasing "irresistable" titles. It's too late now...they should have done it a year ago or at least early this year after the demise of HD-DVD.

There has never been any new video format introduced with very low pricing. Suddenly Blu-ray has to be introduced with $99 players and $10 movies to be successful? Give me a break! The loss leader, no profit margin pricing from Wal-Mart's bargain bin is no barometer to use.

VHS HiFi players cost $700 and up in late 1980s dollar value when they were first introduced. I remember the first Dolby Surround capable stereo systems commanding outrageously ridiculous prices. The first DVD players were very expensive (and very crappy).

If any new video format had to be introduced with hardly any profit margin at all, there would be no justification in developing the format in the first place. Electronics companies are not charities handing out welfare to everyone's living room. Blu-ray player prices are dropping and doing so at a faster rate than DVD ever did. Good quality players running well under $300 is very reasonable at this point.

The folks screaming for $49 BD players can feel free to wait another couple years or so. Those of us with BD players already will be enjoying our 1080p/24 HD movies in the meantime.

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David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

posted 10-30-2008 12:23 PM

The XBox 360 (and I believe, the PS3) were introduced to the market with pricing that resulted in NEGATIVE gross margins on each unit sold. You're saying no manufacturer would ever do that because it's illogical, but they did it. At one point MS was losing $100 on each 360 sale. The strategy was to sell the game console at a loss and hope to make it up on accessories & game titles. I believe MS eventually started turning a profit on the 360 but it took a while.

Is there not a single point in that ZDNet article that you can even sort-of agree with? [Razz]

Anyway I set up my PS3 last night, got it updated, all looks good. [Smile]

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 10-30-2008 12:47 PM

I don't think the Xbox 360 will be turning a profit any time soon due to the fact the Microsoft had to spend billions to attempt to fix the shoddy hardware. An 80%+ failure rate will do that to you.

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