Not just 3D, is Blu-ray media dying? (1 Viewer)

[Nick*Z]

Nowhere in any of these articles do the studios ever take responsibility for badly bungling Blu-ray - the ONLY true hi-def format presently available. Streaming in HD still cannot compete with a 1080p properly mastered in 4K digital transfer on disc. While it is nevertheless certain, streaming is a competitor, as an 'all or nothing at all' option it would alienate an entire segment of the aging population who - like myself - want something tangible to hold in our hot little hands; and even furthermore the point, for those who do not own a computer, or do but only know how to use it to send emails and surf for recipes, the prospect of convincing these people to digitally download ANYTHING is pretty abysmal.


But back to my main point about studios bungling the hi-def market beyond all respectability and belief. Consider the format war that kicked off DVD vs. Divex and then the Blu vs HD conundrum. Confusing the hell out of consumers and splitting the market right down the middle is NEVER a good way to launch a format. But even after the battle was ostensibly won - the war, decidedly was not. Why? Simple. When DVD entered the marketplace, virtually overnight the media conglomerates and studio giants said bye-bye to both VHS and LaserDisc. They didn't even stop to catch their breath in this decision. They simply cut the purse strings to these competing options; enforced obsolescence that made the consumer upgrade - like it or not. Not everyone did - true. I still know people who watch movies on a VCR. I personally own a few choice titles on LD I'll never part with - including the original untouched Star Wars classic trilogy - precisely because seeing it on ANY new format seems slim to nil!


However, Blu-ray debuted at the worst possible time - right before the 2008 crash. You might say, okay - but they had two years to get a toe-hold. Agreed. They did. Why didn't they? First off - price. Blu was expensive at the start. I remember A Passage to India retailing for $45.99 at my local Best Buy. Great movie - but not a very competitive price point. Then, the inevitable occurred. Studios realized - whoops! You can't just slap a movie to disc using an existing master because all the age-related artifacts show up - BADLY!!! Restorations required. Restorations take time - and MONEY - the latter, a commodity studios would rather reap than expend. Add to this, no love for Blu-ray by the studios, who insisted on keeping DVD alive after the Blu-launch; begging the understandable query from consumers: what me worry and why bother with an upgrade?!? Viable questions, indeed.


Then the absolute worst began to happen. Studios began to cut corners. And so came the onslaught of poorly mastered drivel, pumped out to Blu using masters not even worthy of a DVD release. Remember the original release of Spartacus? How about the abysmal looking The Greatest Story Ever Told, the fracas over the 'restored' West Side Story, the even bigger outcry over the first atrocious minting of My Fair Lady; the misfires that went on and on (Universal's Hitchcock box set - with about half the movies looking very bad indeed, the litany of Fox catalog suffering from teal/blue/beige biased bad color timing) with only intermittent stellar work being committed to a format that promised us "Perfect Picture and Theater Quality Sound". No studio escaped such criticisms. But what it did was to make the consumer wary of EVER buying another disc from these studios again. Get burned once for buying a West Side Story collectors set from MGM/Fox for $29.99, how reticent do you think the same consumer would be to buy another MGM/Fox title for the same, or even a lesser price?


And then came the studios collective decision to fragment an already VERY fragmented market - dumping unloved back catalog on third party distributors like Criterion, Twilight Time, and others; usually in lackluster transfers, hoping to hell the general public wouldn't get wise to the ruse. But what effectively happened was the audience for these deeper catalog titles either lost interest in them or merely got lost in the shuffle. I mean, if you want a movie made by 2oth Century-Fox, the conventional logic would have been - at least at one time - to order it from 2oth Century-Fox home video. Now, the consumer has to consider, FoxConnect, The Fox Archive, Twilight Time, Criterion, Fox Home Video proper, in addition to a proliferation of streaming sites - Amazon, Netflix, Hula etc. et al; confusing the hell out of all but the ardent movie buff who is, after all, in a chronically desperate search to get their latest fix, and therefore savvy and up to snuff on all this idiotic fragmentation.


This isn't nuclear science, folks. The mismanagement of Blu-ray has been its biggest hindrance in proliferating the marketplace and becoming the 'norm' and mainstream preferred format. Don't get me wrong. It's still the drug of choice for collectors. But it ought to have become the main staple by now for EVERYONE, if only the industry had shown a little more solidarity. Alas, the market today is so fragmented with far too many sub-standard options to compete that no ONE format - either streaming service or physical option - has the opportunity to dominate the market share. That's sad. Very sad.


But physical media is not about to go away. Someone mentioned vinyl a while back - one of the greatest resurrections of a format that ought to have stayed dead but hasn't and shows all signs of becoming the viable comeback kid of the new generation - purely, or rather, mostly, out of nostalgia. The movie industry's more recent announcements that we're on the cusp of launching Ultra-Blu - with the same ten to twenty catalog titles being peddled yet again while a bottomless wellspring of deep catalog remains even further buried beneath the rubble of time, suggests - even BADLY - that the industry still wants to find a viable physical media option to ride shotgun to digital downloading. Personally, I can't see Ultra-Blu taking off and would have preferred it if the industry had telescoped their efforts to focus on Blu-ray itself; steadily outsourcing DVD as an option and concentrating their efforts on making all of their vintage catalog accessible to consumers.


Once again - consumers haven't left physical media. The industry has done its utmost to confuse the hell out of consumers. Most don't even know what their options are. I can still mention Twilight Time in mixed company and have people think I'm referring to that 'magic hour' between sunset and night, rather than a viable third party distributor for hard to find deep catalog movies that EVERYONE should be housing on their shelves.


Simple remedy to save Blu-ray from oblivion - if, in fact, that is where it is headed.


1. Kill DVD - tomorrow! You don't have to do it all at once, but announce publicly that the old format has had its day and that none of the new films coming to disc will be available except in hi-def. Believe me, nothing convinces a consumer to switch like forced obsolescence. You won't alienate consumers. After all, you didn't when you killed off VHS and LD to introduce DVD.


2. Provide consumers with ONLY quality HD transfers. Yes, it will take more time and money to get them out in the market. But think of all the time and money saved in the long run by not having to do two, four, ten reissues of the same back catalog title, simply to fix the mistakes you've made the first time around. I'll use the CBS/Paramount new release of My Fair Lady as a primary example. Here is a disc that can long withstand CBS/Paramount going back to the drawing board to re-imagine the wheel again. Now, think of how much the company would have saved by holding off and not giving the consumer that crap-tac-u-lar first Blu that looked as though it was fed through a meat grinder.


3. Telescope the streaming market to one or two options. I recently read an article on the "top 10" streaming options. 10 is already too many. Free market enterprise is one thing. But this is lunacy. Finally, scrap the Digital Copy market option that seems to be yet another way of viewing movies when buying Blu-rays. Honestly, how many copies of the same movie do consumers need? Not that many. And again, think of all the money being wasted on having to provide so many options.


Time warp. Rewind - for almost 50 years the only way we had to listen to music was to buy vinyl and spin it at home. 50 years, not including vinyl's more recent comeback. Now we have vinyl, CD, digital streaming, burn-on-demand options, etc. In between came 8-track and then conventional 'tape' technology. Rewind #2. For nearly 30 years VHS ruled the roost. Then came DVD - said to be the panacea for all lovers of movie art. Didn't turn out so well, though, did it?!?

 

[Towergrove]

I think the market for physical media will be less but is it going away? No. CDs are still around (See Adele) as well as LP records for a few examples. Optical disc video media is still around in 2015 and I have been hearing for 10 years that its dead. (lol) Still making billions of dollars each year. Billions that will not be ignored. This on top of digital purchases. But...They must get the digital purchase market in the correct frame for those of us who purchase. I think the Itunes model is the best so far giving the purchaser the choice to download or steam. IF only it wasnt behind the apple garden exclusively. UV does give us that to a degree but I want a fully movable file format like the one being promised from VIdity.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

Most stores kept VHS around for a good number of years after DVD came out. Laserdisc pretty much got the shaft, with some stores dropping it right when they heard that DVD was GOING TO BE coming out soon! I don't know why anyone still buys regular DVDs of new movies, they really do look terrible when compared with Blu-Ray and the price difference on both players and discs isn't even that big anymore. But sales figures still show most titles sell at least 50% or more on DVD as opposed to Blu-Ray, even though you can't buy a standard-def-only TV anymore.

 

[Persianimmortal]

Nowhere in any of these articles do the studios ever take responsibility for badly bungling Blu-ray - the ONLY true hi-def format presently available. ...

I'm sorry, but your lengthy rant misses the point entirely. Consumers are always going to gravitate towards the cheapest, most convenient solution which provides perfectly acceptable quality to their eyes - prior to 2010 this was DVD, and now it's streaming.


A high-end format like Blu-ray is always going to struggle, and dropping DVD would only have killed off a guaranteed, massive (and at the time rapidly growing) cash cow in return for a huge gamble that Blu-ray sales would top DVD sales - which they never were. Even today, 80% of disc sales are DVD, so it's ludicrous to suggest that studios kill it off.


Let's also remember that when BD came out in 2006 - confusing format wars aside - most consumers had only just become used to the DVD format, it having become mainstream by around 2002-03. So within a few short years, consumers were being asked to switch to yet another format requiring expensive new equipment all round. Furthermore, when BD came out, most people didn't have 1080p TVs or big screens, so the quality benefit genuinely was minimal.


Where the studios actually screwed up was in: (a) releasing a new format too soon, despite a total lack of market demand for it; (b) having the format wars; (c ) thinking that consumers would pay more for a barely discernible quality improvement at the time; and (d) later on panicking and slashing BD prices to get more sales, effectively devaluing the entire format.


And they're making the same mistakes all over again with UHD BD, the format nobody but electronics manufacturers and a tiny niche of disc collectors wants.


Bottom line: most people just want to watch movies as cheaply and conveniently as possible. Streaming on demand provides that at an acceptable quality to the average eye, and for only a few dollars a month and minimal hardware investment. Let's stop pretending that if the stars aligned and everything was "done right" by the studios, the average consumer would be falling over themselves to purchase thousands of dollars worth of discs instead. The history of mankind is not filled with many examples of the triumph of quality over low prices and convenience.

 

[Keith Cobby]

I agree that 'most people just want to watch movies as cheaply and conveniently as possible' but we at HTF want to watch them with the best AV possible and if we don't keep on relentlessly putting this point across (as Nick is doing) then we will be accepting the compromises which most people are already doing.

 

[Persianimmortal]

What we want is irrelevant to the mainstream market. We have our own niche, and it's doing surprisingly well, all things considered. But I'd like to think we discuss facts not fantasies on this forum. A lot of what Nick wrote, though well-intentioned, bears little resemblance to the facts of the matter.

 

[Dregoth]

Some of his characterizations may be inaccurate, but on the whole I don't believe he's way off.


As cheap and available DVD's are, their continued existence ISN'T because consumers sit down and do a cost-benefit analysis of whether the high-def version is worthwhile.


It should be clear by now that corporate folk desperately need guidance on when/how to adopt and advertise their assets in the newest available formats. My Fair Lady is the most striking example I know of, though I don't pretend to have broad knowledge about the movie market.

 

[Worth]

I think the mistaken assumption here is the belief that the mass market buys movies at all. Most people don't buy movies, period. Not on blu-ray, not on DVD, VHS or laserdisc. They rent. They may buy a handful of favourites, children's films and maybe the occasional title from the $5 bin, but that's about it.

 

[Dregoth]

I think the mistaken assumption here is the belief that the mass market buys movies at all. Most people don't buy movies, period.

Then I'm not sure what we're discussing. Wal-Mart, Target, my local hardware store, all sell DVD's. I assume, perhaps naively, that market forces prevent those DVD's from simply sitting there. This just seems like spinning the discussion on its head.

 

[Worth]

Then I'm not sure what we're discussing. Wal-Mart, Target, my local hardware store, all sell DVD's. I assume, perhaps naively, that market forces prevent those DVD's from simply sitting there. This just seems like spinning the discussion on its head.

Blu-ray and DVD sales combined amounted to $6.93 billion in 2014. Divide that by the estimated adult population of the U.S. and Canada (around 250 million) and it comes out to around $25 per person for the year. So the average adult bought one or two discs last year.

 

[Dregoth]

Blu-ray and DVD sales combined amounted to $6.93 billion in 2014. Divide that by the estimated adult population of the U.S. and Canada (around 250 million) and it comes out to around $25 per person for the year. So the average adult bought one or two discs last year.

Ok, so the rental numbers I see amount to about $3.3 billion total. That includes Redbox, subscriptions, and brick-and-mortar. Applying the same math, say we get about $12 per person. That's like what, six rentals per year?


So let's assume the companies that offer rentals made more profit than those that did in sales. What does that tell us about digital versus physical, or even blu-ray versus not?


Like I said, interesting but I'm not sure where that's all going. Physical sales and rentals were on the heavy decline that year and continue to be, while digital services continue to prosper.

 

[SFMike]

This isn't nuclear science, folks. The mismanagement of Blu-ray has been its biggest hindrance in proliferating the marketplace and becoming the 'norm' and mainstream preferred format.

And corporate mismanagement is still best personified by their treatment of blu-ray 3D.

 

[Mike Boone]

I think the mistaken assumption here is the belief that the mass market buys movies at all. Most people don't buy movies, period. Not on blu-ray, not on DVD, VHS or laserdisc. They rent. They may buy a handful of favourites, children's films and maybe the occasional title from the $5 bin, but that's about it.

I think you've hit the nail squarely on the head.

 

[Mike Boone]

Blu-ray and DVD sales combined amounted to $6.93 billion in 2014. Divide that by the estimated adult population of the U.S. and Canada (around 250 million) and it comes out to around $25 per person for the year. So the average adult bought one or two discs last year.

Worth, IMO, you were correct in your earlier post when you indicated that you don't think the mass market buys movies at all, except for a few favorites, some kid's films, and an occasional title from the $5 bin. So instead of that 250 million adult population figure for the U.S. and Canada being relevant, it's probably about 10 million of those people who buy any significant amount of movies, so you can probably multiply that $25 figure per person by about 25 to approximate what the average person of those 10 million people spent on movies. That would be about $625 as the average for each of those 10 million folks. And $625 doesn't even represent quite as much as a $13 a week average of spending.


Of course, it looks like my movie spending is way, way, way above average, even if only figuring that 10 million people bought movies, as I've purchased 180 movies on Blu-ray and 52 movies on DVD since October 2014. (most of the DVDs were 1950s and 60s Sci-fi and horror movies, although a half dozen were serious films, some even from the Criterion collection, like the 1948 Hamlet, which isn't available on Blu-ray)

 

[Alf S]

Bought my first Blu/DVD combo in a long the other night when I found Napolean Dynamite for $10. So that almost fills my yearly quota of buying movies on disc.

 

[Robin9]

I think the mistaken assumption here is the belief that the mass market buys movies at all. Most people don't buy movies, period. Not on blu-ray, not on DVD, VHS or laserdisc. They rent. They may buy a handful of favourites, children's films and maybe the occasional title from the $5 bin, but that's about it.

. . . and a very small section takes my old DVDs. Tomorrow I'm handing over to an old - in both senses of the word - friend DVDs I no longer need: Anchors Aweigh; The Best Of Everything; Boomerang; The Cincinnati Kid; Emperor Of The North; Flaming Star, My Fair Lady; Only Angels Have Wings; The Razor's Edge; Sabrina; Spartacus; Written On The Wind; The Young Lions.

 

[Paul Hillenbrand]

Interesting observation that Pan (2015) is not available as a "DVD" only disc purchase.


Edit: My bad. Found DVD only on Google: UPC 883929455225