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Bye-bye Blu-Ray...we hardly knew ye

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boykster:


--- Quote from: ChadTower on February 01, 2007, 12:47:26 pm ---
Intuition tells me that more attention should be paid to hardware than software.  One guy buying 45 discs is far less significant than 5 guys buying two players each.

--- End quote ---

I agree with you on principle, but unit sales of titles will always be the gold standard.  Studios only care about unit sales on the titles, and will be unwilling to back either horse fully (if they are on the fence) based solely on player sales, if their titles aren't selling.  I wonder if those sales figures include sales to rental outlets and/or are normalized for number of titles available per technology or not, or are raw numbers.

Just as print media makes its money by advertising, but guages success by readership, digital video technology will rely on player sales, but will guage success by title sales.



ChadTower:


--- Quote from: boykster on February 01, 2007, 01:37:33 pm ---I agree with you on principle, but unit sales of titles will always be the gold standard.  Studios only care about unit sales on the titles, and will be unwilling to back either horse fully (if they are on the fence) based solely on player sales, if their titles aren't selling.  I wonder if those sales figures include sales to rental outlets and/or are normalized for number of titles available per technology or not, or are raw numbers.

--- End quote ---


We're not discussing success of the studios, we're discussing success of the format.  All any individual publisher is ever going to worry about is their own title sales and that has a lot more to do with what the titles are than what format they are released in.  The success of any format is heavily dependent on how many people actually have the necessary hardware.  Maybe in the moment the VHS/Beta companies were judging by titles but it wasn't long before they were using player sales instead.  Installed user base is everything!   :)

shmokes:

I think boykster is probably hinting at a complimentary relationship, though, between the success of the studios and the success of the hardware.  If studios find that their titles sell better on BluRay, they have more incentive to make more titles available for that format.  The more this happens, the more the BluRay section at BestBuy begins to dominate the HD-DVD section.  If I'm just an average, know-nothing consumer, looking for a next-gen media player and I see that there are twice as many titles available for BluRay as HD-DVD I'm going to say to myself, "Hmm . . . that's a pretty big selling point.  It looks like it's much more likely that any given title I want will be available on the BluRay format, so I think that's the technology I'm going to go with."  This, in turn, gives studios even more incentive to release movies on the BluRay format, because the install base of BluRay players is increasing, which, in turn, gives consumers even more reason to choose BluRay, which in turn, etc., etc.

It's very similar, principle, to the console videogame market.  Playstation and Playstation 2 blew their competition out of the water.  In both cases their competitors had superior hardware.  But the third party publishers (the equivalent of movie studios) gave more support to Sony's systems, creating more software.  The larger library of software encouraged consumers to buy that system, which encouraged even more third-party support, which encouraged even more purchases, etc.

ChadTower:


Right, but in most cases, I figure they'll make any given title available for both formats.  It's not a like a game you have to port for a different console... you just encode the movie for that format, send it to be pressed on that disc, and blam you're good for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.  Only the companies with a specific vested interest in one over the other will try and go with a single format release (and it will hurt them every time).

shmokes:

Yeah, I don't know.  I don't know enough to speak with confidence, but my gut tells me that with a lot of movies the studios would only release them on the dominant platform, because when you press a disc I guess you'd want to do it in huge runs so that you would have enough to last you a long time (or forever) so you would not need to spend money retooling the machines to repress that disc in case you run out.  So if you release discs that are unlikely to sell you end up spending money you didn't need to spend, as well as having the ongoing cost of storing the unsold inventory.

I don't know.  Maybe the costs of tooling up for a run of discs is minimal and irrelevant.  But, at the very least, there must be some reason that there are quite a few studios (besides Sony) that have chosen sides.  If nothing else, maybe it's simply that having two formats is expensive for the studios so they want one format to win as soon as possible.

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