Blu-only Releases?

[Jeff]

Zedz has already echoed my personal feelings on the matter far more eloquently than I could, but beyond that, I think this is probably a smart business decision for MOC. A year ago I would have never said that, and the tide has turned even more in the past two months. My understanding is that not every title would be Blu only, just those where the materials were up to snuff. I can understand why Nick & Co. would be loath to spend time and money to downscale pristine HD elements for standard DVD when over half of the product they're selling is to HD consumers anyway.

You can bet that the Criterion folks are watching this thread closely (Hi, Peter! Hi, Jon!). They spent nearly 15 years making nothing but laserdiscs, when the percentage of U.S. homes that could play them never even reached 2%. Criterion's market split on Blu vs. DVD is almost the same as MOC (around 50-50), so you can bet that as that number approaches 60-40, they'll start looking at dropping standard releases for a few titles too. It's a little different for Criterion, because they release a lot more mainstream fare than MOC, they seem a little more skittish in general, they don't have a corporate parent company to support them, and they sell a lot of product to universities who need to be able to play these films in their classrooms, but it seems like an eventual inevitability.

I still buy many standard DVDs (more than Blu), and plan to do so for the foreseeable future. I suspect the two formats will continue to co-exist comfortably for many years to come, but not because some people will have Blu and some won't. They'll both be around out of necessity. New films and quality restorations of classics will dominate the Blu market; titles with tiny niches, sub-par elements, and the vast majority of television product from the 20th century will continue to be standard DVD (or, *gulp* BoD DVR) only.

[MichaelB]

I still buy many standard DVDs (more than Blu), and plan to do so for the foreseeable future. I suspect the two formats will continue to co-exist comfortably for many years to come, but not because some people will have Blu and some won't. They'll both be around out of necessity. New films and quality restorations of classics will dominate the Blu market; titles with tiny niches, sub-par elements, and the vast majority of television product from the 20th century will continue to be standard DVD (or, *gulp* BoD DVR) only.

Absolutely. The inescapable fact is that some things aren't worth releasing in HD, either because film elements of sufficient quality aren't available or because the master copy is in SD video to begin with. At least two BFI releases - Jeff Keen's GAZWRX and Ron Peck's Nighthawks - deliberately stick film material on Blu-ray and video or video-processed material on DVD, because that's the sane way of doing it. Of Time and the City was mooted as a Blu-ray release until it was discovered that most of the source materials originated on SD video. The vast majority of television is only worth releasing on Blu to take advantage of the format's greater capacity, so you can fit entire series onto fewer discs (or just one) - but there's unlikely to be any visual improvement.

Without in any way wishing to do down Blu-ray as a format, the fact is that DVD through a good upscaling player still looks pretty damn good - and if you're not dealing with HD source material it's absolutely fine. Like Jeff, I too still buy the majority of titles on DVD - and I think any change is likely to be gradual rather than dramatic.

[tenia]

Honestly, I would spend that $200 on a Blu-Ray player and buy (if it happens to be the case) the BR of City Girl, and just hook it up to a non-HD T.V.. You aren't going to lose out as you were planning to watch it SD if you bought the box set, you would have spent roughly that same amount of money, and you are now open to future MOC releases that come as BR exclusive that you feel to be essential orders. I understand it's annoying but it seems like a fairly logical solution when you are talking about spending a vast amount of money either way.

I think that it would be the best financial solution, but not having an HD TV... I mean, what's the point of BR if not watch on an HD TV ? See what I mean ?
It's just sound kind of useless to say "Yeah, I watch BR now, but still on an old cathodic 80cm screen..." That's why, for me, upgrading is not just the player.

[Finch]

Think of Blu as a long term investment, with the new television to follow when you can afford it. 40 inch sets are definitely affordable (well, over here in Britain anyway though they can't be that much more expensive in France).

[Michael Kerpan]

I think that it would be the best financial solution, but not having an HD TV... I mean, what's the point of BR if not watch on an HD TV ? See what I mean ?
It's just sound kind of useless to say "Yeah, I watch BR now, but still on an old cathodic 80cm screen..." That's why, for me, upgrading is not just the player.

The point is to pre-assemble a nice BRD collection -- which will be ready and waiting when you finally do get an HDTV -- but which you can watch perfectly well (as if they were plain old DVDs) while you are saving up for said new TV. This way you avoid double-dipping on new releases. You also may incidentally get an upgraded music playing capability (depending on your current audio system).

The only caution I would offer -- inventory all your current AV input connectors -- and make certain whatever BR player you want to buy offers appropriate outputs. (S-video is obsolete -- so you may need to make do temporarily with an RCA connector if your current TV/monitor doesn't have DVI input.

[MichaelB]

I had to watch Blu-ray discs through an old 28" CRT for about a month - it seemed like a bit of a waste, but it was no different from watching a DVD, and with the huge advantage that when the HDTV was installed, the same disc produced a dramatically better picture.

[Tribe]

How many more titles per year are projected with the move to Blu-Ray only?

[TMDaines]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the tentative plan to make releases DVD-only or BD-only? I don't think everything is going to be released on Blu-ray, just there will no longer be dual format releases.

[Tribe]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the tentative plan to make releases DVD-only or BD-only? I don't think everything is going to be released on Blu-ray, just there will no longer be dual format releases.

Unless I totally misunderstood the discussion, I thought they were going to an everything Blu-Ray because they are in love with the medium and it would enable MOC to release more titles.

[peerpee]

There's a still a bunch of things we could only do DVD for. The plan is, if we can do BD for a particular title, we do BD only.

[What A Disgrace]

I'm assuming that the loss in profits that would result from only releasing certain titles as Blu-rays is negligible?

I mean, if doing both DVD and Blu releases of certain discs means you can afford to put one more Naruse film out there, then by all means, keep releasing both.

[MichaelB]

If I interpret Nick's original post correctly, the issue is that "loss in profits" is effectively cancelled out by "additional cost of producing a DVD" - which is a substantial extra expense, given that it requires HD downconversion, DVD-friendly menus, full authoring, etc. Not to mention a huge amount of producer time, as the DVDs will need to be just as rigorously checked as the Blu-rays - you can't just assume that because a set of subtitles works OK on one, it'll be equally good on the other.

So we'd certainly be talking a four-figure cost as an absolute minimum, and this is a niche market with a vengeance. Remember that discussion a couple of years ago when someone naively assumed that 100,000 copies was a reasonable target, and his shock at being told that merely a tenth or even a twentieth of that would be considered a massive hit?

[GaryC]

I'm torn on this. I can certainly see the commercial logic. However, in the short term - until 2011 at the earliest, short of a Lottery win - if any company went Blu-only they would lose me as a customer and/or a reviewer.

I don't have Blu-ray at the moment, as I would need not only a new player but a new TV set as well, plus a new sound system. My present DD/DTS 5.1 set-up has the amp/decoder built into a (Phillips) DVD player. So that would be a new amp and three speakers and a subwoofer, as I at least have two perfectly good front speakers I can use, which are mainly used for CDs at the moment. That's why having a BD player and using it through my SD TV set wouldn't work. (Okay, I can as MichaelB suggests, play the soundtracks through the TV speakers, which would be fine for stuff in mono or non-surround stereo, not so good for anything else.)

The reasons for this are mainly financial. I am simply not in a position to upgrade - and I won't be in 2010, as my company sharesave will be entirely used to finance a long-wished-for foreign holiday, all going well. If 2011 will be upgrade year, it will be the sharesave that pays for it. I just don't have sufficient disposable income otherwise.

[zedz]

I was hoping swo was going to do one of his patented full-on mathematical analyses, but life is full of little disappointments. So here are how the numbers might stack up, from what I understand.

The issue, as Nick has described it, is one of capacity: doing dual releases is limiting the number of titles they can work on, so if we assume that the finite resources MoC invests in four dual releases could instead be invested in four Blu-only titles and three additional titles – let’s say one of these is Blu and the other two DVD.

So, for the split scenario, if we then assume 100 units of each title would be sold under the current conditions - 50 DVD; 50 Blu – that makes 400 units sold in total.

Under the non-split scenario, let’s assume that the sales of Blu-only releases are only 60% of the combined releases (this is the conservative end of the spread Nick has indicated). And, although everybody who’s Blu-capable can also play DVDs, we know there’s a lunatic fringe out there (or rather, in here ) that will boycott them, even though this approach will allow MoC to make perfectly clear to their customers that future DVD-only releases are highly unlikely to see a Blu upgrade in the near future. So let’s allow 80% sales for those extra DVD titles.

That would make 300 Blus sold (5 releases, 60 units apiece) and 160 DVDs (2 releases, 90 units apiece): 460 units in total, a significant increase for the same expenditure of resources. And MoC can massage those numbers simply by being savvy about which titles go Blu and which don’t (and which, in some cases, might warrant a dual release).


Plus there’s the big bonus for the customers of more titles and more choice, and the crucial factor in all this is, as has been pointed out, is that the Blu sales are only going to increase, so that 60% figure is only going to trend upwards, and those Blu titles are going to continue to sell as customers upgrade their equipment. These figures are just going to get better. Going back to DVD only, they’re just going to get worse.

Given the 50/50 split, and given the need to opt for one format over the other (see above), MoC would be crazy to opt for the format that’s on the way out (however slowly).

[fiddlesticks]

Then there's the pricing advantage. So far, the MoC Blus have been priced £2 (Mad Detective), £3 (Tokyo Sonata), and £5 (Sunrise) above their DVD counterparts, for an average of £3,33. Let's call that £3 going forward. So, the DVD price is P, while the Blu price is P+3.

Old sales: 200 DVD and 200 Blu = 200P + 200(P+3) = 400P+600.
New sales: 160 DVD and 300 Blu = 160P + 300(P+3) = 460P+900.

MoC gets the £60P advantage from higher volume, regardless of format, as well as a £300 bonus from the switch to Blu. If P = £20 (the MSRP of the Sunrise and Tokyo Sonata DVDs), the net benefit in this scenario is £1500, or a bit more than 17%.

[MichaelB]

Yes, but that calculation assumes that authoring and manufacturing costs are the same for Blu-ray as they are for DVD...

[tenia]

Yes, but that calculation assumes that authoring and manufacturing costs are the same for Blu-ray as they are for DVD...

Is a BR still 25% more expensive to manufacture than a DVD today ?

[fiddlesticks]

Yes, but that calculation assumes that authoring and manufacturing costs are the same for Blu-ray as they are for DVD...

Not really, as we're just talking about revenue, not costs or profits. There are lots of other unverified assumptions, though, making the whole thing just for fun rather than science.

[RossyG]

I'm a bit late to this debate, but here's my two-penn'orth.

If MoC went to BD only for certain releases and put out DVD's for other stuff unsuitable for HD, I'd not only buy every BD (as I'm doing now) but would start buying the DVDs again.

The reason I've stopped buying the DVDs is because I got Une Femme Mariee and Fantastic Planet and, while excited at the chance of upgrading soon, it means two relatively expensive purchases will become redundant. I've got my eye on those Pialat films, but they'd be so much better in HD. Do I wait or do I buy and risk having to replace them in the near future? Money is an object, I'm afraid.

The same goes for BFI. I've got almost all of their BDs, but now avoid their DVDs. If I knew for a fact that Young Soul Rebels or La Vallee would never come out on BD, at least within the next three or four years, I'd be more inclined to buy them. But the Bill Douglas Trilogy, for example, shows that what seemed like a DVD-only option can become available in a far more desirable format within a year or so (13 months in this case).

This isn't a pop at either company, by the way. I'm sure they're not out to deliberately engineer cases of double-dipping. I'm very grateful that BFI have announced that a Privilege BD will be on its way a few months after the DVD. That kind of clarity makes it a lot easier for me as a consumer on a limited budget.

As for Criterion, I'm also holding out on those until region free becomes an option. Although I've got their Third Man already, sitting idly on a shelf and unable to be watched.

[MichaelB]

This isn't a pop at either company, by the way. I'm sure they're not out to deliberately engineer cases of double-dipping.

No, absolutely not - any company working in a niche market would be mad to do something like that. The problem is that once you've moved into a new format, it's very hard to judge whether it's viable to embrace it on certain titles.

Certainly, several pre-2008 BFI releases would be pretty easy to repackage as Blu-rays, since the masters were HD to begin with, though there are lots of other issues to consider such as commercial viability (since it's unlikely they'd get the same marketing push unless there was a tie-in event to latch on to- in the case of the Bill Douglas Trilogy, the parallel Blu-ray release of Comrades).

On the other hand, there are also plenty of titles that simply aren't possible to release on Blu-ray, because mastering materials of sufficient quality either don't exist or aren't accessible. Two good recent examples in the first category are Of Time and the City (edited on SD video) and The Miners' Campaign Tapes (master copies on analogue U-matic videotape), and the second would include Jan Svankmajer's shorts - shot on 35mm, the original negs hopefully still survive, but they're currently only available on SD Digibeta from the main rightsholder and the logistics of repackaging all 26 in HD given the number of sources don't bear thinking about. It took over three years to put it all together in SD!

[Blood Pie]

As a side note, sales figures have come in for Black Friday DVD and BD sales and DVD sales are down from last year ( I think almost 7%, I'll check and link when I get time later) and BD sales are up over 200% from last black Friday. Obviously, the sales for DVD still represent the majority but from a leading economic indicator viewpoint its quite obvious that BD is here to stay and that its going to grow exponentially over this holiday season...

The splits are already 50/50 on average according to Nick. I can only guess they will increase in BDs favor post holiday season. I would think the same, maybe even more so for Criterion.

[HarryLong]

Did you encounter any figures on Blu-Ray player sales? I spotted quite a few spectacularly low prices on some models for Black Friday & even beyond. Walmart, for instance, has a Magnavox model for a mere $78 & as I have a Magnavox DVD recorder with which I've been very happy, this is a very tempting purchase. I'm sorta speculating that the price drop on BR players over the past few months might be fueling the sales of the discs...

[Blood Pie]

I couldn't find anything on actual sales data concerning player sales but they have been listed in most news reports as one of the hot items this year that is seeing growth from last year. As you pointed out, Walmart has a Magnavox player for under $100 and I can confirm that the Walmarts in my area not only also have the Magnavox's for sale but one had a Sony model for $118 or so.

Here is the link to BD.com which links their information from home media magazine concerning year to year comparisons.
http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=3838" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

SO as not to be off topic, I'll echo what I said above. This only means the already high splits for Eureka and Criterion will be higher next year.

[Felix]

Oh well, as you are asking us for our opinions I will give my tuppence worth, even if it is worth less than that... I am disappointed that City Girl will not be on SD, but not too aggrieved as I have the Fox box (which I got partly because I gave up on BFI ever releasing their so long promised Borzage titles, though I would have preferred to buy from the UK. What an inept bunch). For all that, I probably would have double dipped, I did on Sunrise despite having both that and the Eureka version, so one sale lost. My collection currently includes 43 MoC releases which is 43 releases that would not have been bought on BD.

I am with those who do not think the change in quality merits upgrading, but if it were the stellar difference that BD afficianados make it out to be would I still enjoy my old DVDs, videos and boots? (I read an article in one of the UK DVD hardware mags a few months ago and the reviewer there said it was hard to tell the difference, and bear in mind that mags like these are there to sell you new hardware). I know some folk here will have done direct A/B comparisons, as one does with Hi-Fi, but has everybody, or are people basing it on screencaps (genuine question)? My one early adopter trainspotter friend is of the view that the significant difference is in sound not picture but he likes James Bond so perhaps that is why...

I dumped most of my videos for DVD and am not minded to do the same for another format upgrade, and some of us remember all the same things now said about BD being said about SD, including on the pre-MoC label website. I also agree with the comments about turning one's house into a techno den, and while I love film I love lots of other things as well.

Of all the comments though I think Gregory's is the most worthwhile because he actually seems to see beyond the rarified world of movies. The economy of the UK is fucked, completely and utterly, even if many people in the media are trying to pretend it isn't, and as such there is no certainty whatsoever that BD will become the standard, so I think (or believe, if you like) that Nick's projections may be off on that one (equally, they may not, we are swimming in uncharted waters economically. SD or BD doesn't matter much when the lights go out and I think the choice will be the least of many people's worries in the UK over the next few years, you can't eat either of them). Though TBH I would happily swap exclusive BD releases on all labels for being right that we are fucked...

I suspect the bootleggers will soon catch up with BD, but I may be wrong technically, I don't know enough about it. For a cinefile audience, I would have though that MoC's wonderful booklets were the best defence against that, I know I upgraded on a couple of titles from old US releases in part to get the booklets.

Ah, the law of diminishing returns, so familiar from my HiFi days. I knew people with HiFi systems worth as much as their houses but very small piles of records to play on them as they were more interested in the hardware than the software, so to speak, and I see similar mindsets here sometimes. People got conned into CD because all they knew was crappy music centres and cassettes rather than Linn or Rega, they saw a major shift in quality as we all saw a major shift from video to DVD, though at least videos never pixillated... I don't see the major shift from SD to BD.

Good luck MoC, and I do understand where you are coming from, but at an advanced age, greatly reduced income, and with a very large collection, I am not for this move at all. If I were young it might be different. Fortunately, the collection is large enough for me not to bother too much, I gave up on seeing every film ever made a long time ago (well, a couple of months ago actually...) But I do look forward to forum members clearing out their DVDs in anticipation of BD releases and look forward to relieving you of them at knock-down prices.

(Just one pasing thought, for a left-leaning bunch, the forum, not the label, with your love of Chomsky and all the rest, you do seem to be pretty gung-ho for consumerism. But perhaps this is a different and more intelligent consumerism from the proles out there ...)

[Caged Horse]

Just one pasing thought, for a left-leaning bunch, the forum, not the label, with your love of Chomsky and all the rest...

Not all "left-leaners" worship at the church of Chomsky, I can assure you.

Is The Killing Fields out on Blu yet? 1080p would be a fitting way of detailing the genocide Chomsky spent a shameful amount of time attempting to diminish and deny.