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‘No Country for Old Men’ had a popular first week on Blu-ray
Everyone involved in Blu-ray is enjoying a pretty nice 2008 so far, and it’s only through just about three months.
The latest numbers from HMR Research show that sales of the high-def DVDs in the United States recently passed the 9 million mark, and that a third of those sales have come this year alone. The great pace puts Blu-ray on track for over 15 million sales this year, the research estimates.
It’s been a little more than a month since the HD DVD camp waved the white surrender flag, and first-week sales of Oscar-winner “No Country For Old Men” topped 68,000 to help Blu-ray jump the 9 mil figure.
So how much is having a clear singular high-def DVD choice, as well as perhaps a resurgent interest in the good movies making their way to the Blu-ray format affecting consumers? Previously, the best first-week sales averaged between 10,000 and 30,000 copies, but the Coen’ brothers’ flick definitely drummed up some excitement. Blu-ray reviews have also been very favorable in terms of audio and video transfer, which perhaps is helping lead folks to see what the high-def fuss is about.
This comes as costs for Blu-ray hardware continue to hover around $400 while good deals on the software seem to abound.
Do you think prices on players will soon drop a little? Have you been more inclined to budget a Blu-ray player into your spending now that you know it’s the format of choice? Are you intrigued by the increasing selection of titles available? Let us know your thoughts on Blu-ray now that it has a virtual competition-free month under its belt.
Via: High-Def Digest
MDA is absolutely right! And it is not like even those people have no HDF access. Right now, one can view all three GODFATHER films in HD OnDemand. Can’t see them on Blu-Ray! Also, another factor that most seem to ignore when considering that “stellar” 68,000 discs sold is that many of those buyers are people who have HD-DVD and were forced to switch. So, if anything, that 68,000 is almost what a combined HD-DVD/BR release would have been…only less! I’d guess that if both formats were allowed to continue, the number might have been over 100,000 sold. Sorry, but the industry shot themselves in the foot (for mass adoption? by arbitraily eliminating HD-DVD.
For what all the Blu-Ray equipment and disks cost now, it’s not worth the money. Upconversion will win out for 90% of the market. Most people don’t care about whether they are watching it in HD or not. The just want to watch the movie. And not have it cost them $400 for a player and $30 a movie. Then the ten minute wait for java to #### you off with “loading: screen.
OVERRATED!!!!
I don’t think downloads are going to make a dent for a long time. Apples to Oranges. A 25/50GB download is a daunting task even over broadband. You could probably drive to another country to rent a disc faster than download real, clean HD content.
When people say you can download HD over the internet, they mean heavily compressed or upsampled HD content, usually about the same data size or less than standard DVD.
I agree with RobRuffo on the quality difference. I’ve always wondered how people can say that an upconverted standard DVD looks just as good…or almost as good as HD. I use to think the problem was with my hardware, now I see that it’s with their’s.
I have a PS3 and a HD-A30 DVD player, both of which do upconverting….and the difference between standard and hi-def DVDs is obvious.
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I don’t see downloads taking off any time soon.
Either you need to stream it every time you watch it, which becomes a bandwidth problem (at least until high speed bandwidth become ubiquitous and various internet backbones are upgraded to be able to serve all that data) or you have to store it somewhere. When I think of the headaches I encounter when having to backup my iTunes library whenever I need to re-install an OS or something, and that’s 40 gigs of data or something. Imagine doing that with terabytes of storage. Yes, the the storage is getting cheaper, but it still takes time to copy files back and forth.
Plus I still think most (not all) people want something they can hold in their hands. The collectible aspect of things.
Eventually it’ll happen, but I think we’re talking 10-15 years out.