Re: What I think they should do to increase HD home movies

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If they fail, blu-ray is dead. For some odd reason SACD just keeps popping up in my head...

Is your head to small to also include DVD-Audio?

We are going to start with the war argument again...

DVD is the biggest rival, and most of us (let's include ourselves this time) don't want to buy movies again, specially for an improvement in audio or video. Most of the people don't have a HTS from the few of us who have, most of us have a HTIB (mine sounds very good, moan all you want) and we are the ones who demand better A/V quality.

Blu-ray is more of a 'commodity' than a necessity...

It's like cars almost everybody has 'normal' cars, luxury cars or more reliable cars that cost more, are not going to be sold to the majority 'Average Joes' like us...

I don't think that there is something that can be done to increase a need for HD movies as of right now...it's gona take a while, and people are not going to spend more money if they can't see a 'clear' difference in quality...

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people are not going to spend more money if they can't see a 'clear' difference in quality...

Obviously not, since most people still use old tube TVs that are hardly capable of rendering even the resolution of standard DVD. But progress is being made. I have proof: Tim even bought one! (Nice one too)

Wasn't aware Sony had anything to do with dvd audio?

Moaning.

[Post edited by bladerunner1 on Apr 25, 2008]

bladerunner, the point I was making is that the failure of DVD-A ISN'T Sony - in other words, perhaps other factors were involved with the failure of multi-channel high-def audio formats. Get it?

Totally get it.
Downloading was coming into fashion at the time those were being introduced. Plus the company's really didnt do anything to promote the formats. Kinda like how our recent situation with hd. movies was. A little setup in the back of BB/CC and that is about it. Sure that may be changing now, with the so called clear winner blu-ray,but I still am not seeing the numbers I would like to see. It's early though. We'll see.

To answer the thread question."-SLASH PRICES-PROMOTE LIKE A M.F."

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Plus the company's really didnt do anything to promote the formats.

I agree with the above, they really didn't do much to promote them. Other factors that contributed might be the following:

1. SACD and DVD-A continued the "format war" until they both died. Consumers were confused.
2. Very few people during these formats' introductions had 5.1 systems, or the ability to connect the $500+ SACD or DVD-A players to them via multi-channel analogs.
3. I would say it's a minority of people that can tell the difference between the already high quality PCM on standard CDs, and the higher bit-rate music offered on these formats.

Skyhawk,

"YEP."

As LH points out - be patient. It sounds like the Blu-ray group is planning a major promotion (or string of promotions), but it likely doesn't make sense to do a major push right now. I expect the big sales drive to start in the Fall, which is more the season when the bulk of sales are made. Timing is everything, so I'm sure they're carefully putting together a strategic plan that will be coordinated with all the major studios/manufacturers. They all have the same interest - to sell more, more, and more.

The average consumer is not like the people on this forum, of course: the Blu-ray camp will want to spend their promo dollars for maximum impact, so instead of doing some now which won't get the attention of the average person (and will for the most part only please people who have already bought into Blu-ray), they probably want to make a really big splash once they have more big titles in the market and they can try to convince the "non-early adopters" to jump onboard using a big campaign (pervasive attack of TV ads, in-store promotions, price cuts, etc.).

Very good comments sbmess.

I also think the Blu-ray camp won't do a major hardware promo push until this year's newer players are released for sale (like the 2 new Sony players forthcoming), the Funai player, the next Samsung player, Panasonic (next month) etc. And summer is when people enjoy GOING OUT to the movies more so than staying home to watch them.

So, look out(!) for the late summer/fall awareness of Blu-ray hardware and even more software releases, and then by 4th quarter (holiday shopping season) the big potential summer box office hits should arrive and be very enticing to those who own an HDTV (or soon will) but had not yet adopted into Blu-ray.... it will be tempting to buy that new Sony Blu-ray player (etc), see?

Still... there is DVD - It's #1 and we know of those rumours circulating about a 'Toshiba super-upconversion' new player, and the possibility of the company doing a major advertising push for their new technology (and targeting customers away from adodpting Blu-ray HD, since Toshiba gets the most share of royalties from DVD patents).

The Blu-ray camp will have to dig deep in their pockets and really spend some promo dollars to again tout the superior quality of BD over DVD (super) upconversion, or growth could be slower-going for some time yet. It's picked up lately a little (up to 5% of the overall market by some estimates), but DVD is the dominant leader at a healthy 95%.

-JIMI LOVE (the Voodoo Child)