Slumping economy? Recession? Poppycock. Based on sales of home media, America's financial engine is humming along just fine, with consumers plunking down 1.6% more on DVD / Blu-ray purchases and rentals combined than they did in the first half of 2007. Granted, some may suggest that home entertainment is seeing an increase as more lavish alternatives (going out for a movie, taking a vacation, etc.) are utilized less frequently, but whatever the case, this sector is sure benefiting. Focusing on HDM, we're hearing that $194 million has been spent on Blu-ray Disc thus far in 2008, which is up some 350% from $43 million in 1H 2007. Amazing what a
format war conclusion will do for numbers, huh?
[Image courtesy of
Syracuse, thanks Joel]
posted Jul 16th 2008 9:16AM
Sales are likely to be 2-3x as high in the second half of the year.
Here is some simple math :
You are a douche bag.
...there this holiday season which is called...i dunno...
Christmas??
I would say that at least 25% of overall sales probably occur from late November and December...
Not to mention Boxing Day as well! That's probably when I'll be stocking up as we up here in Canada have HUGE discounts.
Even if they got a 100% increase in spending between now & the end of the year
(which is so large and unlikely that no-one in their right mind is currently predicting it)
that wouldn't even bring that $200 million up to * half * the claimed $1 billion sales the BDA said they expected.
"I'm curious why media outlets are not reporting how much money digital downloads are making."
They're conspiring against you. God help me, if you're right and Blu Ray is dead then I hope I'm not so obsessive about it all. If Engadget posted a piece on the possibility of direct-to-brain movie service you would be posting how 3 seconds later on how it will trump Blu Ray in the near future.
nfinity
you are [lying]
to yourself
it's called denial
as Blu-Ray does better & better [which it is] you, truth teller, gus & hd4me become more & more irrelevant
at some point you will realize that you are only talking to yourself...no one else is listening
you may get under the skin of a blogger here & there but that is because you are annoying not because you are being taken seriously
try not to be so negative, it's unhealthy
nfinity
regarding download market penetration:
Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research, said, "The fact is, despite what many on Wall Street seem to think, there is very little digital downloading going on. We're talking about $118 million in 2007 spending, and about $254 million this year - so against a $24 billion packaged-media market it'sreally not making much of a dent at this point."
Consumers have spent MORE on Blu-Ray then downloads this year.
Consumers have spent $194 million on Blu-ray high-def discs in the first six months of 2008. Meaning that Blu-Ray is on track to deliver around $388 million for 2008.
Downloads are predicted to deliver around $254 million in 2008.
That means Blu-Ray will deliver $154 million MORE than downloads in 2008.
And downloads includes both HD & SD VS. Blu-Ray is HD only
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/questex/hom654472QWE/index.php?startpage=3
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i5dab627a6e5e9f674598128170626f30
nfinity
quote: "As said before.. YOU KEEP BUYING the failing format... smart people will be investing in the convenience and the REAL future of home entertainment."
an a hypocritical blu-ray owner you are BUYING the failing format with the rest of us "smart people"
do you have MPD or are you just manic?
quick make up your mind before you have a violent mood swing or change personalities.......
* quote
JDS
as Blu-Ray does better & better [which it is]
=====================================================
No it is not.
You can't complain if the BDA themselves publicly make $1 billion sales projections and then fall flat on their faces (again) by widely missing the mark.
Less than $200 million is not going to become $1 billion in the few months of the year remaining.
You might not like that but that is the truth & the fact of the matter and it is perfectly right & proper to point this out.
(....and even discounts and BOGOs etc don't help as they reduce the $ sales)
"$200 million is not going to become $1 billion in the few months left of this year."
Wait, so a corporation made an ambitious forecast that turned out to be much less than expected? Damn, they should pack it in now out of shame since that's never happened before. Neither profit nor growth in a recession matter if you can't hit your magic 8-ball projections.
That information is being reported. Check out this link http://www.tvpredictions.com/blu071408.htm the number is lower than Blu-Ray and includes all downloads, SD and HD. Like is stated in the article most techies have a skewed view on the ease of technology and have the time and money to invest in the latest and greatest gadgets, while most people are confused by technology.
* quote
JDS
Consumers have spent $194 million on Blu-ray high-def discs in the first six months of 2008. Meaning that Blu-Ray is on track to deliver around $388 million for 2008.
=====================================================
Jayzuss wept, is that the outside estimate now?
They are going to get 38.8% of the planned $ sales ($388 million out of $1 Billion)?
Man that is tanking large stylee.
How much confidence do you think that sort of failure ripples out into the wider retailing market?
Seriously, Blu-ray is doing nothing to excite anyone but the PS3 fanboy element.
LMAO
nfinity
Consumers have spent $194 million on Blu-ray high-def discs in the first six months of 2008. Meaning that Blu-Ray is on track to deliver around $388 million for 2008.
Downloads are predicted to deliver around $254 million in 2008.
That means Blu-Ray will deliver $154 million MORE than downloads in 2008.
Or maybe the haters could just READ the linked article from the Hollywood Reporter which states quite clearly:
"Blu-ray sales alone should amount to at least three times what digital downloading is expected to bring in this year."
Truth Teller
I don't care about the weather report.....it was a forecast.
The numbers are the numbers.
Blu-Ray is growing & is out performing downloads....
You are clinging to the forecast like it is the end of the world.
It isn't.
The weatherman gets it wrong all the time.
I'd love to see how those of us in responsible paid employment would fair attaining only 38% of a propsective target
(and that only at the very beginning of a recession, which has not - as some posters rightly pointed out recently here - technically happened just yet)
.....and for those who wish to paint anyone pointing out the on-going Blu-ray problems as mere scaremongering here's the latest on this little spot of bother.
Remember Denon said profile 1.1 discs may not work on profile 1.0 players?
http://www.listenup.com/content/partner_stores/denon/talmadge.aug.07.php
Well it's started to become true -
http://blog.homecinemachoice.com/page/homecinemachoice?entry=batman_begins_is_a_blu
But nevermind, f*ck you early adopters, eh? You knew what you were getting into
(& nevermind what the advertising at the time said)
Still, you might get lucky selling on your low spec profile 1.0 player to some poor uneducated schmo on ebay, eh?
Way to make friends and influence people, eh?
Baby found some players that require a firmware update. The world is collapsing!
Yeah, cos updating on non-ethernet socketed players is going to be so eay & suit 'regular' people so well.
Pathetic.
Just like your trademark infantile feeble cat-call.
Can't back down now, keep on making yourself look like the dreary litt le sad childish tool you are.
LMAO
Baby, early adopters bought those players, not "regular" people. And early adopters would easily be able to cope with a firmware upgrade. Grow up baby your precious format lost.
Well something weird is going on cos it only took imovies 3 months to pass Blu-ray sales.
I'd also wonder how you can dismiss the BDA's own forecasting so glibly.
They are (repeatedly) cr@p at it.
.....and actually JDS I don't know what hick BS they use in your part of the world to tell the weather but these days the forecast around where I live is pretty accurate.
:P
Truth Teller
you live in England where it rains EVERY DAY.
how hard is it to predict the same thing EVERY DAY?
Revenue forecasts are for stock speculation.
Blu-Ray is up when DVD is up, Blu-Ray dips a little when DVD dips a little...see the pattern? It is based on each weeks new release schedule. Weeks with a blockbuster title grow revenue, weeks with catalog only titles take a little step back....how hard is that to comprehend?
Live in the now.
I am not sure if they will hit $1 billion or not. Howerver, the $194 million quoted in the article is US sales only while the $1 billion estimate by the BDA is world wide sales.
So at the very least we are comparing apples and oranges with these two numbers.
You can expect US sales of blu-ray this year of close to $500 million. I have no problem seeing this number in the US. Whether or not the rest of the world will contribute another $500 million is questionable.
TruthTeller -- did you bother to read the article you linked to in http://blog.homecinemachoice.com/page/homecinemachoice?entry=batman_begins_is_a_blu?
First sentence:
Blu-ray owning Bat-fans who have never updated the firmware on their players will have to bite the bullet with Warner Home Video’s release of Batman Begins on Blu-ray.
All it says is that BluRay owners will need to update their firmware -- something I did have to do on my BDP-S300, but its really not that big of a deal to do so.
While its silly that Sony provides their ISO images for the firmware upgrade wrapped up in a Windows exe rather than a standard zip file, its pretty easy to perform the upgrade -- something that the flyer that came in the Batman Begins BluRay disc specifically tells you.
And it wasn't even the BDA which made the claim but studio heads with the head of Paramount choosing the figure of $750 million.
I really wonder where people are getting this $1,000,000,000 # from?
if you include hardware my bet is this # will be met easily.
Also, alot of people here have short memories, The format war only ended a short time ago, in the mid spring.
Consumers haven't had a big blu-ray push on hardware until.... not even yet. the manufacturers are only now getting new models out and prices which had been expected to drop on hardware haven't, why? the us Dollar is dropping alot.
if the dollar were not in trouble, my bet is electronics would be lower priced by now.
any way you cut it, Blu-Ray is doing alot better than before. so stop the naysaying and let people enjoy.
Now... if only the studios lowered their pricing on movies!!
The $1 billion number comes from here:
http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/06/18/studio-execs-see-blu-ray-revenue-breaking-1-billion-this-year/
That number is world wide sales of blu-ray discs as estimated by studio executives.
"Remember Denon said profile 1.1 discs may not work on profile 1.0 players? (...)
Well it's started to become true."
No, it didn't. The players just needed a firmware update...
And no comment about Blu-ray generating 3 times the revenue of digital downloads (HD and SD!) in 2008? Doesn't fit your agenda, I guess...
I don't recall there being a single instance where a 1.1 disc gave a 1.0 player any problems.
What I do recall is that when Fox rolled out BD+, it gave some 1.0 player owners (Samsung IIRC) fits. But to date this is the first I've heard of 1.1 discs not working on 1.0 players.
Truth Teller, now you're just being silly, and showing a lack of understanding of simple math.
First, a lot of people ARE predicting a 100 to 200% increase in sales for the second half of the year. And it's not crazy or delusional to make that prediction. Why? It's because that's what happens EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Home Video sales increase greatly as the year ends. The last two months have always seen a huge increase in sales, regardless of the format. You've got Black Friday and the December Holidays which causes a huge increase in media and hardware sales, and yes, that will mean more sales for Blu-Ray.
Also, the last three months of the year will see a lot of huge titles coming out. Iron Man is due late October, and the rumored date for The Dark Knight is December 9th. In between you'll have the Incredible Hulk, Indiana Jones 4, Kung Fu Panda, Wall-E, Hancock and Hellboy II all coming out on DVD and Blu-Ray. Most if not all of those should do very well on Blu-Ray.
And going back to your ineptitude at math. Half of $1 billion is $500 million. $194 million for the first half, and you said:
"Even if they got a 100% increase in spending between now & the end of the year (which is so large and unlikely that no-one in their right mind is currently predicting it) that wouldn't even bring that $200 million up to * half * the claimed $1 billion sales the BDA said they expected."
So for the 2nd half of the year, we're going with a 100% increase, which is $388 million. Now, you ADD those two numbers together. And then you get $582 million. Which, last I checked, is larger ($82 million larger, to be exact!) than $500 million.
So we are comparing downloaded rentals with purchased Blu-Rays?
I don't think that is a good comparison...I think it would be pretty obvious that you would have more renters than purchasers. I mean more people rented VHS than purchased, I would imagine that more people rent DVDs than purchase DVDs.
I would rather see purchased downloads compared with purchased Blu-Rays.
How fast download services take off is just as related to the economy as Blu-Ray is. If things continue to unravel as rapidly as it has been, you are going to see a lot people cut back their broadband Internet from multimegabit service to sub megabit service if not back to dial-up. Some of the early reviews of the Playstation video store have stated that while SD video can be streamed, HD still pretty much requires you to wait at least a few minutes before video plays back smoothly. I will assume that the testers had the standard multimegabit cable or DSL service, if you cut that back to sub-megabit...forget it, streaming isn't going to work. Other reports have said that people aren't really cutting back on cable and satellite television but I can definitely see people cutting back High Speed Internet access as a way to save money. (e.g. going from 8 to 6 or 768k.)
Oh, and the $6 for the rental is a bit on the high side to, that is same as Comcast charges for VoD HD content except that Comcast is 1080i and Dolby Digital 5.1 and not 720p and 2 channel AAC.
Other than that, I might do some rentals the next time I travel and download some SD movies onto my PSP. That looks kind of neat.
Nfinity, Truth Teller, what exactly are you trying to accomplish with your constant vitriol on a technology blog?
You don't like Blu-ray, we get it.
Right or wrong, better or worse, Blu-ray is now the defacto standard for commercially available HD optical storage and no matter how much venom you spew here it isn't going to change. There currently isn't any competition for it on sale anywhere.
Honestly, I would rather have had HD-DVD come out on top but it didn't happen. The end result being that now I have a BD player and a small collection of discs to go with it.
You rail about prices and such, but as a consumer if I see a title I want at a price I'm willing to pay I'll buy it. And honestly, the prices for the titles I have purchased are on par with the prices I was seeing on HD-DVD's before it left the market.
I understand the sentiment behind your anti-BD tirades, I really do. I could easily launch into similar hate filled rants everytime that damn Halo stealing Xbox is mentioned (I hope every Xbox in the world would burst into flame and melt into little smoking slag piles, evey last one of them) but I don't because it serves no purpose.
People will continue to buy Blu-ray and Xbox (Damn Halo thieves! * /me shoots hate rays at all the Xbox consoles *) and the world will keep turning.
"Alareth, grow up.
It's a high def blog with an open public comments section.
Tough t!tty if you don't like some people's comments, I think you'll find that applies to us all.
Get over yourself.
Take your dreary little fascist notions and place them where the sun don't shine, sideways."
Interesting. I ask a direct question about your motivations in a polite and reasoned manner in an attempt to understand why you put so much effort into bashing an optical format and your response is to tell me "to grow up" before launching into an extremely childish, inane and vulgar little rant that does nothing to actually address any of the points I raised.
Are you always this hostile with everyone that asks you questions?
Did I confuse you with the big words like "vitriol" and "defacto" and you're just lashing out at things you don't understand?
The only answer is that Truth has nothing better to do with his time than Troll. Nothing will come out of either side arguing on an internet blog. Its all comical.
IMO the only thing digital downloads threaten is renting movies.
Never one to work by stereotype eh JDS?
lol
digital downloads are failing see :)
http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/16/mark-cuban-figures-out-how-to-save-internet-video/
Why is it when i read these posts, iread them out loud as if their is a shouting match going on. LOL.
Anyways, if Blu avereages 8 million in sales for the lats half of the year IE 26 weeks, thats 208 million dollars in the last half of the year, and thats low balling the number... i believe it would average about 10 mil a week ending it up at 260 million. So combined with the 1st half thats over 400 mil, thats good numbers, i thought it would be lower.
"Why so serious" lololololololol...