Screen Media plans lowered MSRP for Blu-ray releases
By Richard Lawler 
posted Feb 9th 2009 8:17PM
posted Feb 9th 2009 8:17PM
At least someone has some sense when it comes to Blu-ray pricing as Screen Media, the indie studio home of such notable flicks as Battle in Seattle, Personal Effects and Lymelife, is releasing its first Blu-ray movies next month, with an MSRP roughly $10 less than most. A quick glance at Amazon reveals a preorder price that's $5 or $6 less than most mainstream new releases. Senior VP Suzanne Blech cites the price premium of Blu-ray (still $10~ for these movies) as being even harder to overcome for this studio's lesser known movies that typically feature established actors. Talking to Video Business, she also took into account the higher cost of Blu-ray authoring, but thinks the studio will be able to remain profitable even with lower prices, all we can do is hope that this trend is the one that catches on.
Interesting, especially considering Disney's recent announcement to go in the opposite direction (raising the MSRP on their future Blu-ray releases above where they are right now).
Can't be a big studio when the "notable flicks" are nothing I've heard of. And everyone knows that if I haven't of them, then no one has.
As much as I would love Blu-rays to be cheap as hell...its just not possible right now. Why do people expect it to be around cheaper than DVD pricing? It's a newer technology, costs more to produce and manufacture, not to mention there is not a lot of marketshare for it.
You could say lower movie costs would allow for more Blu-ray sales, but that can be said for anything. Lower the cost and more people will buy it. As it stands right now, I remember paying $40 for DVD's the first couple of years and only after it overtook VHS did I notice prices to start dropping. Brand new DVD's still cost around $20 MSRP and Blu-rays are around $30.00 MSRP.
It used to be the same for VHS and DVD. However, now people expect blu-ray to drop down to DVD pricing when its up against tons of other competition such as HD VOD, Digital Downloads, etc...
Its like people expect a ferrari for the price of a Hyundai.
This is a very inaccurate comparison defending a format which probably should have never been released.
In 96/97 when DVD were first starting to be produced it was far more costly to print Optical Media than it is today, even CDs at the time were still hovering around $20-$30 in comparison to Cassettes being price between $10-$15, the technology to mass print DVD was slow and not widely available. To print a DVD in 97 the first thing that had to be done was a 35mm digital transfer had to be made, this was time consuming and a lot of mistakes were made, many actually got released. Second you had to format the movie to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2, again very time consuming considering the technology we have today. Third then you had to author the DVD, and the GUI authoring tools didn't start appearing until 1999/2000 when DVD was clearly the VHS replacement, again time consuming. The steps go on and on and on, and they are no different today than they were back when DVDs were $40. What's changed? The Technology. DVD Writers have significantly become more available and faster, a privet person with the need could easily reproduce the number of discs an industrial DVD printer was printing back in 1996/97 at 1/10th the cost. Formatting is much simpler, the source material is all going to be digital by the time it gets to the DVD stage because back room editing has stopped completely, yes back in the mid 90's Digital editing was becoming popular but a significant amount still occurred in footage/editing rooms with feet upon feet of film, and it all ended up back on 35mm, back then very little Digital source material was stored for later use, DVD wasn't the main stay of the industry it is now. The authoring of DVD is far easier also, any person with a PC or a Mac can sit down edit their personal movies and create a simi-flashy DVD title screen and put it to DVD in a matter of hours, even though in the industry this still could take weeks, considering what is put into a professional DVD I personally can understand that. Now Blu-ray is in a similar boat, the format is slow to produce in comparison to DVD, and is more costly the same as DVD was against VHS initially, but the likeness stops there. Blu-ray authoring can be as simple as DVD as long as the studios doesn't insist on having some geek in the back programming some overly complicated interface into an overly complicated and redundant programming language, its their fault if they should choose to do this, why should I pay for it. The source material is already digital, it just has to be compressed down to Blu-ray "standards", I use quotes there because the word is a joke in my opinion the way it was used, and this compression is far less and quicker than DVD standard, see how that one wasn't quoted because it is a standard. The writing speeds are still kind of dog slow, but they are far faster than DVD was when it first started. Unlike DVD when it first came out a significant portion of the cost of Blu-ray is coming from all the licensing fees tacked on by the format, and DVD isn't completely innocent themselves in this aspect, but BDA is far more of an offender here. There is no reason why Blu-ray shouldn't be lower than what it is now, but the studios are charging a far greater premium on the format to counter act the short comings of the format. Blu-ray has been around for nearly 3 years now, more if you count the soft r/w release in Japan back in '03/'04 which failed, and at the end of that 3 years it has a faster adoption rate, partially due to the fact that people now are far more accepting of optical media than they were in the mid 90's, yet the price has decreased by only about $5 SRP, in comparison to DVD which had dropped by about $15 in 3 years. The price SRP should be about $25-$30, which puts it at the price standard being used by retailers on new releases, not $30-$40 SRP which it is now, this SRP wouldn't be undercutting DVD which is $20-$25 SRP and retail about $15-$20 first week.
3d
Have you heard of a paragraph? I didn't even bother to try and read that.
I just picked up "Priceless" on Blu-ray for $11.99 from Amazon. The DVD sells for $25.99. Weird.
Thats because they can actually sell the DVD at that price, very few Blu-ray users want the movie.