BLU-RAY SALES THREAD: Put all sales figures and comments here! - Page 276  

How is it a re-release on Blu-ray when it had no prior release on Blu-ray? This release has six times the resolution of any previous release, after all.

The Star Wars trilogy had many releases on VHS and laserdisc. But that didn't seem to hurt its sales on DVD.

Sure, NOW no one expects sales to be high. That's because they have seen the actual sales numbers for these catalog titles on Blu-ray. Expectations have been lowered to the point that they were allegedly satisfied with 150,000 units sold for LOTR. That's quite a comedown from the hype and expense lavished on this format in the early days.

For the record, I was not in any way shape or form part of the hype lavished on Blu-ray in the early days.

Trust me on this

What does a 30-50% sales percentage mean when the DVD sales of those titles have slowed down to practically nothing?

I was around for all that...those were the good old days.
I still think HD DVD would have worked better for the studios from a business perspective, but they were blinded by the promise of a third place video game system.

You were attempting to compare a initial release on DVD to a re-release of a title on digital home media (first time on Blu-ray but a re-release in the sense that the title had already been sold on DVD for a decade). Thats apples and oranges IMHO.

You have no sense of perspective of what any realistic expectations are for a re release of any catalog title, and you don't seem to believe anyone who has a different thought than your unannounced expectations.

I personally was not part of any hype for Blu-ray catalog sales expectations and back in the day as a strong HD DVD supporter with daily activity and 1000s of posts here , I would have been very sensitive to any Blu-ray industry or BDA or any prominent Blu-ray insider postings to that fact.

In fact, my specific recollection of things back in the day, was that the claims from Blu-ray backers on catalog Blu-ray sales expectations was suspiciously low, so much so that many neutral and HD DVD fans were concerned about Blu-ray studio commitments to catalog releases on Blu-ray and led to a lot of fears that Blu-ray was destined to primarily be a new release format with a few older PS3 demo friendly catalog titles along the way.

In short, I don't think any serious industry analyst or studio executive ever expected that Blu-ray catalog titles would ever earn on home video re-release anything close to what they did on their DVD release. As a prominent HD DVD supporter back in the day I would have been very sensitive to that.

If you want to assert that it was a major expectation years ago that Blu-ray catalog titles would have high sales rates, you are free to do so, but I don;t think that was the case, and unless you have some links to back up that assertion, I would contend that was really not the case.

Laserdisk, while extremely important in shaping the DVD/Blu-ray future, was never more than a niche market itself. Blu-ray is different: Blu-ray players will completey replace DVD players within about 5 years.

As this happens, and more younger people enter the market, catalog sales will shift toward Blu-ray. Since DVD and Blu-ray are technically and use-case compatible, many titles will remain DVD exclusive, but new masterings and pressings will be Blu-ray, and exclusively so in a few years.

Give it time.

Well, on the surface, it might mean that for those relatively few titles re-released on Blu-ray that the routine maintenance sales and revenues from those titles would double. Eventually that adds up. Plus over time DVD sales attrit and price points for DVD catalog titles drop to bargain bin prices. SO a 30% to 50% unit sales rate Blu-ray unit marketshare might be a lot more revenue share for those titles. If it was a 50:50 split between unit sales of a Blu-ray sku selling for $15-$20 and a DVD selling for $5-$10, then a 50% Blu-ray unit market share would me a lot more revenues and profits per title for the Blu-ray version.

You have to take the Blu-ray $5 price premium into account.

A lot of the DVD sales for old releases just chug along at a 5-10-20k per week range with a few sales per store of the major retailers. Goosing that up to double the volumes across a large number of titles at a higher revenue and profit per unit sold would eventually add up.

Just based on last week ending 4/14/10 as an experiment week with no DVD day and date new releases the floor of routine DVD catalog sales is over $100-120 m per week. Blu-ray is probably only $10-15 per week of routine catalog sales but is steadily increasing. So that might be $110-135 M of routine packaged media sell through a week that is the base that new release sales build on. If Blu-ray just substitutes over time for most of the DVD routine sales and sustains optical disc revenues for retailers and the studios for the longer term then its a win.

I don't think anyone seriously thinks that Blu-ray catalog sales is going to be any sort of a huge windfall to add additional revenues. It will be a win to just substitute for DVD catalog sales for the near future.

One of my primary reasons for supporting HD DVD was the fear that Blu-ray studios would find it uneconomical to release a lot of the older studio titles on Blu-ray and that cheaper more readily available HD DVD production would make it easier to produce those titles on HD DVD. To me, if BD50 production was not solved to be economical (which it eventually was) ready to go dual layer 30GB HD DVD discs that were "good enough" for HD video was a good alternative.

I'm glad it worked out the way it did and 50>30 but I was very skeptical of Blu-ray BD50 replication yields and capacity and Blu-ray studio commitment to the deeper studio catalog.

You sure do give these studio executives a lot of credit. From the books and articles I've read over the years, plus my observations of the business moves they have made, many of them don't have a clue what they are doing, and many subscribe to the theory that being lucky is a lot better than being good. These studio executives-do you think they had any idea that DVD would be so successful? Remember the support given to DIVX, with some of the studios hesitating to support DVD because they didn't see it selling enough to be better than a pay-per-viewing format? Considering the history, do you think the studio executives were ruling out the unqualified success of Blu-ray? 6 TIMES THE RESOLUTION! I totally think that many of these executives were hoping that Blu-ray could largely make up for the decline in the DVD format. And making up for the decline meant not only replacing the sales of the new releases (which wasn't a necessary replacement unless Blu-ray was sold for a substantial premium over the DVD version) and replacing the rapidly declining revenue from the catalog sales.

Oh I agree with you there. I think there is a lot of poor decisions on the part of Hollywood executives and accurate predictions of what Blu-ray would do might have been all over the place. But for someone who has been following HD DVD and Blu-ray since just before HD DVDs launch, I can tell you my recollection is that expectations for catalog sales volumes were never as high as you assert, and I had some significant conversations with some studio people, mostly on the Universal Paramount HD DVD side, but also from Warner and Sony and I also kept up on all the press releases and trade articles and conferences. I can say with certainty that noone expected a Blu-ray release of something that already was out on DVD to get anywhere near the volumes. That would be expecting that all consumers would want to upgrade every DVD they ever bought to Blu-ray, which is absurd.

Its also out of the realm of possibility that any new Blu-ray release ( or a re release of a previously released DVD title) would sell the same volumes as a original DVD release because the size of the ownership base of Blu-ray player owners is much lower than the pool of DVD owners. It can hardly be expected that a Blu-ray catalog title is going to have the same sales as a DVD release when the size of the Blu-ray owners with HDTVs to sell to is a small fraction of DVD owners with standard TVs at the time of the DVD release.

A price premium was supposed to help. Sell fewer units, but make up for it with higher prices. That doesn't appear to be working out either. The studios largely gave up on high pricing in favor of mainstream pricing, so now they are stuck with a format that doesn't sell near as much as DVD and doesn't appear to be much, if any better off for pricing margin than DVD was at this time in its life cycle. In fact, people seem to want Blu-ray versions of movies to be cheaper than they originally paid for the DVD versions, because they just don't have as much incentive to buy the Blu-ray version after already buying the movie on DVD.

I largely disagree with this.

There may have been some studio thinking that Blu-ray represented a totally new channel and revenue stream. This was unrealistic, given that Blu-ray is basically DVD on steroids with the same use cases and marketing strategies.

The fact that Blu-ray does not sell "near as much" as DVD is irrelevant. DVD did not sell "near as much" as VHS for some years. It is the trends that are important.

I agree that people may expect to pay less for a catalog Blu-ray than they originally paid for a DVD; studios have been unrealistic about their catalog Blu-ray pricing. But, after all, the DVD copies of older catalog titles are often selling for $7-10 at retail. For such titles, pricing such as $13.99 will both attract buyers and make new profits for the studios.

I originally paid $50 for Die Hard on Laserdisk. I didn't buy it on Blu-ray when first released but did buy it for about $13 when it was available at that price. That was found money for the studios since I had no intention of buying a DVD at any price whatsoever.

Blu-ray sales are often very impressive. Here are some data points:

1. On new key titles, we are often seeing 30% and more sales on Blu-ray, with the long tail apparently favoring Blu-ray even more on titles like The Dark Knight. 30% is much more than the player penetration at this time.
2. The African Queen appears to have sold about 30% Blu-ray in its first outing on DVD and Blu-ray (making it an interesting example). That must be an impressive number to the studios, and at higher price points. Queen is a perennial that will continue to sell over the years.
3. Toy Story and Toy Story Two are selling very well on Blu-ray. These are titles that were very well saturated into the marketplace on DVD.
4. LOTR impressed me with its initial Blu-ray sales. Given that this is the TE version, and given somewhat negative reviews about technical quality, I was impressed with the sales. (I did not buy it.) The LOTR titles have been and continue to be sold on DVD for low prices. I am seeing the EE editions on DVD for about $7 at retail. How much more would one have expected from the current Blu-ray release under these circumstances?
5. Avatar has been reported (by James Cameron) to have higher pre-orders for Blu-ray than DVD. It will be interesting to see the sales data in the next few weeks.

All of rlsmith's comments above x2.

Blu-ray pricing for new releases is at the consumer established retail price points plus an average premium of $5, so the studios have been able to establish a modest premium for Blu-ray releases.

In the case of older deep catalog Blu-ray titles, the studios and retailers (who actually set the retail price points consumers see and pay) have been able to price many Blu-ray releases at an effective even higher first week premium over the legacy DVD sku, at a new to Blu-ray initial set point of $14.99 to $29.99 and harvest some initial release week sales and then retailers have currently been rotating in a selection of $9.99-$14.99 Blu-ray titles as low price tokens on the shelves, while those same DVD skus are often in the $5 territory in the bargain bins. So from even the low end to the high end, the DVD to Blu-ray pricing comparison for apples to apples DVD to Blu-ray version of the same movie title is adjusting to around a $5-10 price premium above the DVD sku price in the titles life cycle.

Thats better than nothing.

You just do not understand how the studio and retailer relationship works for DVD pricing though, in many cases the retailers take a pricing hit for sales promotion reasons and the studios get their consistent share off the MSRP.

In other cases, the reduced DVD pricing is for either old inventory long considered dormant by the studios and long off their books or its discounted skus selections of legacy titles meant for discounted sales from the get go. But in many cases of rolling DVD inventory its retailers not studios selecting the price points.

Interesting reading. I'm just an average consumer, who happens to be curious about how the marketplace works with regard to BD pricing...and not being armed with knowledge, it sometimes defies logic.

An example is pricing at Amazon, where about 90% of my BD purchases (approx 290) have been made. I'm on their site daily, and usually several times each day. At times, some of their BD titles will fluctuate daily, if only by a dollar or two. I assume that these adjustments are software controlled, given the vast inventory on their site, but it's still bewildering, as for the logic behind it.

I've also noticed a significant decrease in the discount they're applying to many titles. Sure, they still have a decent percentage of titles priced as low as ever, but discounts from MSRP that used to be reliably in the 28% to 33% range, are now as slim as 9% (for some Criterion titles), and for a few titles, there's NO discount from MSRP. This has had a significant impact on my buying habits. Amazon seems to have a habit of unpredictable and short lived price swings (measured by days, not weeks), but this pattern has been holding since it began five or six weeks ago.

Is this a matter of Amazon realizing that they can afford the action taken, as in...they've been offering too good a discount? Or perhaps other market forces?

There is an effective price premium between an individual titles DVD and Blu-ray versions of around $5 now. Yes, Blu-ray versions are not as high as DVD versions were on release in many cases, but they are still more than the same titles DVD versions on the shelf.


It kinda is irrelevant if Blu-ray pricing is on average less than DVD pricing , even if its true, which I have my doubts, as Blu-ray is in the same market as DVD and is bound to a degree by consumer price expectations and also competitive market factors like $1 per night Redbox rentals and Netflix subscriptions. In fact, I'll did up the info from the current DVDreleaseReport to look at the DVD to Blu-ray pricing trending.

I do agree that retailers and studios may have hoped to get a higher pricing premium for day and date Blu-ray and catalog releases, and they kept that up in 2007 and 2008 and even early 2009 for a while, but retailers have now transitioned to a more mainstream pricing model as Blu-ray has gained more household penetration and has built upon its annual 4Q holiday season sales success for the last couple years.


Yes that is the case. Consumer expectations have been reset to current new release pricing levels and comparison to what the titles DVD version might be bought for today. But thats an unrealistic expectation that consumers would want to double dip and re purchase a catalog title they already own at the new release day and date pricing the DVD title originally commanded when it was a new brand spanking new DVD day and date release. Maybe their was some faint hope in the past on the part of some optimistic scenarios by some at the studios and at retail, but that position was shared by few people, if any from the industry and exactly no analysts thought that was going to be the case.

But that does not need to happen for Blu-ray catalog sales to be successful.

At one low end the costs for re releasing the studios titles per period on high definition Blu-ray in aggregate needs to cover the costs, and that is certainly the case. Its even better than that that only a few thousand - ten thousand units basically cover a basic Blu-ray catalog release and virtually all studio Blu-ray re releases cover that spread.

At another level the Blu-ray version needs to sustain a higher price point than the DVD version and sell faster than the legacy DVD sku to encourage retailers to replace the DVD sku on the shelves or to stock more Blu-ray. That premium and sales Blu-ray unit marketshare trend title to title is clearly there but as DVD is still selling well the urgency to replace the DVD inventory at retail has diminished. As long as money is to be made on selling DVD the retailers are in no hurry to abandon it and Blu-ray will slowly gain more retail floor space over time.

At the highest consideration the sum of all Blu-ray catalog sales revenue and unit wise will grow over time to replace a lot of the DVD routine catalog sales. But keep in mind a lot of that DVD sales per week and DVD base revenues is on very low margin low profit low price point discounted DVD sales so higher margin higher priced not so heavily discounted Blu-ray sales bring more profit per unit and the reported revenue figures have embedded in them higher studio and retail profits on the Blu-ray side than an equal amount of DVD revenue and a given Blu-ray unit sale generates more profit per sku as well. Its a different mix for a new release and catalog titles in the revenue per unit allocated for retailers and studios, but across the board a given Blu-ray sale per unit is more profitable than a given DVD point of sale unit transaction.

All of the above and also you have to account for seasonal factors.

Out of all of the retailers in the country you have to just assume that for online its Amazon thats at the top of their game for effective pricing strategies and for brick and mortar retail its Walmart. As they also have large marketshare as well, Best Buy and Target also are adjusting their pricing strategies for Blu-ray as they more it from a first adopter niche product to a more general mainstream higher volume sales category.

With Blu-ray growing in sales year after year, in effect now what you are seeing is every quarter now is a new era and everybody is trying to see what the best strategies are. Its what the major retailers are very good at in adjusting the price/volume equation to maximize revenues and profit and as Blu-ray has become more mainstream they have moved from consistent first adopter low volume high pricing to a more nimble mainstream higher volume lower pricing model where its now worth the effort to try to see what pricing mix structure works best to generate sales and profits.

In the specific case of Amazon for their pricing strategies, I would surmise that they are also trying to see what the best mix of price points are a growing number of available longer tail Blu-ray titles. They have more in inventory than a brick and mortar retailer so they can mix pricing points on over 2000 Blu-ray titles. When there were 400 titles back in 2007 and 2008 they may have offered a flat discount for more titles. When they have 2000 or more, they seem to be offering less of a flat discount over all and have at this point varied things up more by offering even steeper discounts on a rotating selection of Blu-ray titles each week to spur interest.

If Blu-ray players are somewhere in the range of 16% household penetration its kind silly to expect unit comparisons for a re release on Blu-ray to be at a new release DVD level at the moment anyway.

Working on new chart for the set, relevant for this discussion of 1Q 2010

Its the year to year comparison of the DVD and Blu-ray units that are on the weekly Top 20 Sellers charts that Home Media Magazine creates of the Nielsen Videoscan first alert data.

Kosty,

I sure hope you are being rewarded for all this work. The information that you post here must take a lot of time and effort to collect, compile, organize and post.

I for one, greatly appreciate all you efforts.

And if I read Kosty's previous info correctly, this is despite an YoY increase in box office performance for the movies released in the first quarter.

Second quarter will be interesting, but third quarter will probably be a more accurate reflection of where the Home Video market is heading.

Second quarter numbers will probably not be the best to determine trending due to the impact of Avatar and the market (and consumer) needing time to adjust to the recently introduced sell-through window.

You cannot discount the PS3. The studios certainly did not when deciding which format to support.

So the range is 16%-30%.

I agree that it is not fair to compare DVD new release to Blu-ray new release at the present time.

What is fair is to compare DVD new release (including titles already released multiple times on other formats) to Blu-ray new releases (including titles already released multiple times on other formats) when DVDs market penetration was ~ 22%.

...resulting from people paying $12 instead of $8 to see 3D movies.

Study: 33% of Box Office Generated by 3D Movies
http://www.homemediamagazine.com/3-d...d-movies-19015

Increased ticket prices are certainly a factor, and one I mentioned in a previous post. That does not change that the studios must surely understand that the current market is not delivering Home Video return anywhere near what it used to.

And I am certain that this is not the first time there has been an increase in ticket prices since the introduction of DVD.

And it also does not change that the box office was up primarily due to a new tier of movie ticket pricing - the tier for 3D movies. It is THE reason why the Box Office was up. Nothing else contributed nearly as much to it being up than 3D did.


And I am certain that no other gradual increase since the introduction of DVD has been as drastic as the premium price increase of 3D movie tickets vs. normal movie tickets.

Not talking about $.50 here.

We are talking about anywhere from $4-7 dollars more to see the same movie, but in 3D.

For Cinemark in the DC area...Clash of the Titans:

2D - Adult Evening $10.25
3D - Adult evening $13.25
3D XD - Adult Evening $14.50

Same movie...3 different prices.

IMAX 3D is the ultimate overkill. Alice in Wonderland IMAX 3D (King of Prussia PA) - $17.50.

Avatar didn't shoot to #1 because of the cast's acting chops...and it didn't make more money because way more people saw it than the previous record holders. It was #1 and made more money because of 3D, and the premium pricing of 3D tickets. This is undeniably true.
http://boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=2667

I don't get compensated for this in anyway, its a hobby to me and I do it while I'm doing other stuff, but the fact that I do it has been immensely rewarding to me for a lot of reasons and its opened up a lot of professional contacts that have been useful in many other ways. I do in my day job get lots of information thats useful here, but in no way do I have a professional profit motive in any of this, I just interact with a lot of people who have information on these areas and my interest in these areas is well known to a lot of insider and professional contacts who deluge me with useful information. Plus my work with retailers and other professionals give me some useful contacts that help out a lot as a lot of the senior ones I know are home theater enthusiasts too and got to know me during the format war days long ago.

Besides its stuff I have been interested for many years now, and I have it so much of a routine now that its quite frankly just easier to keep it up on a weekly basis. I also find that being able to write off the cuff on demand every day has been amazingly useful for my writing skills in other professional demands.

Besides no one else can really keep it up at this point in the way I can, so I always feel that its better to share anyway. I always been a high definition movie fan first and home theater enthusiast and I've found ways to benefit from my passion there as the years have moved along, but getting compensated for posting has never been one of them. I do it because I like it, have something useful to share and I hope its appreciated. I attend a lot of industry events though because of professional obligations and maintain a lot of contacts and have a reason to gather the information I do on home theater and high definition options. But being directly compensated has never been part of that. Quite frankly you could not pay me enough to post in the volumes I do and keep this stuff up. I have to want to do it for you all and myself.

Thanks for the support and I'm glad you appreciate the data analysis and any insights and information that I share with you all.

Wow you guys have gotten wordy lately. One of the pricing things that got missed ( I think) is that if you price to high people will just steal it instead.


I got your back here Kosty. I can vouch that you were flat out wrong.

Not wrong but misunderstood from a lot of the real zealot Blu-ray fanatics at the time.

I always liked Blu-ray but enjoyed HD DVD as well and thought HD DVD was a viable path toward high definition media adoption and assessed that HD DVD could prosper if Blu-ray could not scale up to mass market production levels because of needing to build up its infrastructure from scratch.

I always stated that if Blu-ray could solve its teething development cost and infrastructure issues its superior technology and specifications would be nice to have, which they are. I also was concerned about the economics of Blu-ray catalog title releases where a lot of my interest lies. I was very concerned that the production costs and replication capacity of Blu-ray dual layer discs would stop a lot of of pre 1997 studio releases from ever being released on Blu-ray, so I liked HD DVD as an alternative there until it was clear that that issue was with Blu-ray.

The one real thing I think I was wrong though about was HD DVD dual layer discs and the standard HD DVD internet connectivity being a strong addition to the format constraints of HD DVD and 30GB discs. With the low bar now for BD-Live usage, I think the network usage of HD DVD players for additional content was significantly overrated and if the studios are not doing it now for Blu-ray BD-Live they were not going to do it for HD DVD.

I was number #1 on the HD DVD Zealot Tier One ranking list (not the Tier 0 list though) back in the day from our friends on the other site. I was alleged to be faux neutral in the format war but in reality was supposed to be a secret Blu-ray hater , or something like that. Alas, my passion for home theater and high definition movies was always understood.

Always like Blu-ray back them too, and enjoyed Blu-ray movies, but I was concerned about a number of Blu-ray teething issues and absolutely thought that the hype about Blu-ray winning the sales ratio fight each week was over dramatic as the volumes for both HD DVD and Blu-ray were so pitifully small in 2006 and 2007 that it did not matter much, and PS3 usage by itself should have accounted for much more.

But obviously that all changed when BD50 issues were solved and Sony spent the money to solve the issues. I'm glad Toshiba pulled the plug when it did.

BTW, absolutely glad that Blu-ray solved the problems I was concerned about and has achieved greater success than I had hoped for HD DVD even reaching at this point in time.

From my perspective if you liked HD DVD back in the day, you should really love Blu-ray now as its everything HD DVD could do only better and at 50 x the current sales volume and household penetration already.

Again...

That does not change that the studios must surely understand that the current market is not delivering Home Video return anywhere near what it used to.

HMM is up with the rest of the data from the week ending 4/11/10.



The lack of any sales for new releases, because there really was no major new release, as shown in the graphic above for the Top 20 unit sales, really explains a lot of the revenue fall in the year to year comparisons. As stated above its also a calender quirk that last years Easter holiday sales week in 2009 is being compared to this years week after Easter slow release week in 2010. The lack of new releases to home video for the week ending 4/11/10 magnified that seasonal YTY comparison artifact.






http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ques...startid=Cover2