Blu news

[Mr Peabody]

I'm carrying tales over from Bluray.com

* Denon will be putting out two new BR players in July $499.00 & $699.00, they will actually feature the latest CA decs this time. Still not quite budget pieces are they?

* An article sited that disc formats are where the majority of movie purchases are being made. Not so good news for download fanboys.

* Surprise to me, Best Buy is #1 in Blu-ray title sales followed by Wal-mart and then Amazon. This tells me that either people haven't wised up to buying online or there's a lot of impulse purchasers. I will have to do some investigating, in the past Amazon has kicked major butt on pricing. I did see that BB is selling the Underworld Trilogy for only $2.00 more than Amazon. So has BB caught on? The Wal-mart I go into shows still near full retail prices which is odd for WM.

* Music BR Return To Forever has a Blu concert out of their last years tour, this should be great. Nightwish has one coming out. I personally would hope it was old footage with former vocalist Tarja but my guess is not.

[kexodusc]

Interesting. I'm not surprised that BestBuy is #1.
Think about it - when you buy a BluRay player, you want to own at least 1 BluRay right away to watch, right?
In terms of pricing...with new releases and during various sales I've found BB sometimes to be as competitive as Amazon, particularly when shipping costs are factored in, but even that isn't necessary. Sometimes for year old flicks they're close in price, but you can buy the movie today, which does take advantage of convenience and impulse buying. For the most part I'd expect to pay $5 less for a BluRay from Amazon though. Pricing on some of the older titles at BB are almost extortion!

And then there's WALL-E, $19.99 at Amazon, $39.99 at BB...

[L.J.]

I don't mind going to BB if the price is right. Amazon has always seemed the best place to purchase BR discs but I wanna watch my movie today. I hate waiting around for a new release. I remember my copy of Batman Begins got lost in the mail. It came 3 weeks later. I was so pissed. All that hassle to save $5. Unless the savings are more than $5, I usually hunt down the cheapest price at a local store.

[Woochifer]

I'm carrying tales over from Bluray.com

* Denon will be putting out two new BR players in July $499.00 & $699.00, they will actually feature the latest CA decs this time. Still not quite budget pieces are they?

Denon's never been a budget player and never will. If anything, the price points are declining faster than they did for the DVD format. I'll put it to you this way, the BD format is in its 3rd year and Denon's entry level BD player is already down to $500. When I bought my first DVD player -- an entry level Denon player -- the list price on that unit was $500, and that was in 2001, the DVD format's 5th year.


* An article sited that disc formats are where the majority of movie purchases are being made. Not so good news for download fanboys.

Notsurprising. Downloads are overhyped and hardly worth discussing at this point. (I mean, CDs are supposedly dead if you believe what you read on the internet, yet CD revenues continue to outpace downloads by a wide margin), They are not a major market force, and won't be until the current balkanized distribution setup begins to adopt some more uniform standards -- i.e., more ubiquitous studio/vendor alliances, format standards, multiple support on set-top boxes and HDTVs, etc.

The downloading crowd loves to pat itself on the back, yet they are clueless as to how complicated the current landscape is for an average consumer, with multiple services, pricing tiers, and hardware support. And the HD content is currently very limited to begin with. Until it becomes simpler for consumers, downloading will continue to see slow adoption.


* Surprise to me, Best Buy is #1 in Blu-ray title sales followed by Wal-mart and then Amazon. This tells me that either people haven't wised up to buying online or there's a lot of impulse purchasers. I will have to do some investigating, in the past Amazon has kicked major butt on pricing. I did see that BB is selling the Underworld Trilogy for only $2.00 more than Amazon. So has BB caught on? The Wal-mart I go into shows still near full retail prices which is odd for WM.

Like downloading, online shopping is another area that gets incessantly hyped beyond what the actual market share and sales justify. The combined market share for remote retailing (which includes all forms of mail order, catalog, online, and direct sales) remains below 10%. Video sales are more slanted towards online vendors, but B&M sales still dwarf the online sales by a wide margin (IIRC, it's somewhere around 4-to-1).

When the dotcom boom and bust occurred a decade ago, the hype was already in full swing despite the pathetic sales figures that drove nearly all of the publicly traded dotcom retailers out of business. I would constantly get clients challenging my consumer spending assumptions on retail market studies, until I showed them the actual sales figures for the publicly traded e-tailers and compared them with the data for B&M stores. It wasn't even close. And even now, aside from Amazon, very few pure play online vendors (i.e., the ones with no ties to a B&M chain) make any kind of a market impact.

Amazon has decent pricing, but that doesn't mean that they always carry the lowest price on everything. Plus, you cannot underestimate the pull of instant gratification, and the need for consumers to see and touch something before they buy.

Best Buy has decent sale pricing and loss leader pricing during the week of release. It's all a matter of knowing when to buy, and what to buy. I typically shop at Best Buy and Fry's. Their regular pricing is not great, so I check the ads for their current deals and shop accordingly. They also have good bargain pricing on older titles.