peerpee wrote:Countries not doing too well with Blu-ray could definitely leverage more sales by better explaining what the fuck the technology is all about. A very limited number of people fully understand the technology, and even fewer understand that their equipment needs tweaking in order to view Blu-ray optimally.
TV manufacturers have a lot to answer for with their MotionFlow shite, ambient backlight, and pisspoor factory settings all set to default right out of the box. It wouldn't be at all hard for them to have a "24fps 35mm Blu-ray" setting which automatically turns all that shite off and effectively calibrates your display for optimal Blu-ray viewing.
That's exactly my main trouble with the whole story, I couldn't agree more with you on that, and it is also a point tackled by Wild Side in their ITW.
There are also lots of clichés that still live because no editor or manufacturer did enough advertising explaining what is what. I mean, BD is close what ? 8 yr old now ? and I still hear too many people complaining about grain and no understanding why there are so many old movies on BD. When you think that it takes 5 minutes and a couple of exemples to make them understand, you tend to think that all these years are an awful lot of wasted time.
vsski wrote:I live in the US but travel a lot internationally and since I love movies whenever possible I visit larger stores that are known to have a good selection of DVDs and BDs. And from my observations, although I have never tried to proof it with statistics, the number of BDs compared to DVDs in the US is by far greater than any other country I have been to in the last years. The UK is probably second, but this past New Year I was in France (Paris and Strasbourg) and was shocked to see how few BDs there were in even the biggest Virgin and FNAC stores. So for anyone living in the US the situation is clearly not comparable to the rest of the world.
I always understood that there was much more advertisement for BD in the US than elsewhere, but that's certainly due to the fact that it's a market so big that it easily absorb almost any production / distribution / manufacturing oncost. Whereas in France, when you do a catalog release in BD, you're stuck with 1000 copies sold... WS said they were happy to have now sold 10 000 DVDs + BDs of THe Night Porter but it took 3 years. 4 flies of grey velvet, it's 1200 BDs sold. That's definitely not a lot, and I'm quite sure than even some of the slowest seller titles at Criterion sells more than this.
matrixschmatrix wrote:From some figures posted at the High Digest forum, it looks as though in the US blu has between a 25% and 33% market share of titles sold, and has gotten as high as 45% on weeks when some popular blu set was released.
We also have a few titles having a 50%+ share of BD VS DVD, usually big titles like The Avengers or Iron Man 2, but that's about it.
Anyway, if anyone wants to have a look, you have French figures here in PDF for
2008,
2009,
2010,
2011 and
2012.
I'm not saying that it's bad though, just that it's far away from a success, and that the current BD market in France is quite cold, jeopardizing even some releases. For instance, Gaumont was supposed to release Lola Montès in BD before Criterion. FNAC told them "no, we won't take it, it won't sell enough". Done. It's only going to be released this year.