Criterion and Dual Format

[rspaight]

Does anyone know why Dvd pressing costs have dropped?

Most likely excess capacity, since sales are down.

[CSM126]

Jesus, did the whiners throw this big of a fit when the major studios went dual-format? Grow up. You paid $39.99 for DVDs like And The Ship Sails On without this much of a fit ten years ago. Criterion spoiled DVD buyers with a 10 dollar drop in price for a year or two and now they're whining that things are back to the old price while at the same time providing them a higher quality disc they'll probably use in a couple years when the DVD player shits the bed. If this forum had hash tags, this thread would be tagged #firstworldproblems

[Lemmy Caution]

Some of you are taking up valuable space on my internet with your posts

You ain't kidding.
This is what I'm getting all day on my basketball forum:

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

[neal]

A dual-format item is guaranteed to waste 50% of its content (waste = lack of use).

This is far from a guarantee, as others have mentioned. I used to rip commentary tracks to listen to them on my iPod and I often travel without a blu-ray player but with a tablet or laptop. An added DVD gives me a lot of additional options that I didn't have before without a blu-capable computer and/or terabytes of available storage.

[MichaelB]

This is far from a guarantee, as others have mentioned. I used to rip commentary tracks to listen to them on my iPod and I often travel without a blu-ray player but with a tablet or laptop. An added DVD gives me a lot of additional options that I didn't have before without a blu-capable computer and/or terabytes of available storage.

Absolutely. In fact, I'd say that the DVD in my BFI dual-format releases gets played considerably more often. And not just because their no-upscaling policy means that some extras are exclusive to the DVD (which in any case doesn't apply to all their releases).

I've almost certainly argued this before, but I have hundreds of two-disc releases where I've never played the second disc - sometimes because I'm not interested in the PR-fluff extras, at many other times because only the main feature has English subtitles and everything on disc two is in Russian, Polish, Hungarian or Chinese. Releases like that are far more "wasteful" (in the strictly dictionary sense of the term) than anything that Criterion is proposing.

[tenia]

Here is an article which says that a study showed that it uses more energy to stream an HD movie than to manufacture and ship a DVD.
http://theweek.com/article/index/248273 ... frigerator" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[matrixschmatrix]

Well, to be fair, that's not accounting for the energy required to watch the DVD.

[domino harvey]

If only whining were a sustainable energy source

[knives]

This board alone could keep an entire village of refrigerators running.

[movielocke]

taking criterion's comment about 60/40 bluray/dvd and extrapolating I thought it might play like this:

Suppose that in the past two years, Criterion's sold 6,000 bluray copies of Seven Samurai and 4,000 DVD copies of Seven Samurai.

Suppose they order in 5,000 copy print runs. That would mean that at some point in the last two years, Criterion has made a second 5,000 copy print run of Seven Samurai. Their current inventory is 4,000 copies on bluray and 1,000 copies on DVD.

That means to sell 10,000 total copies of Seven Samurai they had to produce 15,000 copies of seven samurai.

Had this been a dual format edition, they could have simply made two runs of 5,000 copies and not had 5,000 more copies than what they had sold. Or they could have made a larger initial run and increased their profit margin by reducing the per unit cost.

[jindianajonz]

True, but you could also tinker with the numbers a bit to make the opposite case- for instance, if they sold 12,000 blu and 8,000 dvd with a minimum print of 4,000, there would be no waste.

And this doesn't even get into the issue of weighing the environmental impact of producing excess packages vs excess DVDs. To use your above example, how can anyone really say that the 5000 unsold copies of packaged DVDs is more wasteful than producing 10,000 extra DVD discs?

Without concrete data, all this stuff is just idle speculation and gut feelings.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

On the other hand, let's say Criterion's minimum print run is 7,000 for Blu Ray and DVD. And let's take a popular title like, say, 400 Blows. Imagine for a moment that Criterion has sold 9,000 BDs and 4,000 DVDs. But let's say all of those copies were purchased by me. Now hypothetically speaking, if I took the title to heart, and smashed every disc with a hammer 400 times and then embedded the shards along the top of the cement wall that surrounds my house, would this be adequate for keeping intruders out?

(Let's also imagine that I have ignored the idiomatic meaning of "coups.")

[Anthony]

Is Criterion trying to put Barnes and Noble out of business? As you know, B&N divide their media section between DVD and Blu rays. With DF, they won't know where to put the Criterion DF releases. If they put them in the blu ray section, someone looking for it on DVD will miss out and probably leave without buying anything out of frustration. If they put the DF disc in the DVD section, then someone looking for a release on blu ray will miss out becasue they aren't able to find it, and also leave the store in frustration. Thus B&N looses... and might soon goes out of business due to this horrible blunder on Criterion's part. Thanks Criterion, now we've lost another B&M store. ](*,)

[knives]

Why haven't we banned this idiot yet?

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

I think everyone is feeling sorry for him because of the traumatic brain injury incurred with his excessive use of that emoticon.

[Saturnome]

Is Criterion trying to put Barnes and Noble out of business? As you know, B&N divide their media section between DVD and Blu rays. With DF, they won't know where to put the Criterion DF releases. If they put them in the blu ray section, someone looking for it on DVD will miss out and probably leave without buying anything out of frustration. If they put the DF disc in the DVD section, then someone looking for a release on blu ray will miss out becasue they aren't able to find it, and also leave the store in frustration. Thus B&N looses... and might soon goes out of business due to this horrible blunder on Criterion's part. Thanks Criterion, now we've lost another B&M store. ](*,)

Hahahahahahah

hahah

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This is amazing
Yet I don't want to ever read something like that again

[Jeff]

Barnes and Noble is not going to need any help from Criterion to go out of business. Their days are numbered. For the record, they're going to be thrilled to have fewer skus and a smaller inventory to manage -- more space for the unprofitable Nook nooks that dominate their stores.

[Moe Dickstein]

And so long as B&N order more than one copy, they can distribute them between the sections as they see fit.

[movielocke]

In the near future, and completely unrelated to Criterion's DF choice, BN will probably just do what Best Buy did and consolidate DVD and Bluray into a single section.

[Moe Dickstein]

So long as they keep a separate Criterion area - The mixing of formats and splitting into genres has made Best Buy nearly impossible to browse

[med]

I honestly enjoyed that last Anthony post. Beautiful.

[jindianajonz]

I dunno guys, I think he has a point. I am tired of big evil corporations like Criterion trying to put small mom and pop stores like Barnes and Noble out of business.

[cdnchris]

I laughed because I found it absurd someone actually thinks B&N is only around because of Criterion. But then the only time I hear about people shopping there is during Criterion sales.

Hmmmmm.

[CSM126]

Man, I remember the day when my local Barnes and Noble finally torn down the book section for good and expanded the Criterion Collection section all throughout the store, so that one half was all DVD and the other was all Blu-Ray. "If anything were ever to happen to Criterion", the manager told me, tearfully, "We'd be doomed. Like if they consolidated into dual format packages. WHERE WOULD WE PUT THEM?!?!". He collapsed into my arms and sobbed gently. "Where would we put them?"

[domino harvey]

Every time I go to a Barnes and Noble it's crowded, but mostly by families. I am guessing most of us don't notice it if you're just making a bee-line to the movies section, but there's a reason their youth book section keeps getting bigger and bigger...