It's sort of odd to hear about this now, but for whatever reason, it seems that some studios are looking to bundle traditional DVDs with Blu-ray Discs in order to broaden appeal and gently ease people into consuming BDs. As you very well know, this tactic was
heavily used during the HD DVD era, but it's definitely not as prominent with Blu-ray... yet, anyway. Reportedly, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment along with Lionsgate and MGM Home Entertainment are all prepping rather large releases in the Blu-ray / DVD 2-disc form, with Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment -- who is credited with pioneering the practice last fall -- hoping to release about seven of the bundles throughout 2009. Fox is even taking things a step further by tossing in Digital Copy on top of a BD and a DVD with
Marley & Me. Mary Daily, the studio's executive VP of marketing for North America, noted that it's simply looking to become "flexible to adapt to the changing [habits]" of the consumer. Honestly, we love the idea of tossing a DVD in at little to no extra cost; there's hardly a better way to convince people to try Blu-ray Discs than to include one with the purchase of their DVD, if you will.
[Image courtesy of
Porhomme]
posted February 23rd 2009 10:03AM
I wonder when they realized that the lagging sales weren't just due to lack of interest, but a combination of lack of discretionary income in this economy along with cheaper alternatives, like streaming and renting (netflix/blockbuster).
The HD DVD combo discs were the best solution for people that build disc collections, so this 'combo case' should fill that bill. As it is now, I just netflix them, since I'm not sure blu will be around unless they get more creative with their pricing and products. This is a good step though.
its horrible feeling that am looking on old films actually all films on blu-ray i ve seen them all and i really dont want buy them even when wil be cheap
am interested about latest films
I prefer the digital copy with my bluray purchases. While I do agree with you Kumar, I get almost all movies via netflix. There are the ones I do purchase. The digital copy, allows me to put it on my IPod Touch and be able to stream it to other tv's in my house. While I still have the high def quality for my main room.
"Fox is even taking things a step further by tossing in Digital Copy on top of a BD and a DVD with Marley & Me."
Some Disney movie already did that.
Seems like they're just looking for more reasons to charge more for the movie or not to lower the price. Like Disney said before, if we give them more stuff (that no one actually wants) we can charge more for it!
"Honestly, we love the idea of tossing a DVD in at little to no extra cost"
Are you crazy? I don't. I'd rather they NOT include it and lower the price. I'd sure be likely to buy a few more.
Shouldn't the headline read, "More studios MOVE towards Blu-ray / DVD Combo Packs"?
He did change the article to read ""More studios MOVE towards Blu-ray / DVD Combo Packs", could you please tell me what the title was before he changed it?
well i live for digital copy. like kane said earlier, i put it on my phone and watch the movie at work all day. now i live a very boring life, and being able to have the movie on my phone, legally, with the chapters and stuff is truly nice. i am not mister money bags. 30 dollars is an investment. no matter the movie i will hesitate to purchase is it does not have digital copy.
This is a great move. My biggest hold up on purchasing BD media, is the incompatability with the SUV DVD player, the upscaler at the second home. Basically, I am limited to the BD player in the theatre room. This would definately prompt me to buy more BD discs.
I like it! Include BD, DVD, and Digital Copy all in one package, I'm in!
I like the idea of this for families with in-car or Portable DVD players. I don't have kids yet, and I pretty much stopped using my Portable DVD player because I stopped buying DVDs 2 years ago when I got my PS3. I personally find the Digital Copy more useful because it will work on my laptop and iPod. At home, I only have 2 TVs, one with a BD Player, one with a PS3, so I don't really need the DVD there.
I think what Disney is doing is quite smart- DVD and Digital Copy included with the BD. That way you get as much flexibility as you want, and I don't mind paying $5 more for that. I may even dig my portable DVD player out of the closet for my vacation this summer.
I like the Blu-Ray Combo packs espically for the kids movies, they can watch it on the big screen in the living room on blu ray, or they can take the dvd copy in the car or in another room where we dont have a blu ray player.
I guess they don't exspect BD players to come down in price much soon? If BD players were less we could just buy other players. You know over a year ago I bought a HD DVD player for $99. I wonder how cheap HD DVD would be now if they still made them?
Anyway...once BD players come under $70 I will buy another and I am sure others will put more in their homes and the need for DVD's drops. But I bet Toshiba is happy to see DVD's in BD sells.
Can someone pleeeeeeaz explain the reasoning behind this to me?
- Person buys a blu-ray player...probably because they want to, i don't know, play blu rays on it.
- Person goes to store to buy a blu ray movie...only to find that he has to buy a dvd with it AND a digital copy.
- Person thinks "I bought a blu ray player for blu rays, not dvds!? Why the hell are they forcing me to buy old technology, the technology I decided to move away from when I bought a blu ray player, to get this movie?!! Why not just take out all the SHIT and sell it cheaper?"
It's interesting to see the Blu-ray folks struggle to replicate all the things HD DVD did 18 months ago. Only Blu-ray makes it all more expensive and more complicated than HD DVD had it.
"Can someone pleeeeeeaz explain the reasoning behind this to me?"
Sure, no problem.
Many households include multiple TVs. Not all are HD, not all have Blu-ray players. So, if you want a disc to play on everything you have to buy a regular DVD. If people think they have to buy both formats for every movie, they will stick with DVD. Pretty much lose-lose.
So, give them both disc formats at once, and they'll be far more inclined to move up.
This is the reason HD DVD did what they did, and why HD DVD had good penetration into households with kids (at least where the PS3 wasn't a factor).
This is fine, but if they insist on doing this, there should be an optional package without the extra crap in it. Especially if they just use it as a reason to keep the price where it is or increase it. I do not want ANY of those extra features. I just want an inexpensive, high quality movie on BD without any extra crap shoved down my throat. Is that so hard?
Agreed, also you have to consider how many people have dvd players in there car. They aren't going to be upgrading to blu-ray any time soon. This gets those people to splurge if they want to enjoy hd at home and the same movie for the kids in the car.
I agree with some of the other posters here, and I think bundling the movies together is just adding more confusion to the market place and making the product far too expensive.
It's the old KISS scenario 'Keep It Simple Stupid', but then blu ray has always lent towards a expensive package catering for the more affluent, hardly a recipe to cater for the masses and to break the shackles of being a niche.
I'd rather have a combination disk that can run on either Blu-ray or DVD players, and for industry to completely phase out DVD-only disks.
Also if Sony is smart they'll throw in a UMD or a steep discount on the UMD version to boost the PlayStation Portable as a mobile movie device.
UMD??? Now you've gone off the deep end. You must be kidding me. UMD has been nothing but a failure. If it wasn't for the fact that PSP games come on UMD, that disc format would not even exist. Everywhere I go, UMD movies are on clearance for $5 or less. Even at those prices, they're still overpriced considering you can buy the better DVD version.
Can you imagine what the cost would be of a combo blu ray DVD??
The industry would tank overnight
Rob, you're right that UMD is hurting as a format right now.
I think a major reason for that was that they were FAR over priced, often more than the DVD version, which was insane given their lower resolution and lack of extras. They should have been made in huge numbers to take advantage of economies of scale, and to allow freebie giveaways that would have driven PSP, and subsequent UMD, purchases.
In effect, that's what I'm urging Sony to do still at this point.
Joy, another way to keep the pricing too high and prevent BR from achieving mass market acceptance. Greedy idiots just don't get that they need to lower the cost of the software prices at retail so the movies can be impulse buys...especially in today's economy. So how much will they jack the price for these convenient combo packs?
I've got one BR player, and one HD set. My DVD player is sitting in a closet and will likely never see the light of day. If I did get a second television, I would just get another BR player since the prices are finally becoming affordable. Packaging a DVD version of the film with the BR disk is pointless.
I don't care about BD Live
I don't care about director commentaries
I don't care about ring tones or pc content package
I really don't care about most of the extras they package on BR discs.
I don't want or need a DVD version of a BR movie I purchase.
Give me a high quality HD movie with possibly some deleted scenes at a reasonable cost. All the combo packaging is going to do is drive the prices up, not down. Bad move!
It's all about price... PRICE PRICE PRICE
I'm that coveted demographic... a 26 year old male. I'm still in school, I make a little less than $50K/year, and I'm a major gear head. I have a 50" plasma in my living room with a pretty nice sound system and a 40" LCD in my bedroom. I have a PS3 connected downstairs and plan on hooking up a second upstairs once they release a slim model. I have a really large DVD collection and maybe 15 Blu-ray movies. I've jumped on the bandwagon, but out of all of my friends I'm the only one who has. Almost all of my friends have HDTVs in their living rooms now, and they appreciate what Blu-ray has to offer, but the cost is holding them back. Not the cost of the players, the cost of the Blu-rays themselves. I think Blu-ray has a bright future, even if movie prices stay elevated for another year or two, but aggressive pricing now would certainly help with penetration in the short term.
Anybody realize that this is just a way to increase the SRP from $34.99 back up to $39.99 by only increasing the cost of production by about $1 . This is just a desperate ploy to try to increase profit margins by packaging it up to make it look like a better deal, "Buy Blu-ray and we'll give you this $19.99 DVD for free" but in point of fact they are giving you a DVD which isn't actually worth $19.99. It brings up the question, how can profits be all that good with a format when they are adding a DVD as an extra selling point. Even though HD DVD did implement the combo Disc, the final outcome would have been failure because for the most part many people wouldn't ever use the DVD portion of the media.
Strange how people are mostly supportive of this concept now, while when HD DVD did the same damn thing the vitriol from the Blu backers was overwhelming.
The only problem with this is that they will increase the price. They are definitely not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. They saw that regular BD sales are bad and now they are including DVD version to boost the price.
I welcome DVD/BD combo ONLY if they keep the prices as regular BDs. That was the whole point with HD DVD. Even though the idea is the same, HD DVD at that time included DVD version for pretty much free as WB was first to match the prices to regular releases then.
This is a good thing, again, only if they keep the prices lower or on par with regular BD prices.
But i think we all know the answer to that. Not gonna happen.
What I assume will happen is they will kill off regular BDs since they are forced to drop the prices on these significantly and they will just continue releasing DVD/BD combos at a premium.
I hate this idea. This is one of the things that rubbed me the wrong way when I supported HD DVD. Blu-ray Discs are expensive enough as it is and now they're going to add a SDVD version I will not use? Not to mention B.S. Digital Copies!
Are the movie studios really trying to promote BD, or, just rape us at the cash register/check out page?
Wow yeah this is a waste of money, resources, and a sorry excuse to jack up prices.
Give me Blu-ray without stuffing in extras that bloat the MSRP, and I'll buy lots. I'd rather buy two bare bones discs at 19.99 MSRP, than one feature packed silliness at $40 MSRP.
I know this would get my parents on board. Also, for people such as myself, who'll never watch the DVD version while I have BD, it would be nice to ebay the DVD copies (assuming the premium is smaller than the separate purchase of said DVD).
You going to use an old netflix envelope to ship that dvd when you sell it?
I'm sure something low-tech could be fashioned, say, one of the many paper sleeves lying around from driver CD's, or, in classier fashion, a plastic jewel case. Either way, point taken, it's not a very good idea, as most people will want the original packaging (chapter list, ever-critical pictures, and overall tidy look). The ones that don't care are probably hitting up a torrent tracker, anyway. I guess offering this dual-packaging now, as opposed to when the format launched in Summer 2006, would be comparable to the PS3 offering backwards-compatibility *now*, when it matters less, versus at launch, when a dearth of PS3 games made BC highly desirable. Okay, that was an unnecessary analogy, but what really needs to happen is just for retail prices to drop. I've gotten almost all my movies on B1G1 specials, but the average consumer doesn't look out for those, and instead compares $5.99 bargain bin DVD's to $40 MSRP Blu-ray.
I fell this is a good idea and a pretty sweet deal .
Love This Idea!!!
By the way, what makes anyone think that (in volume) a BD/DVD combo costs any more than BD alone?
Almost all the cost of discs is in royalties, with some cost added in production of "features" and foofoo online/Java junk. In a year of so of making multi-layer mixed format discs, it'll be the same cost as BD alone. Doesn't even take up the recording capacity that Digital Copy requires.
I just don't see the cost argument ... the price of BD discs has little to do with cost of media, and a lot to do with what the market will bear for particular films.
What's the point of the industry changing to blu ray if they aren't going to make more money, they may as well stick with DVD, blu ray has to be more expensive, they sure aren't doing it for our benefit!
I was just thinking about this very idea a few weeks ago. If movie studios would include a DVD copy with each and every Blu-ray disc and then sell them at same price they sell the DVD version for now, they'd have a winner on their hands. Not everyone has multiple Blu-ray players and I doubt many will until the prices come down even further. Packaging both together and selling them at a reasonable price would also likely get people who don't have a Blu-ray player yet to buy the combo packs so that they can watch the DVD now and then watch the Blu-ray version when they do get around to buying a player. If pricing the combo packs down at DVD levels isn't feasible, at least keep them down to Blu-ray only levels and you'll still likely pick up a few sales.
There are several movies that I have picked up on DVD instead of Blu-ray since getting my first BD player a couple of months ago. The main reason is that the DVD version is usually on sale for $10-15 cheaper than the Blu-ray version. The other reason is I sometimes need a DVD version to play somwhere besides on my system.
That's great but are they any cheaper? Given the price of Blu-ray players being so high, are these combo deals really worth the money?
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