Recession got you down? Have no fear, because now you can spend your way to happiness thanks to a potential 40 percent drop in the price of Blu-Ray players, thereby making them about $200 as opposed to $5 million. Oh, wait a minute. This is only on Blu-Ray licensing, so manufacturers will have to only pay $9.50 for a read-only BR player and 11 cents for disks. Sorry. You’ll basically be saving pennies.
Yes, that’s right: Sony, Philips, and Panasonic are twirling themselves into an early grave by offering a slight decrease on the cost that manufacturers have to pay to license Blu-Ray intellectual property. This is like saying gold bracelets are cheaper because you offer jewelers 50 cents off of a special gold smelting class – sure it reduces the price on the aggregate but you can be sure the jewelers – and the BR OEMS – will use this opportunity to grab a little extra profit.
As it stands, BR players are in the $200-$500 range (here’s a $199 model). The disks are about $20 on a good day not counting the multiple sales available at Amazon and the like. While I love the movies I watch on BR, I’d like it better if I didn’t have to have a shelf-full of BRDs next to my DVDs and I’d love it even better if BR would just die and let streaming take over in this decade as opposed to the next.
So the licensing is only $10 for BR player, and correct me if I’m wrong, but the hardware inside is no more revolutionary than in a DVD player (motor to spin disk, laser eye to read disk [this may be more technical, but $300 more technical - doubt it]) but the prices are hiked way up? I’m sorry, I like new tech as much as the next guy, but I’m sticking wit my 1080p upconvert DVD player untill the prices become a little more reasonable.
Yeah, why aren’t BMWs the same price as Hyundais? I mean, they’ve both got engines, wheels, gearboxes etc. And what about those Ferraris?
It’s really weird, I can’t think of another technology where people seem to expect the “new” version to be the same price, as the one it replaces. It doesn’t work like that for mobile ‘phones, CPUs, Hard Drives, memory sticks, or anything else you could come up with, so why Blu Ray? It’s just silly.
What does usually happen is that prices for the new technology go down as it becomes more popular. Is that happening with Blu Ray? Check!
If you’d simply prefer to put up with an inferior product rather than spend the extra money on the next “big thing”, then fair play. Seems a shame to hobble that grands worth of 1080p set with it for the sake of a couple of hundred bucks of Blu Ray player, the ship was lost for a ha’penny of tar and all that, but hey, more power to you. But let’s not pretend that Blu Ray is some kind of exception and that new tech doesn’t normally cost more.
thank you, I couldn’t of said any better my self.
And, uh, I have to break it to you, but this is how the OEM supply chain works. $1 to the ODM/OEM is often $5-10 at POS. Why else do people whine about all the royalties in TVs, etc. – every penny counts, quite literally. You want $99 players, start finding tenths of penny savings because that’s what brought you a cheap DVD player.
Oh, and blue lasers are bit trickier and costlier than red lasers (seriously). As Rock On said, new stuff costs more – it always does. Besides, since when is turning a profit a crime against humanity …