Where will the Bluray format go next - will movie piracy damage it like DVD has been?

Having a short time ago undertook a survey within our customer base - the conclusions were to say the least more than a little shocking. I have been in the optical discs industry since its inception and run several different companies and in that time I thought that I knew a great deal about the buyer of these types of movies and recordable media but apparently not everything!

The conclusions of the survey were that the in UK market the blu-ray movies sale was now almost a third that of usual DVD movies, maybe that is as a result of the people questioned being particularly technology savvy but I was astounded by the uptake, OK I admit that in terms of revenue a Bluray title is roughly two to 3 times the price of a regular DVD but its still an astonishing jump since this time last year. Since the finish of High definition DVD disks happened in early 2009 - which were of course the main challenger of bluray disks - the sales of Bluray movies and recordable discs have sky-rocketed.

The sale cost of individual Blu-ray players have dropped a lot during the last year, but the asking price of bluray movies are still inconsistently high, this can be seen if you frequent a few of the film forums - a great deal of group will still buy a computer program for £10 to £20 and use it to upscale their films rather than invest a couple of hundred pounds on a Bluray player and then have to pay twice the price for their film! This regardless of the much higher price tag of a Blueray when compared to that of a DVD movie in the UK at least, prices for Bluray media are falling quicker the other side of the pond in the United States which is leading to quicker take up of the format, well we were continuously two steps behind the American shopper! Personally as normal readers of my ramblings will already be aware that I am confident that many people don't even realise how much better Blu-ray is than standard Dvd film and numerous consider it is only comparable to the production quality of Sky's HD channels.

The sales of Blu-ray recordable discs is now doing much better than anticipated in this economic climate, it definately does not help that the Uk market will be the last main economy out of the recession either.

When you try to work out what is occurring in the present Uk Bluray recordable market can be quite complex at the moment. Everybody is saying various things, its a bit like the climate change discussion! In November UK clients bought more than 450,000 blueray disc representing a 170 step up over the month of October - although a deal of this is due to seasonal rise and fall and the real statistics will only be evident at the end of the first quarter of 2010.

In the European market the sales of Bluray players is anticipated to triple in 2010, with two.5 million units sold across Europe - not including the Sony PlayStation 3 which is known as the first choice when it comes to Bluray playback in the UK. If you contrast the takeup of Blueray to that of DVD in its beginning Blu-ray outsells DVD by at least four to one - but remember those where the good old days when we went from VHS to DVD disc!

So in conclusion, Sony would rather we didn't copy Bluray films or games and have gone some way down that road by controlling the price of the recordable Bluray discs keeping it above the £4 mark for much of the last 12 months, nonetheless it has now dropped considerably and it only needs a cheap viable Blu-ray recorder to be launched for the recordable format to really take off. It is at that stage that charges must fall for Blu-ray films with the take off of movie piracy and bigger volumes of recordable Bluray begining to ship. Not lots of customers will in spite of this have the Blueray burners (everyone has the ability to burn DVD these days) and it's not until a Blu-ray burner is shipped en-mass in PC's that the Hollywood studios will become concerned - for my part I do not expect them to permit the same blunder to be made twice!

By: Sim Young

Simon Young - Senior Partner Recordable Blu-ray UK

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