Easy DVD Burning

As everyone knows, there is a war going on between HD DVD and Blu-ray discs or BD. So far there isn’t a player which will play both discs well and until such a player is available, you can’t play both types of disc on the one machine.

So if you have a HD DVD player you can’t watch Blu-ray discs and vice versa.

Now with many manufacturers only making Blu-ray players, retailers are in a hurry to sell movies on DVD; so much of a hurry that they’ve dropped their price. And we’re talking $5 for a top Hollywood film like Titanic.

Now this has caused a chain reaction. Because many top movies are so cheap in DVD format, many customers are stocking up and not buying the more expensive Blu-ray discs. For manufactures and retailers this is not good news. Throw in the global economic crisis and the wheels are starting to wobble in many places.

Why should a customer pay top dollar for a Blu-ray movie when [a] times are tough and [b] you can buy a movie on DVD for a small fraction of the Blu-ray price?

Is this a case of the retailers being too clever by half?

What will happen next? It’s not that HD DVD is a poor product. On the contrary it’s brilliant but many say that Blu-ray is better. But if the latest movies on Blue-ray are double the price of the same movie on DVD or almost double, then with money tight at present and seemingly so for the next year or more, sales of Blu-ray movies are slow.

The question being asked by consumers is, ‘Should I pay $10 or more for the same movie on Blu-ray?’ I mean if you buy a lot of movies, your costs mount up. Is the better quality on a Blu-ray version that much better to justify spending almost double the price? Money is a major factor in everyone’s life and the price of a product often determines its sale.

But there are other ways to watch movies at home and we’re talking about hiring a disc or streaming it from a web site. Again the price difference between DVD and Blu-ray is important. DVDs are cheaper in all formats. So much so that in recent weeks the prices on Blu-ray movies have started to fall. Not greatly but enough to indicate that movie makers and retailers are feeling the pinch.

If you gamble on Blu-ray being the preferred option, as Hollywood and many big Japanese manufacturers have, and the sales are not happening in large numbers, then price has to be a factor.

These are interesting times. HD streaming is just around the corner and not everyone will take up Blu-ray. Unless prices of the visually-superior Blu-ray movies drop considerably, it won’t be just the consumers who are feeling the economic pinch.

Technology seems to move at an alarming pace these days. But no matter how much better the next invention is, if the price is too high, nobody knows if it will succeed. Stay tuned.