Belated happy birthday Blu Ray

Missed the actual date on account of sitting in a field surrounded by druids but:



So BD movies are 9 years old now!

Good grief, are they really?

Didn't get my first one till I got my PS3 (and I'd imagine it was a lot of other people's first BR titles as well - Casino Royale).

I queried why PR companies still ship DVD screeners with no option for BD recently on a bloggers FB group. Public opinion was against me, with comments like:


It was rather depressing really. Digging around it's impossible to find BD sales figures but a bit of guessing puts the PS3 ownership at >5m, with another 1m of stand alone players. Ignoring next gen consoles, that means there's more than a fifth of households in the UK with a player but if people have the opinion like the above (and there were NO positive comments about how much better BD picture quality is) then it's not surprising :/

Hmmm I reckon it's to be expected. Most folk wouldn't know HD if it smacked them in the eyeballs (and probably have netflix / Prime / whatever movie service or Sky at home for kids movies). Weird folk (like us) who still buy movies on BR are obviously something of a rarity (given the extortionate price of most of the Disney / Marvel stuff, and sometimes the shitty grainy quality of certain BRs (Man of Steel, I'm lookin' at you) I can see DVD sticking around for a long time to come.

I can't remember where I read it but apparently blu ray sales make up less than 2% of all films sold in shops etc..

I think price has a lot to do with it. Also, Are "normal" films really that much better. I tend to get blu ray films only for sci fi.

Price is definitely it and I'd imagine streaming services are eating into traditional revenues for shop / retail 'boxed copy' movies. Coupled with the fact that outside Tesco, Asda etc, it's actually getting quite tricky to buy movies on BR (our local HomeBase sells DVDs but you'll never see any BRs on offer there). Big chains like HMV etc going under means that there's nowhere 'physical' on the high street to buy these things any more (and why would you even when they were around, the prices were always extortionate outside the "3 for 30 quid" deals that some chains used to run).

As far as promo stuff goes, I'm still genuinely surprised companies deal with bloggers at all (not that I'm complaining - we're drowning in books so we're always grateful that PRs and publishers hurl the things in our direction!)

Know what you mean Peej, just been offered a BMW 2 series Tourer for the summer holidays (6-8 weeks), which is bonkers.

Don't forget to watch the instructional video if you take 'em up on that...

http://www.funnyjunk.com/Bmw+drivers/funny-pictures/5472698

HA! Just had a random invite to a preview screening of Ant-Man too.

Which is nice.

how have you been offered a car for 6 weeks?

part of the rather bonkers world of blogging. People just seem to want to give you stuff...

Which also came out nearly nine years ago. :p


I think price is definitely the deciding factor. People don't really like going above "free" for their entertainment these days.

As for quality, "normal" films benefit way more than heavy CG films imo. As far as effects have come, still no-one creates worlds with as much hidden detail as real life contains.

A decent HD stream on Netflix or Amazon Prime (Hell, even iPlayer) looks so much better than DVD. It's just depressing that the vast majority of people don't seem to care :(

We don't get stuff like that but we've a completely narrow focus I guess.

11 years old now. Can't remember the last time I bought a BD though :)