Criterion Blu-ray

[MichaelB]

I hate to tell you but I think you're getting a bit of a biased survey sample

I can't speak for the US market, but it's pretty clear from the significant increase in dual-format releases and the scaling-back of initiatives like MoC's BD-only releases and the BFI's Adelphi Collection no longer coming out on Blu-ray at all (despite the decision-makers in both cases being rabid Blu-ray evangelists) that the format isn't exactly sweeping all before it in Britain.

Mind you, one side-effect of dual-format releases is that it's now effectively impossible to compare DVD and Blu-ray sales - which I suspect might well have been one of the motives!

As for Criterion, it's long been clear to me that they're more interested in appealing to what they see as the majority of their customers, as opposed to the "biased survey sample" mentioned above. A decade or so ago, they were only just dipping a cautious toe into the waters of anamorphic upgrades, as they were worried about customers with 4:3 sets losing out in terms of picture definition, and of course their practice of windowboxing 1.37:1 releases continues to this day, despite plenty of grumbles.

[matrixschmatrix]

Presumably, if people are DVD owners and are forced to buy Blus in dual-release packages, that's going to give them a greater incentive to get a blu-ray player- they'll already have a number of them sitting around, doing nothing. I know a fair number of people whose resistance to going blu is essentially inertia, and I imagine if everything they bought already had a blu in it they'd be ready enough converts.

[MichaelB]

Presumably, if people are DVD owners and are forced to buy Blus in dual-release packages, that's going to give them a greater incentive to get a blu-ray player- they'll already have a number of them sitting around, doing nothing. I know a fair number of people whose resistance to going blu is essentially inertia, and I imagine if everything they bought already had a blu in it they'd be ready enough converts.

Absolutely - which was the stated reason for the BFI going dual-format relatively early. I got the impression that they had a fair number of complaints about potential double-dipping from people who hadn't yet decided to take the Blu-ray plunge - bearing in mind that this was just after the 2008 credit crunch, where BD upgrades clearly qualified as a luxury in cash-strapped times.

And the fact that Criterion hasn't gone dual-format is a major reason that I've bought hardly any of their releases in recent years - I can play their DVDs, but am currently region-locked on Blu-ray. But since I probably won't be region-locked for ever, I don't particularly want to double-dip, so I end up not buying at all.

[ShellOilJunior]

Actually, not being facetious here but I'd like to know what % of new releases sold are Blu-ray. From what I gather on this site and blu-ray.com it seems most people are buying the blu-ray version (where applicable of course).

I hate to tell you but I think you're getting a bit of a biased survey sample

Granted, forums like this are made up of heavy buyers but if you've read the comments on posts on their web site lately there is always someone clamoring for an upgrade to Blu.

It's only a matter of time.

[MichaelB]

Granted, forums like this are made up of heavy buyers but if you've read the comments on posts on their web site lately there is always someone clamoring for an upgrade to Blu.

Again, that's not a statistically reliable sample. Since there were plenty of complaints about MoC's Blu-ray only releases, you can bet your bottom dollar that if Criterion did a Blu-ray only release there'd be a similar reaction - which would be equally meaningless in the wider scheme of things.

[zedz]

If physical media survives, and if BluRay remains a viable format, and if BluRay production and hardware costs continue to fall (and there are probably more ifs to factor in), then ultimately the format will take over, but only through attrition, as people's old DVD players crap out and the replacement they buy is BluRay compatible. And I don't doubt that these new 'converts' will indeed be thinking they're buying a new DVD player that also happens to play BluRays. Most consumers care about convenience and (to a lesser extent) functionality, and don't really care about optimal presentation (just look at how many people don't even realise they're watching a film unnaturally stretched to fill their screen, or do realise but prefer it that way), and in those terms there's simply not that same impetus to switch formats as there was with DVD, even if you leave out of the equation the industry's very successful attempts to make the new format less convenient and functional (region-locking, variant standards with authoring and playback).

[MichaelB]

Most consumers care about convenience and (to a lesser extent) functionality, and don't really care about optimal presentation (just look at how many people don't even realise they're watching a film unnaturally stretched to fill their screen, or do realise but prefer it that way), and in those terms there's simply not that same impetus to switch formats as there was with DVD.

This is absolutely true, and getting into Blu-ray involves considerably more investment at present than getting into DVD ever did. In fact, many people inadvertently made themselves DVD compatible simply by upgrading their PC or Mac a decade or so ago - there's far less equivalence with Blu-ray.

My wife is fully aware of the existence of Blu-ray, and occasionally admits that she can see a difference - but she simply doesn't care enough for it to be a big deal, or indeed any kind of deal at all. And she's far more representative of a typical consumer than any of us are (if anything, she's more knowledgeable - two out of my three siblings didn't even know what Blu-ray was until I explained it to them) - and Blu-ray won't become a genuine mass medium until people like her can be won over, possibly through Trojan-horse techniques such as craftily slipping a Blu-ray player into another appliance.

To be fair, Blu-ray has done markedly better than many other formats that were marketed on the grounds of their quality, from Betamax to DAT to SACD to DVD-Audio - but it's not enough.

[Drucker]

I suspect that blu-ray could be doing a lot better if not for the current financial condition of the world. I can't imagine many people can justify re-buying their movie collection on a new format, and a new player, and possibly even the HD-TV at this point.
Then again, companies seem to be almost going all-in with 3-D...so who knows? I have yet to see a 3-D film, but when I see that the DVDs are sold for $50 dollars, I honestly don't get what the big companies could possibly be thinking.

The thing I find most interesting is that some people DISlike the blu ray formats. Many of my friends (used to watching tube TVs and movies on computers, still) hate the "ultra-realness" as they call it. Even my mom has an HD-TV but prefers standard DVDs to blu-rays. I know what they are talking about, but personally, I've gotten used to it, watching the TV every day. I wonder if some people hated CDs when they came out for this reason (obviously CDs didn't sound great, really, until relatively recently...but still...)

[Ishmael]

I wonder if some people hated CDs when they came out for this reason (obviously CDs didn't sound great, really, until relatively recently...but still...)

Yup, I remember when CDs first came out, I often heard people say that the sound was too clean or too cold. Allegedly, George Harrison even said that he liked surface noise and thus prefered records, though even people who didn't care about CDs vs. records thought that one was a little strange.

[MichaelB]

I suspect that blu-ray could be doing a lot better if not for the current financial condition of the world. I can't imagine many people can justify re-buying their movie collection on a new format, and a new player, and possibly even the HD-TV at this point.

Yes, the timing could have been better. A lot of people - including me - sat out the HD format war until a winner was declared, and the credit crunch hit only a few months later. I'd already bought a BD player and HDTV by then, which is just as well as I'm not sure I'd have been able to justify it after autumn 2008.

[John Edmond]

Considering your job, you couldn't claim it on tax?

Curious as to what the penetration is like for Australia which isn't suffering from an austerity drive - it does seem like everyone has one sometimes. DVDs will disappear when it becomes too easy to download an iso file without blinking. I'm guessing we're still some time away from casual 50gigabyte downloads, so I'm hoping not-fussed-with-quality streaming doesn't do too much damage.

[Gaddis]

Curious as to what the penetration is like for Australia which isn't suffering from an austerity drive - it does seem like everyone has one sometimes.

Well, I'm across the ditch in New Zealand and working in a rental/sale store for the past five years. We get asked if we have Blu-ray maybe twice a month at the most, and sell one or two a month. Its a non-event here, although some of the other shops swear they rent them constantly. I call bullshit.

[Matt]

I wonder if some people hated CDs when they came out for this reason (obviously CDs didn't sound great, really, until relatively recently...but still...)

Yup, I remember when CDs first came out, I often heard people say that the sound was too clean or too cold.

I remember when it was the fad to color the inside ring of your CDs with a Sharpie to make them sound "warmer." The record store I worked in had markers for sale by the register to take advantage of this.

[flyonthewall2983]

Did it work?

[triodelover]

Did it work?

Depended on how susceptible you were to the power of suggestion.

There were (and are) a host of issues with digital and the best analog set-ups will still sound more like the real thing, but the fundamental problem was always the sampling and bit rates. If you go back to issues of The Journal of the Audio Engineering Society from the late '70s and early '80s, you'll find a plethora of articles criticizing the 44k/16 standard the industry settled on at the time. The rate was insufficient to guarantee that overtones and ambient effects would be accurately reproduced. But the industry didn't care. The labels had been under a constant barrage of criticism as the pressing quality of LPS had been in a steady decline since the end of the '60s - lower quality vinyl, thinner pressing, poor QA/QC. The record companies saw the CD as the way out around these issues and didn't care that engineers kept telling them that the sampling rate was too low and would lead to error propagation in the algorithms used to interpolate between data points. High quality sound reproduction was the province of a few aficionados with high end systems while the majority of their customer base listening on cheap stereos were complaining about warps and all the ticks and pops. And so we got "perfect sound forever."

[jindianajonz]

Just out of curiosity, which Criterion titles have DVD versions that are superior in certain ways to the Blu-ray version?

Off the top of my head, I know we have:
Double Life of Veronique (DVD has an extra essay in the booklet)
Man Who Fell to Earth (DVD comes with novel)
Last Emperor (TV version and some essays in booklet only available in the 4 disc set)

I'm pretty sure there are other Blu-rays that have trimmed down booklets, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.

[The Narrator Returns]

Fanny and Alexander's Blu-Ray was missing the director introductions. And I suppose you could count the new DVD edition of Howards End, considering the problems present on the Blu-Ray.

[swo17]

All of the Blu-rays lose the DVD menu screen, which is occasionally a bit of a shame.

[The Narrator Returns]

The loss of the Rushmore menus made me particularly sad.

[rspaight]

The BD of Monterey Pop is missing the vintage Jann Wenner "Rolling Stone" article, if we're being that picky.

[EddieLarkin]

Donald Richie's "biographical sketches" are missing from the BD Kagemusha booklet.
The original "Beauty and the Beast" story by Mme. Beaumont is missing from the BD booklet

[BillWatkins]

I'd say the PQ quality on the Children of Paradise DVD is superior to the waxy DNR'd Blu-ray.

[captveg]

By my count, when including the the announced titles through January '13, we're at 1/3rd of the DVD collection also being on Blu-ray (as Spine #'s go, 229/644). That averages to 4.5 releases a month (50 months since the first BDs in 12/08).

Not bad in ~4 years of BD releases. 86/229 of the BDs are upgrades released after the DVD counterpart.

[swo17]

By my count, when including the the announced titles through January '13, we're at 1/3rd of the DVD collection also being on Blu-ray (as Spine #'s go, 229/644).

It's maybe a more helpful measure if you only count spines that didn't initially get Blu-ray releases (i.e. everything before 450, and about 50 titles between 450 and 534). That way, out of about 500 spines that could at some point have been upgraded, I count 80 so far that have been (about 16%, or 20 a year). At that rate, that's still 21 more years before they could upgrade everything.

[captveg]

By my count, when including the the announced titles through January '13, we're at 1/3rd of the DVD collection also being on Blu-ray (as Spine #'s go, 229/644).

It's maybe a more helpful measure if you only count spines that didn't initially get Blu-ray releases (i.e. everything before 450, and about 50 titles between 450 and 534). That way, out of about 500 spines that could at some point have been upgraded, I count 80 so far that have been (about 16%, or 20 a year). At that rate, that's still 21 more years before they could upgrade everything.

Here's the breakdown:

Spines 1-449

85 have been upgraded.

55 DVD-only titles are OOP and unlikely to ever get re-issued (I did not include the BRD Trilogy in this count as it will eventually be re-issued)

So, 85/394 eligible titles are upgraded.

Spines 450-534 (534, L’enfance nue, last DVD-only release)

Of these 85:

32 were released on BD day-and-date with the DVD
1 has been subsequently upgraded (485, The Last Days of Disco)
52 remain DVD only

So, that's 447 (394+52+1) that were originally DVD only that are currently in print, with 86 having been upgraded.

86/447 = 19.2%

361 remain, though it is unlikely some will ever be upgraded.