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NEWS: Anime Makes Up 64% of BD Sales in Japan in September

Dargon: Actually, sales are up, but profits are down, because studios had to slash prices significantly for people to buy into BD. [Thanks to electoral-vote.com for the link.]

What that means is that, even if BD sales go up across the board, manufacturers and studio are going to be broke for some time.

As for whether the newcomers will be encouraged to buy BD, that depends on whether BD is priced competitively with DVD.

If not, then the people who bought BD players did so merely to upscale their current collection.

It is about selling items that have sat on manufactures and retailers shelves that have shown slow movement and/or are ready to have price drops in the coming year anyway.And replace those items with new higher profit margin products for the coming year. This goes back to the liquidity issue we were talking about in another thread. Traditionally, just moving these items and getting cash for them (as opposed to them collecting dust), is enough to move companies who have been in the red for the whole fiscal year, to now move into the black. Hence Black Friday. Again that has nothing to do with a per item profit margin, and it never has.

But leave it to the Times to always bring out the utmost negative in everything.

The fact is more shoppers participated, and spent more per capita than they did last year, and the year before that, and that, and that. It's a good thing considering the economy

My best friend is a doctor. When HD TVs came out he went and bought a 50" for like $6,000, and that was a good deal.

Make no mistake that much of the initial costs have already been paid off, and is why we see TVs these days for much more reasonable sums.

Any kind of hit they(BD companies) might be taking now(which we aren't sure of), might very well be worth it, once they find the correct price point so the public at large goes out and buys its products.

Also, and I have no way to back this up but it wouldn't surprise me in the least, Hollywood studios may be subsidizing the BD player manufactures to get the prices down so that more people will buy HD movies.

Why would they spend more than double that* on a BD player if all they want to do is upscale their collection?

Not surprising. Discrete vector-based media like anime show much more noticeable gains from a resolution increase than fractal media (i.e. live action).

GATSU wrote:

Oh, and HDTVs are another example of a product being dumped on the consumer-this time by the government. If the FCC didn't force the country to convert to HD signals, no one would buy those things, especially since their televisions work just fine without them.

Delicious FUD! HD ATSC, digital transmission and HDTVs (which have been around in analogue formats for decades) are not all the same thing. Please do your research before claiming gubernmint conspiracies.

Though the difference between what ADV is doing and what those stores are doing is that the stores are hoping people will occasionally pay full price on something or two while they get the discounts. And while that normally happens in most sales, it's clear that this year was different.

Curse you, damn Liberal Media and your facts.

They participated, because the prices were low-balled below the usual discounts, which means that the shoppers aren't able or willing to pay full MSRP.

Doctors =/= average Americans and can thus afford HDTVs at that price.

If that were the case, then HDTVs would have been this cheap a year ago. Regular televisions didn't even get that cheap until at least a decade ago.

That's assuming the public buys its products, and not just a few select BD titles they don't already own.

That's actually even worse for the studios, because if they get an already overpriced bomb or two on their hands, it means it's harder for them to make their money back on it on home video.

That's sort of my point. Studios are going to have to work harder on exclusives for BD, in order to justify people getting rid of their dvd collections.

Kougeru wrote:

i still think 60 dollars for 3 episodes of macross bluray is WAAAAY overpriced i also think 4-5 times todays market share is too much. It will probably 2-3 or less...especially with the economy as it is, people (at least people i know) are spending a lot less on entertainment.

I know HD takes up more space, but I still expect American companies to load more episodes onto each disc, a BD is 50 gigs dual layer, and I can't see each episode being more than 5 gigs. I expect half at least 6 episodes per disc.

When you capture live action, there's always more detail provided the resolution is there (again, in film or HD digital material). So I find it strange that you'd make the opposite conclusion.

Secondly, digital TV is just another step forward in technology like plastic bags instead of wax paper or something.

There's another one: cars. Ridiculous! Over priced, over hyped, too soon, unnecessary, and horses have personality.

The story is that the though the seasons produced different results than expectations, the consumers still showed they have buying power.

Of course corporations will always want and expect better, but the fact is consumers didn't let them down this year.

But hey it's not all bad. Here is more responsible journalism, filled more with things we know, and less editorializing.

But if you would chart the price of HDTVs over the years, you would see a steadily decreasing line pointing down.

I think the thing you are assuming here is that in order for this to succeed is for people to have to completely replace their whole collections. Which is ludicrous.

If that were true why even make new movies and TV shows available.

Plus BD players play DVDs.

jdnation: BD's gotten a larger market share sooner than DVD, but only because the studios tried to dump it on the consumer, rather than let market forces decide its success or failure. DVD won over DIVX, because that's what people wanted, not because it had the most support from the studios.

As for exclusive content, if you have to turn those players into DS'es or Wiis, as Disney's doing with some of their products, you're basically acknowledging that the Internet is the wave of the future for movies, and not BD. And including a demo for a game which is on two next-gen consoles, one of which offers direct streaming of movies and shows, is just another example of that type of Freudian slip.

Oh, and HDTVs are another example of a product being dumped on the consumer-this time by the government. If the FCC didn't force the country to convert to HD signals, no one would buy those things, especially since their televisions work just fine without them.

Also, there are already cheap non-BD up-scaling players on the market.

Discounting the ridiculousness of BVU's pricing scheme for a moment ... BD's can hold 4-6 times the amount of raw data as DVDs, unfortunately, an HD source takes up 4-10 times as much space. So, we really won't see a boost in episodes per volume unless they are used merely as a mass-storage medium (or the new 400G discs are deceptively cheap & easy to master.)

Luckily, studios are starting to get the message on pricing, and Funi's releases were all down around acceptable levels when I last looked. Heck, Buy.com had Afro Samurai S1-BD for $12 preorder (granted, no new features, just a prettier picture & lossless audio.) Now if only we got something more than DBZ or obscure LA movies to buy.

Whatever the case may be GATSU, whether forced as you claim or customers choosing it of their own will, you are basically agreeing that this is all in BD's favor.

There is no gun to their head that forces anyone to buy a BD-player or a PS3.

Digital distribution will only gain a small percentage of the market and be more for rentals than purchases.

by your logic when colour TV was out they should've continued to sell B&W TVs beside them too to give cosumers a choice.

No, I'm saying the opposite, actually. BD is destined to lose, because consumers have to be convinced to buy it.

Except for the studios reneging on their support for HD-DVD and except for people who end up with non-backwards compatible PS3s, sure.

Most people are happier with rentals than purchases.

HDTV is just an overpriced picture upgrade, not a significant difference over tv the way color was over B+W.

I don't know what the hell vectors are, but I do know that a majority of anime are actually upscaled to accommodate their HD release. Of the ones that were actually rendered in HD resolution or are film based of course, this isn't the case. But isn't a drawing limited to the detail that's drawn anyway? When you capture live action, there's always more detail provided the resolution is there (again, in film or HD digital material). So I find it strange that you'd make the opposite conclusion.

dewlwieldthedarpachief wrote:

Secondly, digital TV is just another step forward in technology like plastic bags instead of wax paper or something.

It has nothing to do with energy efficiency. In fact, the transition is lacking in foresight, since it's encouraging consumers to dump their old televisions in land-fills where they leak waste. It's all about the public subsidizing a fiber network in order to increase the value of ad revenue for cable and tv networks, by making it harder for us to record and Tivo shows.

Quite the opposite actually. While maybe half of HD broadcasts are upscaled, there are very few upscaled Blu-ray release (because there simply isn't any point). I can only think of two: Yukikaze (upscaled from 480i. Yes, interlaced. WTF Gonzo?) and Full Metal Panic (first series, another case of lolGonzo, Fumoffu and TSR are both excellently done upscales from the final master rather than production masters). ...

The Air TV BD-Box (which is or about to get a re-release very soon) is also an upscale. I believe those are the only SD anime upscales available ATM (unless you want to get into the Macross Frontier debate of which I know little about ).

GATSU wrote:

dewlwieldthedarpachief wrote: Secondly, digital TV is just another step forward in technology like plastic bags instead of wax paper or something. It has nothing to do with energy efficiency. In fact, the transition is lacking in foresight, since it's encouraging consumers to dump their old televisions in land-fills where they leak waste. It's all about the public subsidizing a fiber network in order to increase the value of ad revenue for cable and tv networks, by making it harder for us to record and Tivo shows.

You're actually correct for once, it isn't about energy efficiency because dewl (not del) never mentioned energy efficiency!

As for live-action: Detail there is fractal. Increasing the resolution will show more detail, but reducing it will simply blur this detain into the macro-scale rather than hiding it completely. Not that I'm saying the HD live-action is pointless, just that the detail increase is less noticeable than with animation (due to the brain filling in the loss in fine detail). The reasoning behind this has a lot to do with visual perception theory, so you'd probably be better of researching it yourself if you're interested.