The Blu-ray blues
The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men was finally released in SA last week on Blu ray Disc, the new format for high-definition video. When I first saw the movie on the big screen, I knew I wanted to own it on Blu-ray.
The mood and atmosphere was greatly enhanced by the Coens’ brilliant use of cinematography to draw moviegoers into those vast, barren plains of West Texas. The countryside was as desolate and bleak as the movie’s tale of hopelessness in the midst of random violence. It’s this sort of picture making that deserves the hi-def treatment.
Unfortunately, the entertainment industry seems determined to discourage people from buying Blu-ray movies and investing in the players needed to view them. The Blu-ray version of No Country for Old Men costs between R269 and R299, depending where you buy it — I reluctantly coughed up R299 for a copy at a high-street music retailer.
The DVD version costs less than half that. Take2, an online retailer, is selling the DVD for R135, precisely half the price it charges for the Blu-ray version. And it’s not an SA phenomenon. Amazon.co.uk is selling the DVD for £6, the Blu-ray disc for £16.
There is some justification for a small price difference between DVD and Blu-ray — it is more expensive to stamp out Blu-ray Discs — but it’s not enough to justify the exorbitant prices being charged.
Moviemakers and equipment manufacturers want people to move to the new format, but greed — the attitude appears to be to milk early adopters — seems to be trumping commonsense. There is no logical reason, other than price gouging, that the movie studios have set such high prices for Blu-ray movies.
It’s not only the entertainment industry. Sony itself appears hell-bent on discouraging people from moving to Blu-ray. During question time at an Apple press conference last week, CEO Steve Jobs was asked when the company would incorporate Blu-ray players in its computers. Jobs made it clear that Apple had no intention of building Blu-ray-capable Macs any time soon. Why? Sony’s licensing policies for Blu-ray are a “bag of hurt”.
Jobs said Apple would consider selling Macs with Blu-ray drives only if there was clear demand for this from Apple users — demand which doesn’t exist yet and may never exist. Macs will continue shipping with DVD drives. DVD, introduced 10 years ago, looks set to die more slowly than the VHS format it replaced. It’s likely to remain the format of choice for movies and other video content for the next couple of years. With new DVD players capable of “upscaling” (a technology that provides crisper on-screen images on flat-panel displays) the format will remain entrenched for the foreseeable future.
Jobs’s comments about Sony’s problematic licensing terms must be taken with a grain of salt, though. Apple, in some respects, is Blu ray’s biggest rival. In rejecting Blu-ray (for now), Jobs may be taking a bet that Sony’s format will never take off fully because it will be superseded by online distribution.
Apple has begun selling HD movies and TV shows in its iTunes Store. For users in countries where Internet access is fast and uncapped (that is, not SA), it is easier to pay for and download HD movies, despite their size, from the iTunes Store than to go through the hassle of buying or renting them on Blu-ray.
For those of us in bandwidth-starved nations, our only hope for now is for the entertainment industry to stop its price gouging on Blu-ray. But that’s as likely as the Coens’ next movie being a dud.
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