K-On Boxset & Haruhi movie Blu-rays Cancelled!

It's only £33 actual purchase price on Amazon, which sounds reasonable enough for a full show on blu-ray to me :) I think there's a reasonable price point in the range you suggest that captures the niche BD fans without making things impractical.

I'm happy for them to price things at the range the MangaUK survey entrants requested, if those surveyed can find another several thousand buyers to make up the losses they'd suffer undercutting France, hehe.

R
 
Most of Manga's TV series Blu-rays are £25 on release, after online discounts. Despite that, Casshern and Xam'd still only shifted a few hundred copies each. Quite simply, the market doesn't exist in the UK. Manga may as well have set a £50 retail price, as most of those few hundred buyers would likely have paid the extra £10-15. Would it have been enough to make those releases profitable? Who knows.

Kaze's release of Samurai Girls is priced in line with Sentai's and I think that's perfectly reasonable. But while I consider myself a "Blu-ray devotee", I'm not devoted enough to blow £30 on Samurai Girls. Something I really want, sure, but not Samurai Girls :p
 
fabricatedlunatic said:
Kaze's release of Samurai Girls is priced in line with Sentai's and I think that's perfectly reasonable. But while I consider myself a "Blu-ray devotee", I'm not devoted enough to blow £30 on Samurai Girls. Something I really want, sure, but not Samurai Girls :p
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I imported Sentai's, and for some reason tragic fanservice shows were the first genre I swapped up to blu-ray from DVD (after expensive movies). So hopefully people with dodgy taste like me will be all over this one, and Kaze will put out something a bit classier in the next batch :D

R
 
Thing is, the pricing of Blu-Ray creates a Catch 22 in that if a Blu-ray costs significantly more than the DVD, unless the BD is part of a limited edition or a premium release, due to the economic situation the majority of people will buy the DVD instead. However, if they raise the prices of the DVDs to bring them closer to the blu-rays, then that creates the problem of DVD-only people feeling that they're being ripped off (quite rightly so. Even though I own a blu-ray player, I'm not sure if the idea of adding an extra £5 onto DVD prices just to subsidise the few blu-ray releases would sit right with me).
Hell, do FUNimation even release any standalone blu-rays? Haven't they pretty much forced all buyers into buying combi-packs when a series is available on blu-ray? (iirc, it's only the smaller titles like Sgt. Frog that are still DVD-only. Also, didn't they recently say they've now got the go ahead for One Piece BDs?)

The problem MangaUK unwillingly created for themselves is that by trying to release DVDs for as cheaply as possible, when it comes to the relatively new blu-ray, the cheapest they can sell them for is marginally higher than their low DVD prices.

But then we have the issue of blu-ray as a whole. I was in Tesco yesterday and noticed that the blu-ray section is INCREDIBLY tiny. The only titles they had, if memory serves me well, were Avatar, Frozen Planet and Marvel comic book hero movies.

Another problem is how the prices compare to the mainstream blu-rays. When I was in Tesco I saw X-Men First Class, a recent release and the triple play version for £15 (Just looked, it's £11.99 on HMV online).
Am I asking for MangaUK and KAZE to make their prices that low? No, because I know it's impossible. I'm just saying that the average customer who knows little about the anime industry will probably feel pretty cheated at having to pay around £40 for the blu-ray of a series when a more widespread one can be purchased for just over a quarter of the price.
 
I'd be ok with RRPs that I stated before, it assumes the BDs have a higher value and keeps the more discerning buyer happy with DVDs.

That said, a move to Double Play as a default action might be what it takes for people to see why BDs are worth a bit more scratch.

Certainly didn't hurt Baka and Test any, that's for damn sure.

On One Piece, is there any real point in doing BD's besides the obvious answer (Toei want more Mad Cheese)? Between 2000 and 09'ish everything was computer animated so the best you can get are upreses if I remember my BD knowledge right.
 
Rui said:
It's only £33 actual purchase price on Amazon, which sounds reasonable enough for a full show on blu-ray to me :) I think there's a reasonable price point in the range you suggest that captures the niche BD fans without making things impractical.
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It really isn't that long since DVDs were £20 for 3-5 episodes (and a whole £1 off if you were an MVC member!).
 
I was perfectly happy paying £10 per single volume DVD a couple of years back from the likes of MVM and ADV (and there were usually three volumes in a 12 ep series, six in a 24 ep, so £30 and £60 respectively). That seemed to me like a fair price to pay for a niche product, which I was glad was being made available legally in English.

Personally, I think they should just stop making DVDs and force everyone to upgrade. Freedom of choice is good, but if people decline to take the right choice when carrots have been dangling for a long time (BD prices are now easily down to the level of DVDs just before BD was launched) it's time to apply the stick.
 
ayase said:
I was perfectly happy paying £10 per single volume DVD a couple of years back from the likes of MVM and ADV (and there were usually three volumes in a 12 ep series, six in a 24 ep, so £30 and £60 respectively). That seemed to me like a fair price to pay for a niche product, which I was glad was being made available legally in English.

Personally, I think they should just stop making DVDs and force everyone to upgrade. Freedom of choice is good, but if people decline to take the right choice when carrots have been dangling for a long time (BD prices are now easily down to the level of DVDs just before BD was launched) it's time to apply the stick.
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Yeah, but by extension DVDs have gotten cheaper too. If anything it just makes DVDs seem like more of a bargain :p There's also no way they'd stop making DVDs for the foreseeable future. Blu ray is still niche by comparison and remember that just about everything plays DVDs these days. Maybe if they switched to double play releases for a while it could work but I still don't think it likely for a good few years.
 
And therein lies the problem. A new format is generally released with a view to it superseding the current format. If the previous format remains dominant but gets a lot cheaper as has happened with DVD, that's got to be pretty terrible for business. The time has come to force consumers into Blu-ray whether they like it or not, as sure as the time has come to drive a high speed rail link through the back gardens of a load of NIMBYs.
 
ayase said:
I was perfectly happy paying £10 per single volume DVD a couple of years back from the likes of MVM and ADV (and there were usually three volumes in a 12 ep series, six in a 24 ep, so £30 and £60 respectively). That seemed to me like a fair price to pay for a niche product, which I was glad was being made available legally in English.

Personally, I think they should just stop making DVDs and force everyone to upgrade. Freedom of choice is good, but if people decline to take the right choice when carrots have been dangling for a long time (BD prices are now easily down to the level of DVDs just before BD was launched) it's time to apply the stick.
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I for one, wouldn't like this considering I spent money on getting a new dvd player rather than Blu-ray last year. I don't see the point of switching to Blu-ray when dvds seem perfectly fine to me.
 
Thing is, for a new format to work properly, it has to at some point, see VHS and DVD, there was a handover period but no one produces them anymore.

All BD players will play DVDs, so Im surprised there hasn't been a bigger shift to releasing new titles in BD only; it'd move the format on far quicker IMO, and it only takes one big studio to do so before the effect begins to snowball.
 
The benefits of DVD over VHS were more obvious though, even to the most humble customers. Smaller, less prone to getting chewed up, portable for those with laptops; there were huge physical advantages. For anime especially, the advantage of being able to have multiple languages on one disc was especially revolutionary.

Blu-ray however is a much more subtle transition, and it doesn't help that studios are making big missteps regularly with anti-consumer region locks, aborted releases and hobbled discs (which is largely due to the regioning too). With so many opportunities to do away with the problems with DVD and get things perfect, there have been a lot of mistakes made this generation. For people with lame screens, or fans of series which don't benefit so much from the significantly better picture, there's no compelling reason to upgrade at the moment. They'll likely agree it looks better, but not better enough to warrant additional expense.

I certainly wouldn't want them to stop making DVDs for series which don't benefit at all from blu-ray, since DVDs are still much more convenient. Tempting me with sexier blu-ray sets with clear advantages over the DVD has proven highly effective as a technique.

R
 
For things which don't benefit from HD, surely they could just use Blu-ray's extra capacity to fit far more SD content on each disc though? A ten disc DVD set or a single BD? I image most consumers would see that as being rather convenient, even if the content was identical.
 
From the perspective of someone with three blu-ray players now, that's certainly a great way to do it, but for people with no hardware for it and millions of DVD drives (I think I actually have fifteen accessible DVD players in my house from a quick count from memory...) it's probably less desirable. You can fit half a dozen DVDs into a single DVD case width with some horrible case designs, so the advantage might be easy to ignore.

I'd like to see more of that kind of thing from countries where blu-ray has caught on. Less shipping fees for me to pay for weaker-looking content :D

R
 
Sometimes I think that blu-rays are pricing the younger fans out. The ones that have to shop in stores like HMV as they aren't old enough for cards etc?

tbh a large proportion of fans don't care about buying dvds or blu rays. I get the impression from being on line (and what I saw at the last con I went to) that kids are more into buying the merchandise than the shows. them selves. They will download the show for free, but shell out on a plushie.

At the end of the day I would have rather have a company that is releasing something than a company that has gone under as it can't sell its stock.
After reading the discussion on twitter between manga and eepperschoice last night I can understand why they would struggle to shift blue rays. Sell lower and they cant sell enough to break even. Sell higher and people balk at the price and wont pay it either.
 
Sparrowsabre7 said:
ayase said:
The time has come to force consumers into Blu-ray whether they like it or not
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It's called freedom of choice brah :p
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I covered that in my first post, didn't I?

Freedom of choice is good, unless it leaves you with no-one distributing anime (or even one distro with no competition, thereby also destroying your freedom of choice in another way). :p
 
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