blu-ray

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get my latest posts directly in your mailbox. Thanks for coming to the Foo!

As a follow up on my last post on the costs of licensing Blu-Ray, I sent a little e-mail to Larry Jordan to confirm that small production runs of Blu-Ray discs are prohibitively expensive. Larry replied that it seems indeed that Sony does not want independent producers to embrace this delivery format.

So, most likely you will not see any lower budget productions on Blu-Ray.

On another front it is not sure whether Blu-Ray will beat the simplicity of downloadable movies. They for sure have a number of advantages: virtually immedeate availability. Scratch resistance (great for kiddies films). No loose DVDs flying around the TV set.

And then looms the question of the logevity of the HD 720p / 1080i format, with professional cameras already moving up towards 2k, 3k and even 4k.

Mike Flynn has a very interesting post on the costs associated with producing content on Blu-Ray:

[P]roducers of industrial and non-broadcast content are required to pay a $2,500 licensing fee to author and distribute Blu-Ray. Then, each producer is required to pay a $3,000 one-time AACS license fee, plus a per-title fee for EACH replicated Blu-Ray disc. […] Sony DADC is quoting that fee at $1,585 per title […].

Then there’s the per disc replication cost, which varies by quantity, and finally, there’s a $0.04 per disc fee for AACS and $0.01 per disc if you want SONY DADC to administer the payments to AACS on your behalf.

So let’s say a small local company ordered a little presentation film, which cost $2,500 to make. They want 50 copies on HD. This would then cost: 2500+3000+1585+50*.05=over $7,000. Or over $140 per disc. And that does not include the actual replication/duplication costs.
If this should really be true, it would put an end to Blu-Ray HD distribution for small productions, even before it had a chance to start. It would cost more to distribute a program than to actually produce it.