cost

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!

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.