Well, it is 2010, and as some of you may have noticed, I have taken a bit of a break from writing on the site.

Truth be known, I have a film project I am working on with a mid January deadline I would love to make, so it might be a little quiet for the first half of the month.

I guess 2009 was a bit of a hard year for many - I definitely saw a downturn in commissions from Amazon for the site compared to last year, especially for the holiday season.

That said I very much appreciate the folks that use the Amazon links to give the site some revenue - it is pretty much the only revenue stream that I use to keep the site up and running.

A couple of interesting trends for me at least were the trends towards DTS-HD Master Audio and AVC codec - these seem to have been cemented as the primary codecs for the Blu-ray format now.

Also nice to see some milestones, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs taking the top DVD sales spot and Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut selling more Blu-ray than DVD copies in the first week.

Also some record revenues for Blu-ray, with especially good Black Friday sales.

Well, hope you all survived 2009, and I look forward to 2010, even if it isn’t really the year we make contact…

As is always fun to do in a new year, I took a moment to look back over the preceding year and see what trends have been apparent in the Blu-ray Disc market.

For the most part I think we have seen moves in the right direction in both technological trends as well as trends in sales revenues and market share.

2008 saw the demise of HD DVD, the addition of Universal Studios and the return of Paramount to the Blu-ray Disc market.

We also saw the first Blu-ray titles with Bonus View picture in picture, BD Live internet connectivity and Digital Copy.

There were moves towards the AVC codec for video as well as a greater share of titles with lossless audio and less use of restrictive region coding.

New records in market share, revenues and unit sales were set with a general positive trend for all.

Feel free to check out the full article, and leave any comments here regarding your thoughts on Blu-ray Disc in 2008.

The EMA has released a report that predicts, among other things, that Blu-ray sales will surpass standard DVD in 2012 and be about $9.5 billion.

The report found that sales of almost 9 million high-definition discs in 2007 generated over$260 million in revenue.

Of course we have already read that studio home entertainment heads are predicting around the $1B for 2008.

Via Engadget

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the release of the initial slate of Blu-ray titles from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. The initial slate included 50 First Dates, Hitch and XXX. This first wave of discs were all single layer BD25 discs with MPEG2 video encoding and PCM lossless audio.

A lot has happened since 2006, including the remastering and replacement of one of the launch titles The Fifth Element - with the new version being much more representative of current releases, featuring AVC video on a BD50 disc with Dolby True HD Lossless audio.

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The latest Home Media Magazine is reporting a new milestone today for Blu-ray - for the first time reported, the market share of the top 20 Blu-ray titles was 10% of the market share when combined with the top 20 DVD titles. Overall the week was down for both formats, however Blu-ray revenues remained just over $10M, still an improvement over single digit millions for most of May.

In the top 20 chart, Rambo easily came out on top, followed by last week’s winner National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets. The next titles trailed somewhat, though the Rambo 1-3 Boxset had good sales considering the price with close to a quarter of Rambo sales to take third place. The top 5 was rounded out by 300 and National Treasure in its second week - we suspect sale prices contributed greatly to 300’s numbers, though it is interesting to see that this effect is less prevalent than in the past as overall volumes increase. The other Rambo titles, Rambo - First Blood Part II and Rambo III made the top 15, otherwise there were no real surprises.

A few interesting numbers in the ‘per title’ market share versus DVD. Rambo was a strong contender on Blu-ray, selling 12.8% of its units on Blu-ray Disc. The Trilogy did very well, selling over 69% of its units on Blu-ray, while the individual titles didn’t do so well at between 23 and 27 percent, implying that many chose the way of the box set to fill out their Rambo collection. Other hot selling catalog titles in the 60% range included recent releases V for Vendetta and Twister as well as older releases Blood Diamond and Blade Runner. Full Metal Jacket gets honorable mention at 56%. It is interesting to see titles get ’second life’ on Blu-ray, though I am sure sale pricing has helped boost Blu-ray sales in some cases.

All in all an interesting week with encouraging double figure marker share for the first time that we know of. It will be interesting to see how things go moving forward.

If you were one of the no doubt many people who emailed Universal Home Entertainment over the last couple of years asking them to release their titles on Blu-ray, you might have received an email from Universal announcing the upcoming release of Doomsday.

The email is worded as follows:

Dear Consumer,

Universal Studios Home Entertainment has announced that beginning in late July of this year, select Universal theatrical films and TV series will be released on Blu-ray to coincide with their standard DVD release dates.

The first Blu-ray release will be “Doomsday,” scheduled for July 29. For announcements of other upcoming Blu-ray releases, please visit our website from time to time at http://universalstudios.com.

We appreciate your interest and hope that you will continue to enjoy our releases.

Sincerely,

Consumer Relations
UNIVERSAL STUDIOS HOME ENTERTAINMENT

Oddly from other announcements we believe that the Mummy releases will be prior to the Doomsday release, however it is great to see that Universal kept the contact list from all the people who contacted them.

We read over at CEPro that according to a new survey sixty percent of U.S. consumers are aware of Blu-ray discs, though hardware penetration for the format sits at 9 percent.

Research firm Interpret, LLC has found that Blu-ray and HD DVD owners continue to buy standard-def DVDs at a rate of 7.7 to 8.7 for high-def titles during the past six months, but more available Blu-ray titles are needed to grow that difference. Interpret also suggests that low HDTV penetration rates are hindering Blu-ray’s adoption in the U.S. and worldwide.

The survey asked 600 adults ages 18-54 in the U.S. during January, right after Warner Bros. announced their decision to support Blu-ray only, which started a chain of events that eventually led to HD DVD’s demise.

Via Gizmodo

Hollywood Reporter has a new article with more accurate statistics demonstrating the rise in Blu-ray sales relative to the DVD counterparts of recent titles.

According to Nielsen First Alert data, No Country for Old Men sold 9.8% of its total sales from Blu-ray Disc its first five days in stores. Fox’s Hitman, also released March 11 generated 12.6% of its total unit sales from Blu-ray.

By comparison, while the format war was raging, unit sales of high-definition discs, either Blu-ray or HD DVD, generally accounted for no more than 2%-3% of a title’s sales.

Fox’s The Simpsons Movie generated just 2.8% of its total sales from Blu-ray, while the Blu-ray version of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, from Walt Disney Studios, accounted for 3.7% of total sales.

With the format uncertainty over, Michael Clayton generated 5.5% of its total first-week sales from Blu-ray. Sony’s 30 Days of Night, released Feb. 26, gained 8.9% of its total unit sales from the Blu-ray version.

Studios are keen to derive a greater chunk of their sales from Blu-ray because of the price differential - on average a Blu-ray Disc sells for $10 more than the DVD counterpart.

Blu-ray Disc hardware penetration will reach 29.4 million homes worldwide this year, according to a report by the Strategy Analytics Connected Home Devices Services.

For an total estimated of 18.8 million Blu-ray units, Strategy Analytics projects 4 million stand-alone set-tops, 13 million PlayStation 3 consoles and 2 million PC-based Blu-ray drives will sell globally this year.

“HD DVD’s withdrawal leaves the way open for Blu-ray to become a major revenue earner for technology vendors and content owners alike,” said David Mercer, principal analyst at Strategy Analytics. “The 265 million homes that will own an HDTV by 2012, and Hollywood’s need for a new growth engine, represent huge incentives for the industry to coordinate marketing activities and demonstrate unified support for the successor to DVD.”

By 2012, Strategy Analytics estimates that more than 132 million homes worldwide will have at least one Blu-ray device.

Scott Hettrick is reporting on his Hollywood in Hi-def Blog that Blu-ray has reached 9 Million units sold since inception according to HMR research.

Perhaps even more iinteresting is that 3 Million of those were sold in this year, putting the format on pace to easily hit at least 15 million units for 2008.

The average weekly sales have been ranging from 200,000 - 300,000 the past two months or so, but recently spiked up to 319,000 units, driven by Disney’s release of No Country For Old Men, which sold 68,000 in its first week of release.

Prior weekly top-sellers this year were ranging from 10,000 - 30,000 units.