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Some Blu-ray players expected to stay under $99

by on02 December 2009

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Could have stronger holiday sales because of pricing

The struggle of Blu-ray has been documented by us at Fudzilla time and time again, but it would appear that the 2009 holiday season might be the first serious mainstream surge for the format since its release.

There were a variety of Blu-ray players that offered prices as low as $78 on Black Friday and there were loads of Blu-ray titles priced at some of the lowest prices that we have ever seen. While the majority of the Blu-ray players priced at $99 or less were older profile 1.1 less full-featured models, those in the know tell us that this trend will not last for long: expect to see the lower-end profile 2.0 players continue to hover at the $99 mark long after the holidays.

Even with an increase in momentum of the sales of Blu-ray, don’t expect DVD to go away over night. With backward compatibility and upconversion, it is likely that many buyers might be using these low-cost players to do nothing more than play standard DVDs for the time being until the price of Blu-ray titles and availability of titles become better.

While we saw select Blu-ray titles for as low as $5 to $7 on Black Friday sales, we don’t expect this trend to continue in the near term. Our sources do suggest that you can expect to see older catalog Blu-Ray titles dip below the $20 mark, but in the short term expect to pay a premium for new first release titles on the Blu-ray format over what you can buy them for on standard DVD.

As for the rental of titles in the Blu-ray format, you can expect those in the rental business to add more Blu-ray stock, but also can expect to continue to fight title availability on Blu-ray rentals until the price drops. Rental models need Blu-ray titles that are more competitive with the price currently being charged for DVD before rental retailers will invest more money in stocking additional Blu-ray titles. The surge of players sold, however, will not go unnoticed by these rental providers.

With the encouraging signs pointing to surge in Blu-ray sales, we can finally say that the Blu-ray transition has begun. Still, with the quantity of classic titles missing on the Blu-ray format and the fact that consumers (even at these prices) just don’t seem excited about the transition to Blu-ray could make the transition process much slower than the Blu-ray player manufacturers and the movie studios would like.

Last modified on 02 December 2009
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