UHD BLU-RAY PLAYERS
With two brands now out of UHD Blu-ray players, and disc sales in a spin under the pressure of movie streaming, should you get yourself a UHD Blu-ray player while you still can?
Oppo’s gone, now Samsung is out too, while the dominance of movie streaming has seen Blu-ray disc sales plunge, and UHD Bluray disc sales are a drop in the blue ocean. So do movie discs have a future – and should you buy a player now while you still can? Stephen Dawson spins the tale.
Samsung is pulling out of the Blu-ray player market. Various reasons have been given, including the apparent victory of Dolby Vision over the Samsung-backed HDR10+ in the battle for an enhancedmetadata version of HDR. I personally found the news quite shocking. And it points to something important: most consumer entertainment products operate in a high-competition, lowmargin space. A company can only make money on a device if it can make a respectable per-unit profit margin, or have an enormous sales volume. Continued development costs money. If enough money can’t be made to continue development, sales will just get worse.
And if you’re a company like Samsung with a reputation for quality, you can’t afford to have your brand name tainted by one or two product lines which are sub-standard.
Even though it was the first (or close to the first) company to release Ultra-HD Blu-ray disc players,
Samsung didn’t seem to be able to establish itself as the go-to quality brand in this field. Others, such as Panasonic and Sony, seem to be more accepted by consumers in that space. Meanwhile, LG occupies the middle ground, and may thrive with the absence of competition from Samsung.
But it’s not all about product placement. It’s also about demand.
Disc sales
When I reviewed the ‘Harry Potter’ series on Ultra-HD Blu-ray last year (pictured left), I noted that the included standard Blu-ray discs had their original BD-Live menu options. BD-Live was an interesting feature of early Blu-ray. It allowed content to be enhanced by linking to online material. But as I noted in that review, none of the BD-Live stuff worked any more.
If you look at any new-release Blu-ray disc, you’ll find no BD-Live. You’ll also tend to find fewer BD-specific features (such as
BonusView PIP). Again, it’s hard to cover development costs in a highly competitive environment. So some of the cleverest BD features of past have largely fallen by the wayside.
Indeed, a lot of content isn’t even released on Blu-ray, and remains confined to DVD. At a time when a new TV is routinely 55 inches or more, and nearly always 4K, just about everything but blockbusters are released on disc using only standard definition. Yet we know there are high-definition versions of virtually all this content, because that’s how it eventually appears on Netflix or Stan. Apparently mastering the Blu-ray discs adds an additional expense that threatens to make such releases unprofitable.
At this point, some would suggest that the disc distributors are ‘shooting themselves in the foot’ or some such. I am writing on the assumption —surely reasonable — that the distributors know far more about the economics of their industry than I do.
And then we have a collapse in disc sales. All the various figures I’ve seen show that total sales, both in volume and in value, of DVDs and Blu-ray discs, peaked in the period from 2004 to 2006. Then began a long slow decline to a value of less than one third of what it was at the peak. Remember, 2006 was when Blu-ray first appeared. No doubt the film studios hoped that disc sales would receive a boost from the new format. It wasn’t the case, although it may have slowed the decline.
As for UHD Blu-ray, it constitutes a tiny proportion of the movie disc market. There’s a reason that region coding seems not to apply to UHD Blu-ray — it’s simply too expensive to maintain an inventory of several different kinds of the same movie unless justified by high sales numbers. So the discs are released region-free, and with a host of dubbed languages and subtitles to suit as many markets as possible.
Will Blu-ray die?
Around 2007 someone from a film industry magazine interviewed me about the then-current Blu-ray vs HD-DVD battle.
‘Which,’ he asked, ‘would win?’
I was very pleased with my unusual take. ‘Both,’ I replied. Both sides had sunk a lot of capital into their formats. Both had some film studios on their side. Both would be reluctant to lose the battle.
Furthermore, the discs were physically compatible. This wasn’t a Betamax vs VHS thing. I had a combo HD-DVD/Blu-ray drive in my computer. I’d recently reviewed the LG BH100 Hybrid Blu-ray/HDDVD player. Clearly, things would continue to develop along that path. Clearly, future players would become hybrid. After a while, it simply wouldn’t matter whether the high-definition disc came in a red box or a blue box, you’d just pop it in your player and enjoy your movie.
Then, a few weeks later over in the US, Walmart announced that it would henceforth only stock Blu-ray discs, not HD DVDs. A few days later, Toshiba announced that it would be winding up HD DVD.
So I shall be making no firm predictions now.
Well, I will make one. We can be certain that despite the 8K buzz around at the moment, we’re not ever going to see 8K physical consumer media. Nobody is going to pour millions (tens of millions?) of dollars into its development.
I would make some soft predictions though.
Movie and TV show viewing will continue to shift over to streaming. We can lament the fact that an HD stream from Netflix is only 3 or 4Mbps, while from Blu-ray it is 15 to 35Mbps, but we can’t do much about it, other than buy physical media wherever possible.
And that means that disc sales will continue to diminish, and the more expensive versions of movies will likely become ever rarer. That is, Ultra-HD Blu-ray will be reserved for the big sellers.
But DVDs, Blu-ray discs and UltraHD Blu-ray discs aren’t likely to disappear in the foreseeable future. The technology exists. It doesn’t really have to develop further. There won’t be any significant innovation, but so long as there are enough sales to allow some profit to be made, they will continue.
CD sales peaked in the US in the year 2000 at around 943 million units. By 2017 they’d fallen to a little more than one tenth of that level. Why? Streaming of course. Yet you can still buy CDs at any shopping mall. The optical disc should be here for many years to come.
But I do make one suggestion. If a movie you like is released on Ultra-HD Blu-ray, snap it up when you have the chance. I don’t expect to see too many re-releases on the format.
As for the players, Samsung’s decision reinforces last year’s exit by Oppo, which couldn’t get disc players to be sufficiently profitable even with that brand’s best-in-market approach to design and support, and even after creating a headphone line which was designed to subsidise the disc player business.
Now here are two more universal players, one being a relatively affordable LG model, the other the unabashedly high-end $1649 Panasonic DP-UB9000 which has already been awarded both an EISA gong and a Sound+Image Award for stepping into the breach with a player promising similar levels of performance to the departing Oppo. You can read our full review in the pages that follow.
Not forgetting that Pioneer is also in this space — we reviewed the company’s $1999 UDP-LX500 in our February-March issue (you can read that full review online at www.avhub.com.au/lx500), and very fine it proved.
So while we’re not yet saying that time has been called on the format, if you’re after a high-quality UHD Blu-ray player which will hopefully play the best optical discs available for years to come, perhaps don’t wait too much longer considering your purchase...
Stephen Dawson
“We can lament the fact that an HD stream from Netflix is only 3 or 4Mbps, while from Blu-ray it is 15 to 35Mbps, but we can’t do much about it, other than buy physical media wherever possible.”