City of ember part 1 english The entry More than 1 million

City of ember part 1 english The entry More than 1 million Blu-ray copies of The Dark Knight sold in the first weekis tagged: Blu-ray, The Dark Knight If this indeed is the make or break period for Blu-ray, then these initial sales results have to be encouraging for fans of the high definition format. Researchers found that consumers bought 147, 000 standalone Blu-ray players the week of Thanksgiving, up 300 percent from the same period in 2007, while Blu-ray movie sales quadrupled from that same period. Full release is after the break. And among HD television owners, Blu-ray players are the number one most-wanted Christmas gift. On the movie side, The Dark Knight apparently sold 600, 000 copies on Blu-ray on its release day on Tuesday, beating the previous record of 260, 000 set by Iron Man several weeks ago. And the Los Angeles Times reports that the new Batman movie sold almost three million discs overall on release day, meaning that Blu-ray accounted for about 25 percent to 30 percent of all copies sold. Its encouraging, Ron Sanders, president of Warner Home Video, told the Times. The Blu-ray sales of Dark Knight were exceptionally strong and much higher than our projections. Theres a lot of talk about nesting during recessions, of people ditching expensive outings and vacations and opting to entertain themselves at home. There are signs that this impulse will benefit the video game industry, and now it looks like it could help the Blu-ray movie industry, as well. What are your purchase plans for the latest Batman extravaganza? Andrew D. SmithGuest blogger Entertainment companies believe a better product should command a higher price. When music moved from cassette tapes to CDs, prices rose from 10 to 17, even though CDs cost less to make. Movies, meanwhile, often cost 15 more on Blu-ray than they do on DVD. I understand the reasoning here, but city of ember part 1 english self-defeating. For one thing, entertainment options are proliferating. People have more options than ever, so if record companies and movie studios want to maintain their market share, they city of ember part 1 english have to keep offering people a better experience for the same or less money. Whats more, people have a mental picture of the fair price for any product or service. Companies that charge more than a fair price will anger consumers and drive them away. This is particularly dangerous for the entertainment industry because it is so easy these days to take their product for free. If people feel that Hollywood is trying to rob them, they wont hesitate to rob Hollywood. Id guess that most consumers think that the fair price of a movie is 15 for a brand-new release and about 10 for anything else. The 40 that Hollywood wants for many Blu-ray discs strikes many consumers as robbery. Most people will never pay that. If Hollywood is lucky, consumers will simply ignore Blu-ray discs and keep on buying DVDs. More likely, theyll just turn to the Internet. Blu-Ray should be a huge opportunity for Hollywood. Despite what you read from folks who say that upscaled DVDs are nearly as good, Blu-ray discs actually look way better unless you have very small TV or watch from very far way. They also have wildly better sound. If Hollywood pushed prices low enough to get people to city of ember part 1 english rapidly from DVD to Blu-ray, movie viewership would go up because people would be seeing a better product. The shift to Blu-ray would also help insulate Hollywood from the dangers of piracy. Once people got used to high-definition video, they would not be willing to downgrade to the lesser quality product available on the Internet. Instead, by making high-definition content annoyingly expensive Hollywood is driving its customers either to other forms of entertainment or to pirated content. HD-DVD, Toshibas attempt at setting the standard for next-generation, high-definition video discs, flopped and died way back in February. Its a Blu-ray world now, right? But Toshiba seems determined to pee in Sonys victory champagne. I was flipping through our Sports section this morning, and the back page has a full-page ad for Toshibas new upscaling DVD technology, dubbed XDE. As far as I can tell, Toshiba has not bothered to release a single Blu-ray player since HD-DVD was retired. Instead, the company is pouring its time and money into this goofball XDE format that is essentially an upscaling DVD player. The XDE player advertised is 99, which isnt much cheaper than some of the Blu-ray players youll be able to find this holiday season. And a 99 Blu-ray player is certainly coming next year. Toshiba clearly believed in the future of HD, or it wouldnt have spent billions propping up HD-DVD. So its hard to see this XDE push as anything but sour grapes. Now, Rockon and DaveBG, I want both of you to come out of your corners at the bell, and watch the headbutts and rabbit punches. No clinching.