Recession got you down? Have no fear, because now you can spend your way to happiness thanks to a potential 40 percent drop in the price of Blu-Ray players, thereby making them about $200 as opposed to $5 million. Oh, wait a minute. This is only on Blu-Ray licensing, so manufacturers will have to only pay $9.50 for a read-only BR player and 11 cents for disks. Sorry. You’ll basically be saving pennies.
Yes, that’s right: Sony, Philips, and Panasonic are twirling themselves into an early grave by offering a slight decrease on the cost that manufacturers have to pay to license Blu-Ray intellectual property. This is like saying gold bracelets are cheaper because you offer jewelers 50 cents off of a special gold smelting class – sure it reduces the price on the aggregate but you can be sure the jewelers – and the BR OEMS – will use this opportunity to grab a little extra profit.
As it stands, BR players are in the $200-$500 range (here’s a $199 model). The disks are about $20 on a good day not counting the multiple sales available at Amazon and the like. While I love the movies I watch on BR, I’d like it better if I didn’t have to have a shelf-full of BRDs next to my DVDs and I’d love it even better if BR would just die and let streaming take over in this decade as opposed to the next.