The First Blue Ray Releases
After a drawn out format war that threatened to follow the financially damaging and divisive bout between Betamax and VHS decades earlier, the next generation HD format Blu Ray has come forth victorious over HD DVD. The current format having finally been agreed upon, many people feel secure spending on hardware that works with the format whereas before, being unsure which format would ultimately pull through, people weren’t ready to commit to a system. Now that Blu Ray is becoming mainstream and is gradually phasing DVDs into obscurity (the way DVD did to VHS), people are looking to bolster their high definition movie library with one concern in mind: what will be the next blue ray releases?
The primary blank media movies to get blu ray releases were by Sony and MGM studios, such as The Fifth Element and Terminator respectively. Blu ray releases sold relatively poorly while they were still in opposition with HD DVD, again because consumers were not willing to dedicate to a format until either one had cemented its place in the market. However, new movies were still released on blu ray by its supporting studios, and once the format war had ended and blu ray had emerged victorious, sales of the format began making serious strides.
Blu ray’s recognition also saw a soaring increase: where blu ray releases accounted for about 5% of all disc sales through the first half of 2008, by the end of the year this number had improved to 14%. When The Dark Knight was released in December of that year, it sold more than half a million copies on the very first day of its release. Within a week, it had sold some 1.7 million copies, becoming the first among blu ray releases to sell in seven figures in its first week on the market.
At this stage, blu ray sales were found to be substantially more numerous than DVD experienced at a similar point in its release history, proving that blu ray was being much more readily adopted over its previous format than DVD was over VHS. A unique feature that many studios have offered is a sort of duel function to the disk itself. Dubbed “flipper discs”, studios have revealed movies with a blu ray version printed on one side while the other is in DVD format, allowing for both forward and backward compatibility, which helped ease the transition to the new format. Some of these releases also came with a digital copies – files that could be played on iPods and computers and the like without the requirement of a physical disc.
As of 2010, blu ray releases have become the standard. The end of the format war caused all studios to adopt the format and release films on blu ray, which has by this point completely eclipsed DVD as the default media format.