'Insatiable' Brits gobble Blu-Ray, deserve reward
Fox bigwig says HD discs will be key to cloud lockers
Britain's appetite for buying movies makes it a lively laboratory for Hollywood's marketing experiments. One of these is the "triple play" bundling of a Blu-Ray disc, regular DVD and digital file in the same package - a practice now standard here. Unfortunately, however, we won't be at the forefront of UltraViolet just yet, billed as the second generation of triple play.
20th Century Fox says Blu-Ray sales rose 49 per cent in Q3 over the previous quarter, and Vincent Marcais, Senior Vice President of International Marketing, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, says he expects Blu-Ray viewing to overtake DVD in 2013.
"The UK has the biggest per capita proportion of buyers in the world, the demand of British movie buyers is insatiable. Ninety per cent of UK consumers who are actively involved with video choose to buy. That's really striking, compared to US where people are renting."
As for UltraViolet, the cloud locker scheme devised by cross-industry consortium DECE, it would seem we'll have to wait for that too. But Marcais thinks we in the UK deserve a little something for our open-walletedness.
"Where you get a lot of people who buy content, I think we should reward that," he says. "The notion for consumers is safety - buy once and play everywhere."
"Personally, I'm convinced that Blu-Ray will be the gateway to the UltraViolet file, so if you buy a Blu-Ray disc that has an UltraViolet copy on it, you have the safety of an HD disc - but it's also in the locker for you on all your other devices. In the beginning that's going to be the environment." ®
COMMENTS
but I thought piracy was killing the movie industry and all the actors were starving and they needed more laws to protect themselves in these perilous times?
It always makes me laugh at the 'digital copy' you get, as if the DVD and Blu-ray versions are analogue...
You sound like somebody whose never enjoyed the full audio / video quality of a Blu-Ray disc played on a analogue turntable.
i like the triple play stuff, it means I can keep the blu ray downstairs and the kids can take the dvd upstairs, fuck it up, draw on it whatever, and I still have a copy
for an extra quid of two, its definately worth it
its totally believable that we buy more BD's per head in the UK, i've always preferred a shelf full of actual things rather than files on a pc, and most people i know are the same, only resorting to shadier methods if something is ludicriously hard / needlessly expensive to get hold of (eg disney blu rays were £30-£35 EACH in HMV a year or two ago...and they wonder why most of their shops are in the shit financially)
Ultraviolet sounded decent on paper at first then they started to get meaner with it and some American friends are already declaring it "Just DRM Bullshit".
Another reason we don't have such a large rental market here is the lack of Netflix which dominates (or did) in the USA?
I personally am now in one of the Film Clubs (the only I've found which is not Love Film by another name).
