Thursday, March 30, 2006

Why is UMD dieing?

Here is what the big guys say:


Also out of the UMD business is Image Entertainment, while other studios -- including 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and Buena Vista Home Entertainment -- have drastically slashed release schedules.
"No one's watching movies on PSP," said the president of one of the six major studios' home entertainment divisions. "It's a game player, period."
Observers speculate the studios released too many movies, too fast. Within five months of the PSP's March 2005 launch, 239 movie and TV titles already were either in the market or in the pipeline -- a significantly higher tally than games, according to the DVD Release Report.


Too many movies too fast. Too many movies too fast? That is not a reason to not have sales. I don't know what is wrong with these observers, but they aren't observing the right thing. It takes someone with a brain capacity the size of a UMD to see why the media format has flopped. Why are all companies that make UMDs losing money? Pricing, pure and simple.

Let's take a look at the all-time best pirating movie, Pirates of the Caribbean. Here is a link to buy the DVD on Amazon, here is the link to buy the some movie, with less features on UMD. Notice anything? How about the fact that the UMD version, with less features, costs 50% more to buy. Who in their right mind would want to buy the UMD version of the movie? What do you get for the added cost? Portability? A portable DVD player costs less than a PSP and has a bigger screen and can use the cheaper, and feature rich, DVDs. So why would anyone want to use the PSP as a movie machine?
Because they already have one, that is why.
But currently the movies cost way too much for people to want to buy on a whim (on the way out of town on a trip). So nobody buys UMD movies.
What is the solution? Sell UMD movies for $10 a pop. I guarantee you that if UMDs were that cheap I would be talking about the UMD revolution instead of the UMD flop right now.

At least they didn't blame "file sharing". (That's a joke, take a look at the article, they do that too.)

1 comment:

Big Red said...

Totally 100 Billion % agreed...a very thoughtful analysis.