I bought El Hubbo a PS3 for his birthday, so now we have a Blu-Ray player. We’ve watched exactly 0 Blu-Ray movies on it. But Mom bought Tangled for her granddaughters, and she’s giving us the Blu-Ray disk from her mandatory two pack as well, because she only wants the DVD. So hey, free movie!
I’m not sure they’ve really thought through the marketing.
This going to come as a surprise to you but sometimes businesses make mistakes. They’re not perfect.
A good business doesn’t try to sell what it wants to sell. It sells what its customers want to buy.
Sony has a history of ignoring the market. It tried to convince people they wanted ATRAC, Betamaxes, CD rootkits, Connect, DAT’s, Dynamic Digital Sound, HiFD, Memory Sticks, Mini-Disks, MusicClip, SACD’s, UMD’s, VAIO’s, and the movie remake of Bewitched.
It took seven years for the DVD to overtake VHS in the US, with essentially no other competition. Blu-Ray has had to compete with DVD, HD-DVD, and streaming video (whether from companies like Netflix or directly from cable and satellite providers).
Plus, in Japan Blu-Ray overtook DVD more or less instantly when it was released in 2006.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Sony has a history of ignoring the market. It tried to convince people they wanted ATRAC, Betamaxes, CD rootkits, Connect, DAT’s, Dynamic Digital Sound, HiFD, Memory Sticks, Mini-Disks, MusicClip, SACD’s, UMD’s, VAIO’s, and the movie remake of Bewitched.
[/QUOTE]
This is silly. Sony doesn’t “ignore the market”; it creates the market. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out, but when it does, it does spectacularly. People seem to forget that Sony and Philips were the driving forces behind the DVD and the CD.
DAT did just fine in commercial applications, and Sony never followed through on pushing it in consumer applications because it was too expensive. MiniDisc did well in Japan, and the only reason it failed in the global market was because Sony failed to predict the emergence of affordable CD-Rs and flash media.
I think you nailed it in one there.
That said, we bought a Blu-Ray player to go along with our new HDTV this last Christmas (all Sony, coincidentally), and we’re still being stunned by the picture quality of blu-ray discs. THAT said, we’re still buying DVDs for movies where we don’t care much about the special effects (comedies, romantic movies, etc.). I recently watched Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” on blu-ray, and it was worth it. I don’t care for the more expensive bundled packages, either - we choose one format or the other, based on the movie.
Had it.
Got it.
Hardly even got to use it.
What am I going to do with these when the Cybershot is kaput?
Can still play these in my Onkyo CD player… after playing tag with the tray.
I loved mine… for about a month and then the lack of media drive made it pretty useless.
you forgot the
Hobbled Palm OS and more Memory Sticks.
Grrrrrrrr… I guess when you swing for the fences as often as they do you are bound to hit a couple out of the park.
So I assume that if you go to a restaurant and the food is too expensive (at least in your mind), you dine and dash, right?
I am not a big fan of Sony, but right now the DVD/Blu-Ray packs make sense. It’d be nice if they sold them individually, however, in my house we have a Blu-Ray in the living room and the rest of the rooms have DVD. Since the DVD players won’t do Blu-Ray having the DVD is nice. I bet that most households have both right now.
Slee
No, I wouldn’t and I don’t see any reason why you’d assume I would. I just wouldn’t buy the meal like I didn’t buy the movie.
And you’re missing the point. This isn’t about a product that has a high cost. This about two products being sold exclusively as a package so that customers have to buy both even though most people are only going to want one.
We keep the Blu-Ray, give the DVD to my brother-in-law, and Sony (or Disney in this case, since it was Tangled) only made one sale instead of two.
But what better movie title to force bundling on than Tangled!
Old school P2P.
Some day some media distributor will figure out a business model that works in the modern distribution channels.
in japan!
you can’t create a market. you product to an existing market. sometimes new markets will emerge (like targeting ipod users), but i kind of disagree there.
and the fact that it was stupid.
i donno. i’ve been to hong kong and it was tech city. (this was 14 years ago, too.) mini discs, cds, cameras, camcorders,* everything*. the culture is completely different when you’re talking about japan or certain Asian (i have no other word for this, sorry) metro markets.
The point is that while from Little Nemo’s point of view, all of that stuff was stupid because it didn’t do well here, from Sony’s point of view, most of it made enough money somewhere to ensure it was profitable.
I guess you could argue that their one-size-fits-all approach is a problem in and of itself, but what do you want them to do? Develop one media storage device for Japan and one for everywhere else?
Of course you can. You can’t create consumers, obviously, but you create a market for a product or service by offering it for sale. Sony could simply not have bothered inventing the Compact Disc, and happily carried on selling audio cassettes, but instead, they decided to try to create a new market.
Sony has been at the leading edge of consumer electronics since 1958, and the way they got there (and stayed there) is by throwing shit at a wall and hoping it sticks. For every Betamax, there’s a Walkman, and there is no other company in the world with the same track record.
Did anyone else miss the “Pictures” part of the thread title and figure this was going to be about the PSN debacle?
Is the term “Asian” not PC enough for you? It must be important to you, as it is the only word you capitalized.
Not that I disagree with the OP’s sentiment (I don’t) but I just thought I’d mention that it isn’t just Sony engaging in this type of bundling. I first ran across this when I was given “Inception”, a Warner Bros. release, this past Christmas. The package contains a bluray, DVD and windows media digital file.
And, like others mentioned above, I gave my brother the DVD and kept the bluray.
Bundling has certainly existed for quite a while. But that’s not the issue. Inception was available in several different packages: a DVD only package, a Blu Ray only package, and a Blu Ray/DVD combo package.
But The Illusionist is only available in the combo package.
When Tron Legacy came out a few weeks back, I wanted to 3D version to enjoy on my new TV. To get the 3D Blu-ray disc, I had to buy the 3D Blu-ray, regular Blu-ray, DVD, and digital copy. That’s just silly.
Sure, if you wanted to buy the four-disc combo.
But for only thirty more dollars, you could have gone for the five-disc combo, which had the the 3D Blu-ray, regular Blu-ray, DVD, the digital copy, and a Blu Ray of the original Tron.
And at that point, you might as well just spend another forty dollars and get the collectible package. It has the same five discs as the previous package but they come in a really cool disc-shaped box.
Is there an equivalent of Poe’s Law for marketing?
You’re thinking of 3" CDs. MiniDiscs were a completely different format, like little floppies packaged in a roughly cassette-sized case. I picked up a couple of them (Jethro Tull, Frank Zappa) as collector’s items during the short time they were on the market.