Sony delays Blu-ray movies

Posted on 4 May 2006 at 13:20

Delays in the delivery of the first Blu-ray players have prompted Sony to put back the release date for the first Blu-ray (BD) movies.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment had planned to ship the initial batch of nine titles on 23 May to coincide with the introduction by Samsung of the first BD player. But that has now been delayed by a month and the discs are now scheduled to go on shop shelves in the US on 20 June.

'The majority of our retail base and hardware partners have requested that we reconsider this date to better coincide with the first commercially available Blu-ray-compatible hardware,' said Sony Pictures Home Entertainment president Benjamin Feingold.

The delay extends the head start gained by Blu-ray's rival, HD DVD, whose main backer, Toshiba, began selling two players last month alongside four movie titles. That said the headstart is unlikely to reap considerable sales, according to a survey by DVD swapping website Peerflix.

The survey of high-volume DVD traders, the most likely early-adopters of high-definition technology, found that just one-in-five may buy either a BD or HD DVD player in 2006.

According to Daniele Levy, Peerflix's vice president of marketing, the results show that widespread adoption by hard-core DVD fans is at least a year away.

'We were quite surprised to see that a very small number of those die-hard DVD fans envisioned moving into the high-definition format this year,' he said. 'With all the talk and excitement around high-definition DVD they are still a long way away from moving into that format.'

The big question for anyone looking to buy an HD player is which format to choose. Until that is resolved in favour of one or the other, or until cross-platform players go on sale, sales can only be expected to be slow. Early adopters, who tend to be more technologically savvy than the norm, are also likely to be concerned by the widely discussed but untested restrictions imposed on both platforms by their DRM systems. Particularly, they will want to be assured that they can play their $30 discs on PC media centres without encumbrance.

Author: Simon Aughton