The Blu-ray format just turned eighteen.   Eighteen years and going strong, with the latest twelve month cycle being the busiest one yet.

You read that right … the busiest one yet!   A seven-year run of new record release totals!

It was not a pretty beginning for the format back in 2006.   The launch was to hav taken place on May 23, with eleven titles lined up from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Lionsgate Home Entertainment and MGM Home Entertainment.   That didn’t happen.
Delayed again on June 13.   

Finally, June 20, 2006 saw the first wave of seven titles on Blu-ray.   Six were from Sony — House of Flying Daggers, 50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, Underworld: Evolution and XXX — with MGM kicking in one Blu-ray, The Terminator.

The following week, June 27, Lionsgate contributed its five delayed titles — Terminator 2, Crash, Lord of War, Punisher and Saw — and Sony released Ultraviolet.

MGM managed to cough-up three titles in July and Sony found two more, the surprise was WEA – Concert Hot Spot dipping its toe in the water with Muriel Anderson: A Guitarscape Planet and View From Space With Heavenly Music.

Meanwhile, Sony’s arch-rival, Toshiba, had launched a DVD second generation format of its own, HD-DVD.   The VHS/Betamax wars of the early 1980s were about to repeat themselves.

Toshiba was even out first with a smattering of titles in March of 2006.   But, their format launch efforts would prove to be inept.

At the 2006 VSDA (Video Software Dealer’s Association) convention in Las Vegas that summer, the DVD Release Report (our original publication name) held over 40 meetings with home entertainment suppliers over a four-day period.  We asked two questions at every session.   

First, which format do you prefer?  The answer was complete ambivalence — we are not picking sides; we are not getting into this war.   Authoring is too expensive to take the risk.

The next question, if HD-DVD or Blu-ray picked up the tab for authoring, would you commit your best selling DVD titles to that side?   The universal answer was a resounding YES!

Within days after the convention we reached out to Toshiba, who had publically stated that they had a $50 million war chest to promote the HD-DVD format.   We supplied the data.   Hundreds of titles would be instantly available if Toshiba authored product for the new format … instead, they went on a $50 million “bus tour.”   Money squandered … an opportunity lost.   Within 24 months they were gone.

This mini-war was not without consequences.   After two full years of pushing the new Blu-ray format only 601 titles were available … the DVD launch almost matched that title count in the first 12 months of its launch.

Warner Home Video’s first supported the Blu-ray format with four releases on Aug. 1, Disney joined the party on Sept. 19 with four titles and Paramount followed on Sept. 26 with four titles as well.

Magnolia Home Entertainment released writer/director Eylan Fox’s The Bubble on Sept. 26.
20th Century-Fox finally arrived on scene on Nov. 14, but New Year’s Eve came and went and both Universal and Dreamworks, the last studio holdouts, were still on the sidelines. 

It got ugly as 2007 opened up, Dreamworks released Dreamgirls on May 1, Flags of Our Father arrived on May 22 and two more titles followed.   On Aug. 21, Paramount and Dreamworks joined Universal in abandoning the Blu-ray format … all titles released were promptly withdrawn from the marketplace.

Three studios quit Blu-ray in 2007.    Tick tock, tick tock.  On May 20, 2008 both Dreamworks and Paramount signaled that they would once again support the Blu-ray format, however Dreamsworks was delayed in getting back into the pool until June 3.   On that date, all previously released Blu-rays from both Paramount and Dreamworks were reissued.

Universal finally raised the white flag on July 22, 2008 — over two years into the format wars — with The Mummy trilogy as their first three Blu-ray releases.

As a result of this mini-format war (and the consumer confusion that it caused), it took eight long years for the annual output to reach the 2,000-title mark.  

By mid-June of 2016 the Blu-ray format recorded its first down year … title release activity was stagnant.   2017 saw another dip in title output.

Indeed, if one only looked at “replicated” Blu-ray releases, a plateau was reached by year six (June of 2012) and output never climbed above 2,200 after that, peaking in year 13 (June of 2019) with 2,119 replicated Blu-ray releases.  

This peak in 2019 is significant as that’s the year that Hollywood (the studios) decided that they would declare on the Netflix monster that they had created and go all in on streaming, losing billions in the process.    

Couple this with the arrival of the Covid pandemic and replicated Blu-ray has been in steady decline — in terms of traditionally replicated output — over the past five years.   The latest cycle saw only 1,714 traditionally replicated Blu-ray titles released.

If that is your view on physical media in general, and Blu-ray specifically, then you have completely missed the mega trend of MOD (Manufactured On Demand).

At the “peak” year of Blu-ray (June of 2019), MOD releases were less than half of the replicated count — 990 versus 2,119.   By June of 2021 (year 15) they had flipped with 1,969 MOD titles delivered on Blu-ray versus 1,822 replicated releases.   

As we finish year 18 of the format’s lifecycle, the traditionally replicated count has fallen to 1,714 SKUs, while the MOD output has exploded to 6,651 (and that is just the preliminary count … it will go higher).

WHY?   It is not a clear-cut answer, but generally speaking the rapid rise in MOD Blu-ray product offerings is being driven by two factors.

First, when “Hollywood” went on its streaming kamikaze mission the “Helper” community (our term for pirates, bootleggers, etc.) took notice of all the pristine masters that were being served up for film and series across multiple platforms.   It was a trickle at first, but once they realized that the studios (rights owners) either didn’t care or didn’t realize that there was a problem worth dealing with, they became increasingly more aggressive.  

And we don’t even track China, Sri Lanka and other exotic “importer” locations.   In fact, it has reached a point where it appears that both eBay and Etsy (among other selling platforms) are in partnership with China in the mass delivery of pirated intellectual properties and the owners — the studios; the streamers — don’t seem to care (or notice).

Second, the Blu-ray format, which was launch for its superior Hi-Def qualities, is now being used as a storage platform.   The extra bandwidth over DVD makes it easy to cram an entire eight or ten episode series on just one disc.

Another minor factor is that consumers appear to have accepted MOD as the standard.   Looks good, plays fine, what’s the problem?   

The Blu-ray format is thriving because “Hollywood” (in a very loose sense) has turned its attention elsewhere and the demand for product by consumers is simply being filled by others.   You stream, or have a premium VOD window, and you’ve just delivered a nice master of the your film and/or series to those who will gladly distribute it … and not pay you a dime for the privilege. 

Is that an insane business model?   The numbers clearly show it … record after record is being smashed literally on a monthly basis.   Happy Birthday Blu-ray, you are a rock star!!