Blu-ray Dimensions

This is a follow up on my first post back in October 2008 in which I tried to answer the burning question, “why are Blu-ray discs so expensive?”. Although I’m discussing recordable blu-ray blank discs some of the same forces are at work with BD-ROM discs, primarily licensing fees.  Some recent changes to licensing fees of BD-ROM which will simplify the licensing and payment of royalties is expected to help lower the cost of production. One of the major expenses is new production equipment.  Both BD-ROM and BD-R discs use a specialized system that is not like the CD and DVD production lines (which can be modified to produce CD or DVD) so there are capital expenses that work into the disc cost structure.

A big change in Blu-ray recordable media may be just around the bend.  Taiyo Yuden just announced the release of a new LTH type recordable BD-R disc which is supposed to cost far less to manufacture as the new product can utilize the old production systems.  The change is in the recording dye which is currently inorganic based with the new LTH product using organic dye.  The big issue with LTH media is it is not compatible with current Blu-ray players or Blu-ray recorders. There is a possibility with firmware upgrades that the LTH Blu-ray media can be adapted to function in current Blu-ray technology. It is a big if and certainly does not add to the consumer confidence in Blu-ray.

Just what we need another format change.

Panasonic 50GB Dual-Layer Blu-ray discs

It is certainly a sign of the times when a emerging technology like Blu-ray is compared to a mature technology like DVD. Many people have a hard time understanding the costs in product development and manufacturing.  Then and only then does the product line start to “bring in money”.  However that money (or revenue) is paying off the original investment in the R&D.  True profitability is not achieved until after a economy of scale has been reached.  In some cases that point is never reached.  DVD Recordable is a great example of this.  Some media manufacturers have been trying to capture the market by undercutting one another and have only succeeded in driving the price down below their costs.  This was an attempt to jump start the recordable DVD market (which it was successful at) but also made it very difficult to make any profit or recover the investment in manufacturing.

Recordable Blu-ray discs is somewhat different in that there is not a viable competing technology like DVD+R and DVD-RAM.  HD-DVD was abandoned by Toshiba and so only one format is available.  This excludes some of the more boutique optical discs like UDO and some of the Chinese formats.  In comparison to recordable DVD evolution Blu-ray has been far faster.  Perhaps that is why there is some impatience in the price decreasing in the same way DVD did.  It took recordable DVD around 5 years to mature and it was not till the last several years that prices started to decrease: sharply.

Blu-ray recordable is still developing.  At this point dual layer Blu-ray recordable discs (BD-RE) can store 50 GB of data, single side can store 25GB.  The road map looks to a 100GB disc in the near future.  All this takes capital to finance.  Essentially the technology is shrinking the method of storing the data and creating multi layers that each store more and more data.  The technology uses a different type of laser (that’s how optical discs are read). With all that it does not compare to when a DVD recorder drive was $13,000.  Yes those days (years) really did exist.  This is not where we break out into a story about walking to school in bare feet in the snow but it really is a matter of perspective.  Recordable Blu-ray is not as inexpensive as recordable DVD because DVD is a mature market.  Demand has leveled off  and despite the crazy forecasts from some manufacturing sectors, the same ones who dump product on the market because they are always wrong, prices have drifted down.