Blu-ray vs. Slumdog Millionaire

I watched Slumdog Millionaire last night, which I have been planning on doing for a while. I enjoyed the award winning movie in all its high definition glory on Blu-ray, but at the end of the movie, I was left asking one question:

Why did that movie just cost me $29.99?

Sure, it's a good movie. Sure, high definition is probably a little more complicated to put on a disc, but is it really necessary to rape me this way?

The same store that sold me the movie for that outrageous price had Terminator 2 on sale for just $14.99. In fact a few months ago I bought another Blu-ray movie for $10 at Walmart.

So if they can sell me a Blu-ray movie for $10, why is it that I need to pay three times that for Slumdog Millionaire?

Amazon.com are selling Slumdog Millionaire for $25.99 right now. If I want it on DVD I could pay just $15.99. But if I want to enjoy that HD experience I have to accept being screwed.

The thing is, it's not about the money, although that is an issue. The problem is I fear for the fate of the format. When I bought an Acura TL, I was excited about the DVD Audio surround sound. But as a result of over pricing and bad marketing DVD Audio died a death, and despite the superior sound quality and surround sound capability of the format, we as consumers don't get to experience it any more.

Then the recording industry decided to get into an expensive and unnecessary format war as HD-DVD went head to head with Blu-ray. The consumers were confused, and Toshiba who basically owned the HD-DVD format withdrew from the fight in spring of 2008.

But despite Blu-ray winning the HD DVD format battle, they are not out of the woods. Consumers are finding it hard to justify switching to Blu-ray.

After all, a good big screen TV, home theater system, and DVD player will give you a pretty good home movie experience. DVDs are cheap, as are the players. By contrast, if you take the Sony Playstation 3 out of the equation, a Blu-ray player can cost hundreds of dollars, and if that isn't enough, a new movie can cost $30 or more.

The whole time the recording industry tries to rape the consumer once more, people are getting into downloadable media. There are an increasing number of non-physical formats out there. Movies on demand, downloads, streaming content, and even the replacement for the Blockbuster business model, Netflix.

Many articles have been written about the HD format wars, and many have concluded that while Blu-ray may have won the battle, it may ultimately lose the war. Consumers are simply not going to accept $30 a pop for movies. They don't care if they get a digital copy to play on their iPhone. They don't care if the sound is a little bit better or the image is a little sharper. What they care about is being ripped off. No one wants to be taken for a sucker.

The reality is that if they can sell movies on Blu-ray for $10, it is obviously not a technical impossibility to create low cost Blu-ray discs. So the only conclusion is that they are looking to take us for a ride.

What makes me sad is that this greed could spell an end for Blu-ray and so despite it being a superior technology (like DVD Audio was over the CD), it may simply fall by the side of the road, as people adopt more reasonably priced products.

I guess time will tell what happens to the format. But I think it would be a sad thing if we did not make progress in technology simply because of greedy recording industry executives.