Best Buy sells Blu-rays for $10-$13
Posted on August 10th, 2009 – 11:29 AMBy Randy A. Salas
How low must Blu-ray disc prices go before you buy in? How about $10 to $13?
Blu-ray deals come and go online. You can track them through sites such as High-Def Digest. But now they’re starting to pop up in brick-and-mortar stores, too — and not just in after-Thanksgiving sales. Best Buy (via Dealnews) has a bunch of catalog Blu-ray titles on sale for as little as $9.99. Some are clunkers, but there are some really fantastic titles in the lot — not just for the movies, but also for AV quality and extras. For example, for $9.99, you can get Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride or V for Vendetta. For $12.99, you can get the new super-duper special edition of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the cult fave Road House, the classic The Graduate, the Oscar-worthy Eastern Promises and The Aviator, the comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the horror masterpieces 28 Days Later and The Descent, and the sonic spectacular U-571. There are more than 50 titles in all. Order online and specify in-store pickup to skirt shipping fees.
And Blu-ray deals are coming on the rental front, too. Rental powerhouse Redbox recently announced that it plans to stock Blu-ray titles soon in its ubiquitous red vending machines. They probably won’t rent for the $1 that its DVDs do, but you can bet the price will be below what others are charging — without memberhip obligations.
10 Responses to "Best Buy sells Blu-rays for $10-$13"
About time they started pricing these movies realistically. I’m going to pick up Miami Vice and Eastern Promises.
Sure. They’ll sell Blu-ray discs on the cheap until the market finally ditches DVD and most everyone is running Blu-ray. Then you will see prices go up again, as there will be little reason to try to entice conversions. Once everyone is on the platform, they know they can charge (to a great degree) whatever they want.
Oh neat! An advertisement masquerading as news!
This blog asks “How low must Blu-ray disc prices go before you buy in?” For me it is less the cost of the discs and more about the cost of the player.
a2zme: Player prices shouldn’t be an issue. Best Buy sells a full-featured Insignia player for less than $120 and Wal-Mart sells an entry-level Magnavox player for less than $100. See http://www.donlindich.com.
But I can pick up DVD players for between $25 and $40. The difference in quality is not big enough to warrant an additional expense. I’m also able to purchase a broad range of DVD titles for $10 or less on a regular basis.
Going beyond DVD and Blu-ray, we actually watch more video online (e.g., network sites, Netflix) than we do via DVD today. I see no point in upgrading our player, when I believe our future will be watching online, on-demand.
Using HikingStick’s reasoning, shouldn’t a regular DVD (as the dominant media) cost about $30 or more? I was the dominant media well before BluRay or HDDVD came along. If you want a good player you still have to fork over $200+. I can get a quality DVD player now for less than $100. It IS the player pricing that is keeping most people away…and the quality isn’t that much different than an upconverted DVD.
kell0462: Actually, the Insignia player has just about everything, including BD Live (after firmware update), so you can get a good player for less than $120.
when the blu-ray players get into the $30-40 range, I will consider one. assuing they upconvert existing DVDs at that price. I’ve caught onto this next-gen bait and switch nonsense used to sell you the same license for the same content for the third or fourth time every 8-10 years.
Blu-ray will sell at what the market will bear. I also think that some think that DVDs were priced at $15 or lower when that format first hit the market. No so… there were plenty of must have catalog titles and new releases that were some routinely being priced at $30 or higher. But it did not get as much flak from the format’s base consumers because many of them were former laserdisc owners that were accustomed to paying $50 to $100 for a title. DVD was a bargain format compared to LD. Don’t worry as the consumers move over to BD, the catalog titles will be positioned at more attractive price points. New releases? Heck some new releases still street for well above $25 on DVD. Personally I have such a large stack of unwatched films, I can wait for sales on newer titles.
