The standard-issue Star Trek Into Darkness Blu-ray comes with a mere seven featurettes in the US. But there’s much more content out there! Buy the movie from iTunes and you get the director’s commentary; buy it from BestBuy (or Sainsburys, in the UK) and you get another selection of exclusive extras; buy it from Target and you get a few more. If you’re a US completist, in other words, you’re going to need quite a few copies. Here in the UK, it appears that we get six featurettes, and if you want the commentary there's a code for you to download it free from iTunes. People are riled, and on some level one has to wonder: are the studios intentionally throwing Blu-ray under a bus? Have they given up on the format?
This isn’t the first time this has happened with a major release. Avengers had extra bells and whistles at Bestbuy and Walmart, but those were slightly less essential extras than a commentary (the fact that the UK’s still waiting for Whedon’s commentary on that title is another disgrace). If you’re a film fan and could only choose one feature, chances are it would be the commentary, so this drive to make that a hard-to-get rarity is – frankly – a terrible one. In a very good recent article on the movie Clue, director Jonathan Lynn mentions that he offered to record a commentary for its Blu-ray release and was turned down by the studio. The upcoming Jack Ryan DVD box-set, in the UK, is available as a three-film set, but if you want The Sum Of All Fears included you have to buy it from Sainsburys (or you can buy that separately on Blu-ray). But that box set apparently doesn't have any extras, despite the fact that extras exist on previous versions of the films. And why not put it on Blu-ray?
This all seems, as an enthusiastic Blu-ray consumer, like a pretty terrible idea. For the clued-up consumer, this does not look like an opportunity to get cool extras by buying from a particular retailer; it looks like an inferior product going on general release.
So we have to assume that the studio isn’t trying to sell to a clued-up consumer. They’re trying to sell to a casual shopper who sees the title and “exclusive extras” and hopefully feels compelled to buy it on the spot. The highest-quality, highest-priced way of owning a film on the market is now being aimed at people who don’t have a strong opinion on the matter. It looks like some desperate person in marketing is trying to win the masses over to Blu-ray, but losing the hardcore by doing so is surely a bad long-term strategy.
You see, there’s an argument, a fairly strong one, that physical media are dying. Between download and streaming services, there’s no longer any need to have shelves full of discs in order to have all your favourite film and TV shows handy. If you just want the film, after all, you get it from your streaming service.
Blu-rays were, at least partly, a response to this, an all-singing, all-dancing high-definition upgrade to DVDs that would be the last word in quality and completism for AV nerds and geeks alike. They were the special-edition, leather-bound hardback book of the movie, a beautifully presented and utterly comprehensive take on the film. Sometimes they came in gorgeous containers with bonus physical extras (booklets, posters, even T-shirts or collectable figures). BD Live was an online download service originally designed to allow special material to be updated and expanded as time went on, so that you’d be completely covered. The studios tried to replicate what they did so successfully when VHS gave way to DVD; they sold the format on its higher picture and sound quality, its bells and whistles that any self-respecting film fan needs to have.
But from the start, Blu-ray’s been a neglected stepchild for the studios. That much bragged-about disc capacity is barely filled in many cases, with DVD extras or none at all. Some big, modern films didn't even bother making their extras in hi-definition for the format. Meanwhile, BD Live was almost entirely ignored by the studios, who instead entered the familiar cycle of launching period “special” and “ultimate” editions to keep keen fans buying multiple copies. Instead of playing to Blu-ray’s strengths, the studios apparently expected to treat it almost exactly like DVD and hope that no one would notice. And when Blu-ray failed to take off to quite the same extent (largely because of that failure to differentiate it but partly because the economy went off the cliff at just the moment that Blu-ray should have gone bananas), they apparently gave up on all that promised support for the format and seemed to stop investing in it.
As a result, those who don’t really care about extras have largely written Blu-ray off, not quite getting the point of upgrading beyond the perfectly OK DVD picture quality (for quite some time, studios wouldn’t even provide side-by-side picture comparisons to prove the advantages of Blu-ray - and given that Blu ray players and most modern DVD players upgrade the DVD picture, it's not even that apparent in all cases). Those people are now downloading films, and chances are that they’ll never go back to discs. So why piss off the hardcore fans who might still buy the format?
Maybe one reason is that big retailers increasingly have a stranglehold on product; they’re doing with film what they’ve done for years with groceries. With the big retailers online and off driving independent sellers out of business, the few behemoths left in the market have more and more leverage over the product they sell, because there’s no viable alternative to them. The studios apparently hope that, by making deals to provide more and more exclusives to these sellers, they’ll get prime placements in store, hook casual shoppers on Blu-ray and increase the consumer base. But if the effect is to alienate your hardcore fans and provide a product with little visible advantage over the much cheaper DVD / download options to convert those casual buyers, it seems like a short-term measure at best. About 50 percent of sales of new titles last year were on Blu-ray as opposed to DVD; if they hope to increase that to the vital 70 percent (the approximate level where an old format gets phased out) they need to sell Blu-ray better than this.
If the studios really want to stave off the decline of physical media, the way to do it is to make their Blu-rays really, really good. If you must give exclusive content to certain retailers, make it optional curlicues rather than commentaries and core featurettes. Make Blu-rays the essential format for any film you really love, make them gorgeous and complete things that become status symbols. That’s the best and only way to get, and keep, a mass-market in the medium or even short term. Right now all they’re doing is driving the format off a cliff.
) puede que noten una mayor incidencia pero no creo que sea uno de los elementos más críticos.
El contenido que tengas dentro se las pela. De ahi en parte la psicosis de copias de seguridad que lleva metido todo informatico a sangre y fuego.
y si quieres volver sobre lo andado, vete a comprar las poquísimas reediciones que se están haciendo de duplicados de master tape y a ver que tal sienta eso de pagar alrededor de $200 por álbum 
