As we prepare to pass the 700 title mark in the US for Blu-ray releases, I thought it was worthwhile to take a look at how far the format has come in just over 2 years. According to the release list here on the site, we will pass the 700 title mark (not including small BD-R releases) on July 29th. We've obviously got a LONG way to go to catch up with the 10s of thousands of titles available on DVD, but its definitely an improvement from the early days.
Blu-ray launched in the U.S. on June 24, 2006, with just 6 titles (all of them Sony). Lionsgate and Concert Hot Spot released their first titles a week later. Fox joined the part in July, but it took Warner until August to release their first titles. Disney and Paramount took even longer, with the first titles not hitting until September 2006.
By November 17, 2006, the launch date of the PS3 system in the US, exactly 100 titles were available. The last two months of the year saw a fairly rapid increase in Blu-ray movie output, and we ended 2006 with 133 titles available.
The following spring was a mixed bag, with Fox "going dark" and ceasing new Blu-ray releases until they could get the BD+ copy protection layer implemented. At Blu-ray's 1 year anniversary, June 20, 2007, 265 titles had been released.
In August, 2007, Paramount shocked the industry by accepting "advertising concessions" (read: flat out bribe) from Toshiba to support the HD DVD format exclusively. Fox quickly responded by announcing that they would be returning with new releases shortly, though no Fox titles were put out until October. Still, by years' end, the format counted 442 total US titles, still quite a bit more than the competing HD DVD format.
Warner in effect ended the format war in early January, 2008, announcing that they would be supporting the Blu-ray format exclusively going forward. Toshiba soon threw in the towel on HD DVD, and Paramount and Universal began making plans to begin Blu-ray production. By Blu-ray's 2 year anniversary on June 20, 2008, Paramount had returned to the format, and there were a total of 637 titles available. In the short time since then, we've clocked in even more titles (including the first Universal titles to be released on Tuesday), bringing the total count to 690 as of July 22.
Below is a breakdown of title releases by quarter since the format launched:
As you can see, the format has experienced considerable growth since the first slow quarters, and has improved dramatically since Q4, 2007. The current quarter above includes released and officially announced titles for the quarter, so the final number will actually be higher. Still, this marks the first quarter in which the format has released over 200 titles. Given that for the last two years, the fourth quarter has had more than twice the releases of the third quarter, we should see an incredible number of releases in quarter four of this year. It's guaranteed that we'll break 1000 titles by year's end, and even breaking 1200 is a fairly likely possibility with all the additional replication lines being brought online shortly.
0 comments:
Post a Comment