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Why is Die Hard $8 on Blu Ray but $15 on AppleTV? [Unfair Media Pricing]
r4dr3z
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A Blu Ray disc is harder to manufacture. And ship. It gives me the option to watch it even if I switch TV products. I can resell or give it away. But the digital copy costs more. Why?
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It's an interesting note that for non-audio media attaining it digitally seems to have quite the markup for Reasons™. Though for games I think it's a dogged attempt to resist the price drops that can affect all but the biggest blockbusters.
And yet, in one of the interesting issues to come out of fragmented rightholders, digital distribution is frequently much more fragmented in terms of what can be sold, and from where.
Also, I assume, less overhead.
A store selling a DVD has spent $x already, and if something is a dog just using up shelf space they are motivated to recover that money.
They pay the royalties for digital copies more or less as they are sold.
Steam: adamjnet
There's a lot of personal preference that comes up regarding digital vs physical media. In the end though a digital copy is always cheaper to distribute than a physical copy. The sole reason digital media ever costs more than their physical counterparts is "because the vendor can charge that much".
Which is fair. Sellers can charge whatever they want. But when I have to pay more for an e-book than the hard cover I'm not going to believe it's for any reason beyond business.
Nah. It's just that they can. Years ago publishers would claim the book prices being what they were because of materials and shipping. Not shockingly, once the barrier of actually printing books was removed they didn't lower prices. Small Gods on Amazon costs nine dollars paperback and ten dollars for a digital copy. There's zero reason for that to be the case beyond someone along the line just wanting more money.
Edit: After all the convenience goes both ways here. I don't have to worry about storing a book on a shelf somewhere but neither do they. And now that they don't have to keep warehouses full of books or pay to distribute them they charge more.
At least in the UK part of the reason is that sales tax is charged on ebooks, but not for "analogue" books. But yeah, doing things like artificially holding the ebook price high so it doesn't compete with the new hardback release is some dumb, annoying shit.
I'd guess this one. At the end of the day the top publishers are going to be holding the keys to most of the best authors out there. Amazon's been trying to break in to the publishing game but have done a pretty awful job of it. I've tried a couple of their popular direct published books and they were atrocious.
Which overall sucks for us the consumers. But at the end of the day people can choose who they want to publish their books and those publishers can charge what they want.
Probably the latter. Though it's probably also because the market isn't big enough to be competitive yet. Publishers are only going to go with a reduced price per digital copy if the potential lost sales are large enough.
This is going to sound funny, but Apple tried.
And they tried wrangling all the publishers to agree to a fair price per ebook, and require that they do not sell bulk to vendors who can afford to buy bulk and therefore get a lower price than everyone else.
Amazon argued it was monopolistic and collusion, despite them owning the ebook market (80% or more), they won the court case, and now Amazon is pretty much the only game in town for ebooks and they got to look like David ala David vs. Goliath in the process.
So publishers charge more, sell to amazon at a lower price because amazon bulk buys licenses, amazon undercuts MSRP, and they cornered a market with the support of the courts.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
This was a super interesting read regarding pricing shenanigans:
http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/25/amazon-hachette-explainer/
That's the reason anything costs what it does though. A physical book or BluRay costs what iy does solely because they can charge that much.
Not solely. There's costs to be taken in to consideration such as the author, editor, and publisher's time, printing the book, storing it, shipping it, having a building it can be sold in, etc. Having knocked out those latter parts you'd think publishers might pass at least some of the savings on to the consumer. Instead they've increased them on the cheaper to produce product while selling the more expensive to make one at a cheaper price. Which is currently a perfectly sound if dickish business move.
Well, to some extent this has to happen every once in a while, what with inflation being real but prices being incredibly sticky in consumers minds.
EDIT: I mean, hell movies were like $20 new basically my whole life, $10 or $15 after they'd been out for a while. The prices are still holding steady and the inflation slack is being taking up by the better margins offered by digital.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
What I'm getting at is that with the elimination of so many expenses, you'd think there'd be an interest in pricing aggressively to 'hook' more people on the platforms. Steam and iTunes have become ubiquitous within my customer buying patterns, to the point that going to another platform is usually a dealbreaker. Exceptions are made for things I'm truly frothing for (example; Diablo/Starcraft games on battle.net, Mass Effect 3 on Origin), but where possible I keep to Steam because they've treated me well and I like the convenience of (almost) everything under a single banner, usually for a good to great price (steam sales being where most of my purchases come from, again barring the rare exception I won't wait for, X-Com 2 I'm looking at you).
Oh absolutely. But right now there's no reason for a paperback to cost less than the digital copy. No good one for consumers anyway.
I guess, all things being equal yeah.
Isn't the unit cost on a mass-produced paperback also absurdly low? Not surprising that differences in the sales models is the main contributor to prices.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
If that were the case then there's no point trying to undercut physical media because it won't actually drive sales, just lower your profits
If the people who will price compare are less than the people who will pick it up in their preferred format whatever, then both are going to charge the highest market rate they can rather than seeing themselves as competing at all.
The cost of physically producing a paperback or a bluray is pretty minimal. The rest of the costs except for distribution are pretty much the same.
But that's all besides the point. There's no reason you should expect them to pass the savings on to the consumer because that assumes the pricing is based on what it costs them rather then based on what they believe the market will bear. It's not dickish it's just the way everything is priced.
And of course, there are a myriad of other business considerations at work. You've got loss leader strategies on one side (see - Amazon or Walmart) and attempts to not undermine the price of other equivalent goods they produce (see - Publishers and Production companies).
And you've got the whole idea of IP itself, whose whole purpose is to inflate the price of goods that are expensive to create the original of but cheap to reproduce.
Basically there's no direct connection between what it costs to make a good and what it sells for. And yet many arguments for why X is "too expensive" rest on the idea that they are.
Unless your chosen platform chooses to close down or revoke your license for whatever reason...
One extremely annoying thing is that in the EU, e-books aren't a product. They're a service. So that's 25% VAT instead of the 6% a dead tree book gets.
There are big slapfights about this.
Why would you think that? This is simply not how a market economy works.
The price of the inputs to a product do not directly influence the price of the product. They have an indirect effect by influencing the willingness of suppliers, but that's it. Price is set where supply and demand meets, no more or less.
Except the actual supply here is virtually infinite. Cause it sure as hell doesn't take more resources or effort to put a book on my kindle than it does to ship and store it somewhere. At this point the only reason there's an increase in customer expense is the publishers wanting more money.
This isn't, like, an especially harsh indictment of them either. Ten bucks for a book is a perfectly acceptable price to me. But the only reason the digital one costs that much and the physical one doesn't is publishers wanting more money. Not because it's a dollar more in expenses to download a book.
yes, digital only for games, please.
My PS4 has this annoying habit of just deciding to spit out whatever disc I have in it. And then not letting me put it back in right away.... and then spitting it out again and again and again and why the fuck does this system even need discs what is this the fucking stoneage
/rant over
Some combination of needing to keep a retail channel running, popularity / newness, and straight-up price gouging.