LOS ANGELES — Although prices for some Blu-ray players dropped below $100 this holiday season, customers are hesitating to jump into the next-generation video format. Even people who already own Blu-ray players are still buying movies on DVDs.
One big reason: Blu-ray discs won’t play on standard DVD players found in cars, computers and bedrooms.
Now Hollywood — which is banking on the pricier Blu-ray discs to help lift sagging home video sales — is stepping up its efforts to win customers. Studios are packaging Blu-ray discs with regular DVDs and throwing in so-called “digital copies,” which can play on computers and iPods.
Over the past month or so, “Up,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and many other hit movies were released in such combo packs. Universal is releasing its “Bourne” movies on “flipper” discs with Blu-ray on one side and DVD on the other.
Such combos generally cost about $20 — sometimes 50 percent to 70 percent less than what it would to buy a Blu-ray disc and DVD separately.
Movie studios have been pushing Blu-ray for its crystal- clear sound and images, which can be enjoyed even without the best flat-panel TVs. Yet DVDs remain more convenient because players and computer drives that read DVD discs are ubiquitous. Two-thirds of the 92 million U.S. households that have a DVD player have more than one.
There are Blu-ray players in nearly 12 million U.S. homes, but you still need to think hard about where you’d want to play a Blu-ray disc before you buy one.
“Blu-ray is landlocked. It’s home-locked,” said Michael Vitelli, a vice president at Best Buy Co.
At a recent industry conference, Vitelli remarked that it shouldn’t matter where consumers plan to watch a movie they buy, just as it shouldn’t matter where Starbucks customers are going to drink their lattes. But these days, with an array of video formats and devices, it does matter.
Studios have been working on technologies to let consumers buy a movie and then access it on any format or device.
