I must also say, I live half-way across the world in Bangladesh – where there’s nothing even CLOSE to a CD factory – so this is the only way for me.

Hoping you can help.
Thank you,
Marcus

That being said, his analysis makes some sense. I work for a mid-sized replication facility (for real, just look at my email address – and I make no exagerrated claims of being a “purchasing manager” etc) and find myself having to explain to customers who want us to handle their BD replication that 1. the content provider MUST be licensed by AACS (and have paid the $15,000.00 annual fee) and 2. we will then charge them both a one time certification fee (which we pay directly to AACSLA as a “content producer”, that is, a disc manufacturer) and the per disc fee ($0.04 each disc which again, we pay directly to AACSLA, unless the content provider has made a deal with AACSLA as a “volume provider” and has managed to secure a volume per-disc rate deal, which they will then pay directly to AACSLA)

Let me say here, that dealing with this AACS licensing fees/bureaucracy is as bewildering as dealing with macrovision. Sheesh.

Anyway, we are also “dipping our toes” and have recently purchased a HD-DVD line – it is being installed as I type, and we expect to start making actual HD-DVDs next week. It is very fast and able to do DVD-5 and 9 as well as HD-DVD, so, as well as being able to do HD-DVD, we just increased our regular DVD capacity by 20%.

We also purchased, and expect to take delivery of in early 2008, a BD line, and we expect to be able to sell this format to a (what I believe will be) limited amount of customers. The boss here is very excited by the prospect of selling $3.00 discs. We shall see.

Bottom line: Blu-Ray will very expensive to manufacture, mostly due to the various AACS licensing/per disc unit fees, equipment upgrades, equipment purchases, etc., at least in the forseeable future, and will price some of our clients out of that business. While HD-DVD will only be marginally more expensive, and that cost increase gets smaller and smaller as amount of discs required gets larger and larger.

Though the post house and authoring guys tell me “Hollywood is going Blu Ray”, that does us no good since we do not have any *movie studio* accounts, and mostly deal with marketing types of content. I can’t imagine any of THEM wanting to pay an annual fee or per disc rate of any kind – they would be willing, however (I hope) to pay an additional $0.05 – $0.10 per disc (for 10,000 – 100,000 discs) to have an actual Hi-Def DVD of their wonderful program with which to lure customers.

And I just told one of the sales guys just this morning to stay away from BD…HD-DVD is my choice.

ACME

I am only taking HD-DVD in the long run, because there is no way Sony will be able to keep up with replication demands, and porn will sway the industry toward HD-DVD. And our company stands to benefit financially 150% more from HD-DVD sales. Again I say, Sony will not be able to keep up with production/replication unless someone else wants to throw in roughly 100 million USD for 50 Blu-Ray replication lines, neglecting the other 40 million USD they will need for stampers/mirrors… More research is a good thing…