HomeWeekly News Roundup (February 19, 2017)
Hello on this chilly morning from Melbourne. Hope the past week has been a good one for you!
Not much news this week, in that there really wasn’t too much news worthy stories to discuss. So I spent most of it working on other projects and also (finally) finishing up the Blu-ray: The State of Play post for 2016.
Could a single title be responsible for Blu-ray’s mini-revival in 2016?
While you can read the report for what I think happened to Blu-ray (and DVD, and Ultra HD Blu-ray) in 2016, for 2017 so far though, things don’t look very good for Blu-ray and disc sales in general. It could be the relative lack of quality in the new releases so far, but Blu-ray revenue is down an average of 27% compared to the same weeks last year.
There’s no doubt that ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ had a big hand in boosting Blu-ray sales in 2016 – it’s third on the list of all-time consumer spendings on Blu-ray, and could go even higher given time to catch up to ‘Frozen’ and ‘Avatar’. It also broke all sorts of sales records in overseas markets. But it wasn’t released until April, and so January and February should be fairly comparable between this and last year (although I guess you could say that the popularity of ‘Minions’ was still giving a helping hand to Blu-ray sales back in early 2016, and there’s no such comparable title this time around).
Time will tell if this is just a blip, caused by the lack of good releases, or something a bit more serious.
Well since there’s not much news, which should change next week, there’s not much point in going on and on except to say, see you next week!