Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

This rumor by no means has been confirmed, but we’re telling you about it so that you can keep your eye out for it. If it’s true, it’s an awesome deal. Rumor has it that starting on November 24th at 8 AM and running through November 25th at 11:59 PM, Wal-Mart is having another “secret” sale. They’ll be selling the 80GB PS3 system for $499 (its usual price) but buyers will be able to choose 10 Blu-Ray titles under $30 for free. Add those 10 to the 5 you already get by mail through Sony’s program, and you’ll have 15 Blu-ray movies worth over $400.

The user who reported this deal at Blu-ray.com says he works at a Wal-Mart in the electronics department which leads me to believe he does actually know what he’s talking about . He said stores were just notified on Saturday and that a link for it won’t be available until about Wednesday. According to what he knows, Wal-Mart is stocking up big for this! He says “For those stores that carry BD already, additional titles are being sent in for the sale.  For those that do not have BD in their store (a small minority), product will be sent to each store specifically for this sale.“

Here we thought Wal-Mart was supporting the HD DVD camp after they sold that Toshiba player for under 100 bucks! Turns out they’re not taking sides, and they’re supporting both pretty equally. Anybody considering buying a Playstation 3 to get 15 free movies if this rumor turns out to be true?

Source: Neowin

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That Blockbuster plans to bring its On Demand service to TiVo is news enough — the Netflix rival certainly needs to shift its streaming movie service onto more devices than the proprietary MediaPoint player you currently need in order to use it.

In fact, this news should tickle TiVo owners, whose box is fast becoming the best single way to watch movies instantly via the internet. But the news that is catching everybody’s attention is a small fact that Blockbuster senior VP Kevin Lewis let slip when talking to Reuters — Blockbuster will stream content to “Apple devices". Sadly, Reuters didn’t quote directly, so we don’t know which devices exactly, only that they will be “the normal places that consumers want to watch movies."

This could just mean a Mac client, something it took Netflix a while to get around to. Or it could mean iPhone or Apple TV. Or it could mean absolutely nothing. Remember Adobe’s increasingly desperate bleats that it is bringing Flash to the iPhone, and that “Apple and Adobe are collaborating"? This “collaboration" was in fact wishful thinking on the part of Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayan.

Could it be that this is merely a Freudian Slip on the part of Lewis? That his desire to be on the iWagon is so great that it bubbled up from Blockbuster’s collective unconscious and spilled out all over the TiVo announcement? We don’t know, but if company philosophy is any indicator, we’d put money on a Netflix/AppleTV double-team instead.

What we do know is the the whole TiVo lineup will be able to use the Blockbuster service in the second half of the year. There will be 10,000 titles to choose from. Prices are yet to be confirmed, but they are likely to be similar to today’s Blockbuster.com prices, at $2-$4 for rentals and $10+ for purchases. The biggest shock, though is this quote from Lewis: “You have to think about what the consumer wants." Yes, he really said that.

Blockbuster aims beyond stores with TiVo deal [Reuters]

Original photo: John Pastor/Flickr

Here you see a movie ticket and kernel popcorn, as scaled to their price increase over the past 80 years. On your left, 1929. On your right, 2009. Needless to say, things have changed.

In 1929, The Great Depression popularized popcorn as a movie time treat since it was cheap, easy, tasty and somewhat filling. Back then, a bag cost you 5 cents. Now, a (small) bag costs you $4.75. Sure, our new bag is probably a bit bigger, but it’s vastly more expensive.

In fact, when adjusted for inflation, popcorn prices* have seen an ironic 666% price increase, while movie ticket prices have increased a more moderate 66%. The above picture tells the story to scale, but just in case you’re a bigger fan of numbers:

1929
Movie – $4.32 ($0.35 pre-inflation)
Popcorn – $0.62 ($0.05 pre-inflation)

2009
Movie – $7.20
Popcorn – $4.75

What gives? As many of you know, Hollywood takes a majority of ticket proceeds (we’re talking upwards of 70% or more) during the first few weeks a film is released. Not so coincidentally, those first few weeks are also usually a film’s best-attended screenings. So theaters fall back to popcorn, soda and candy to make money because Hollywood doesn’t see a cut of these sales.

But is this 666% popcorn price increase evil? Obviously, numbers don’t lie. Has the increased price of popcorn helped keep ticket prices in check? Possibly, though there’s no real way of knowing.

Still, one thing’s for sure: Those stadium seats and surround sound systems won’t pay for themselves…right?

* Explanation on Data
Movie ticket data is based upon stats by the MPAA/NATO, seen here, with a 2009 estimate based upon the 2008 price. Realize that movie ticket price is always an average of all tickets sold per year, which drops the price greatly due to child tickets, matinees and second run theaters.

Popcorn price was based upon the widespead 5-cent bag of popcorn compared to a small popcorn from the AMC in Brooklyn, OH—which we feel is, if anything, a conservative sampling of movie popcorn prices. We’d love to have an average sale price on movie popcorn across America (just as we do tickets), but that data is not tracked by either the Popcorn Board or the National Association of Concessionaires.

Additional research by Andrea Wang, Graphic by Jesus Diaz

Who watches the Watchmen? I watched Watchmen (The Complete Motion Comic).

Price: $35 Blu-ray, $30 DVD

Verdict: So how are we watching Watchmen on Blu-ray before it’s even hit theaters? It’s actually the motion comic version that’s been available on iTunes for some time but has just been released to DVD and Blu-ray this week.

It’s an interesting idea that’s being adopted by Marvel and others—add a bit of motion to the original art and a comic book becomes a movie. Does it work for Watchmen?

Actually, yes, yes it works pretty well I’d say.
Even though I’m more of a comic book guy, seeing Dave Gibbons’ original art blown up on a 1080p big screen is a fantastic experience. Of course images are cropped, zoomed and panned for the widescreen format, but you can literally freeze any single frame of the six hours and capture a beautiful, poster-worthy still. That, in itself, is absurdly cool.

Animation is for the most part tasteful and smooth—if you didn’t know Watchmen was a comic, you might just believe that it was always meant for television. But there’s one major design flaw – the art is ALWAYS in motion. Either a camera is zooming or panning, or characters are moving this way or that. It sounds like a small point, but I found myself getting a bit motion sick watching the disc…and I don’t often become motion sick with games or television.

Some scenes do work very, very well with slight animation, though. When Dr. Manhattan becomes Dr. Manhattan, the famous panel is done incredible justice on screen. Or when Rorschach first interrogates a bar’s worth of patrons by breaking fingers for intel, I’d argue that the well-planned layering of movements crowd enhances the original art. But when Night Owl takes out his ship for a midnight cruise, the epic nature of his craft, bursting through a cloud of steam, is undermined by simplistic animation.
And then there’s the small matter of voice acting. In short, there isn’t any. The motion comic is merely narrated by actor/audiobook reader Tom Stechschulte. Predictably, his voices for each character were often so similar that, especially as lips do not move on screen, I couldn’t tell who was supposed to be talking. Oh, and have you ever listened to a rape scene between a man and a man acting like a woman? The lines lose some punch.

Buyers of the $30 DVD set will be disappointed by no real extras, while the $35 Blu-ray version lacks a menu system of merit and only includes a brief 3-minute behind-the-scenes of the Watchmen film by Dave Gibbons alongside an appreciated digital copy (PC only). You also score $7.50 off seeing the movie in theaters.

I’d still recommend people start with the actual Watchmen graphic novel. But if you never learned to read or just appreciate big, pretty pictures, the Watchmen Complete Motion Comic may be worth a viewing. At minimum, it’s a good use for your HDTV during your next hipster party.

VUDU made some pretty big waves with its Blu-ray-rivaling HDX downloadable format, and now it’s pushing the envelope once again by becoming the first on-demand service to actually sell (as in, for keeps… on your box, anyway) HD and HDX movies. Starting today, all VUDU owners can browse a growing library of for-sale high-definition flicks, and it should be noted that both HD and HDX titles will sport the same price tags (between $13.99 and $23.99). Initially, only around 50 films will be available, all of which are from top independent studios. Magnolia Picture’s Man on Wire, which just so happened to take home an Oscar this year, is in that group of 50 along with FirstLook Studios’ Transsiberian and War, Inc.. Better still, VUDU intends to make future releases available for purchase day-and-date with the DVD release, and we can only hope that major studios get with the program and follow suit. Full release is after the break.

Continue reading VUDU first on-demand service to sell HD and HDX movies

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

VUDU first on-demand service to sell HD and HDX movies originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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