Sony Announces Blu-ray Disc Pricing

Sony Pictures set prices Wednesday for its Blu-ray disc titles that will be available in retail outlets later this year, while announcing a new strategy to market titles by bundling different formats together.

For example, Sony plans to bundle DVD-UMD combo packs of the same movie together starting in the end of March, priced at $28.95 USD. The cost would be over 40 percent less than buying the discs separately, and the studio plans to do the same for Blu-ray discs.

But it's not clear whether the bundling would come in the form of the same disc or in a physical sense with the combo packs.

As for Blu-ray disc pricing, Sony said older titles would sell wholesale for $17.95 USD, while new release titles would sell for $23.45 USD. The studio has decided to not offer a suggested retail price, saying retailers could choose their own price structure and that the company believed in a free market.

The prices are not far off from the prices of DVDs when they first were released in 1997, however the new release titles are at a 15 to 20 percent premium to what was charged for new-release DVDs.