"...1. Very few do both
2. There are more that replicate HDDVD...."
Considering Blu-ray is outselling HD-DVD at least 2 to 1, plus PS3 games, this would imply huge overcapacity for HD-DVD- or the Blu-ray replication facilities have significantly greater capacity.
"...Replication costs were never really the issue......"
I believe I have the link at home, but IIRC there was an article from a year or two ago considering the actual costs to physically produce an HD-DVD disc vs a Blu-ray disc. They pointed out that the HD-DVD (& DVD) require two plastic platters sandwiching the aluminum disc with the data. All must be carefully aligned and bonded. The Blu-ray disc is one plastic disc with the data laid on top of it, aligning two pieces not three. It might then be spray coated. In short, considering the process only, the Blu-ray disc could be cheaper to manufacture than the HD-DVD. Note this is physical manufacture, and does not consider authoring, plant capital costs, etc. That plant must be paid for, bit by bit with each disc sold. I've read there are 8 BD replication plants today.
"...The cost to set up 1 Blu-ray replication line is $3 million. The cost to set up 1 HDDVD line is $100,000. The real costs come in the glass master...."
Is that all? Let's spread those costs over tens of millions of players and hundreds of millions of discs over many years. Just as a swag, let's say one plant produces 5 million discs per year, on average. I suspect they produce more, but this is a swag for very rough figures. That's 60 cents per disc. Figure a 10 year plant life, which again, is probably understated; that works out to 6 cents per disc. And that's assuming the Blu-ray plant costs $3M more than the HD-DVD plant, not $3M less $100,000. Double that cost figure if you think I've overstated the plant capacity, and it's still tiny. And that doesn't consider spreading ANY of the cost over the players. Very rough figures, I grant, but conservative. A cost difference of a nickel or a dime per disc does not translate into much, if any, price difference on the retail shelf. Perhaps more important will be the authoring, and those costs will decrease and probably become more or less equal.
And of course, for computer back up purposes, or any purpose using full disc capacity, the cost per GB is significantly less for Blu-ray.
Proprietary has sunk many a ship in the past, but Sony has licensed this out so there are actually more companies producing Blu-ray players than HD-DVD players. And Sony does not own/control all the BD replication plants, so they've licensed that out also.
I don't like Sony, but
IF this trend of outselling HD-DVD more and more continues throughout the summer, Blu-ray will probably be the winner.
BTW, in 2002 it was reported that
"...more than a billion DVDs have been sold over the past five years..." That's 200 million per year. Even with the decline in DVD sales, figure at least 100 million are selling per year, maybe still 200 million since there was some sales growth since 2002 (before the decline started -in 2005?). So if that rate is anticipated for the future, building a plant with 5 to 10 million discs a year capacity, for both movies AND PS3 games, is not unreasonable.
