The Value of Home Video

It’s interesting — to me, at least, you may have already stopped reading — to compare what you get for your dollar in the world of home video releases today versus the past.

Let’s start with the past, just because it came first. How about 14 years ago, when Amadeus was released in a special edition laserdisc release. It gave you a commentary track by the director, Milos Forman, a soundtrack on CD, and a one hour documentary about Mozart and the production of the movie. You also got the movie in the original aspect ratio, and a 5.1 AC-3 soundtrack (what you’d call Dolby Digital these days.) Not bad. The list price was $160, though it could be found for $140 if you checked the right stores. In terms of extras, you have about four hours worth: 3 hours of commentary, and the one hour documentary.

For those of you who are having heart attacks right now, that price isn’t ridiculous for laserdiscs with extras. Bare bones movie-only laserdiscs were typically around $40, and adding extras meant they could label it as a “special edition” and charge $100 and up for it. Those of us who skipped laserdisc and started with DVD tend to ignore the term “special edition” since it’s pretty meaningless; we’d just look at the list of extras and come up with an assessment of how special the release is in terms of extras. Laserdisc people have a whole different idea of what a “special edition” is, based on the huge impact it had on their wallet.

Now let’s fast forward to 2009. I recently bought Casino Royale on Blu-ray. First off, of course, the HD image quality from Blu-ray is going to blow away laserdisc. Bare bones analog movie-only Hi-Vision MUSE laserdiscs (which were high def, but didn’t come close to 1080p) were $200 back in those days. This is much higher quality video (MPEG-4 AVC 1080p at 24 mbps.) The audio is provided in lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1, a definite step up from the 384 kbps 5.1 track that laserdisc supported.

Then we have the extras. There are two discs in this set. The first has two commentary tracks, and a trivia game which doesn’t really count as an extra to me — does anyone mess with these silly games? Then there’s disc two, which has five hours of making-of material. Let me repeat that. Five hours of making of material, split over an endless number of featurettes covering every single aspect of the making of the movie. I’m going to ignore the downloadable BD-Live content, because I’ve never seen any BD-Live content or feature that was remotely appealing to me.

The two commentaries add up to five hours of content themselves, which gives you a total of ten hours of extras. If you start with the price of the Amadeus laserdisc, and figure that with twice the amount of extras, and video quality that can easily said to be at least twice as good, you should be able to charge around $300 for the Casino Royale Blu-ray and be in line with 1995 laserdisc pricing.

However, I paid $12.49 for the Casino Royale Blu-ray. That means it has roughly 25 times the value of the Amadeus laserdisc. That’s not a bad increase in your home video value over 14 years.