Manga Entertainment · @MangaUK
5th Apr 2012 from Twitlonger
@Megagold5 #Blu-ray The reason we do not release all of our new anime series releases on Blu-ray is because we cannot sell enough of them to break even on the inception costs. BD costs three times more to produce and manufacture than DVD. But let's focus on sales levels. Fairy Tail Part 1 DVD sold 500 copies week 1. This is fine. We're happy with this. But, for a release of this kind we would expect a conversion rate to Blu-ray purchase of 30%. That means that if we sell 500 DVDs we can expect to sell 150 Blu-rays in the first week. This roughly translates to about 300 units for the first month, which works out to about 1,200 units for the first 12 months. I am afraid that this is less than half of our minimum order quantity we have to commit to on Blu-ray. There's no way we would be able to break even. We have to manufacture the BD discs ourselves in the UK because it is illegal to sell a DVD or BD here without a BBFC certificate on it. If we didn't have to do this we could just buy 500 copies of the Funimation BD and sell them to you via Amazon and Expo etc. But the BBFC rules prevent us from doing that, so on smaller shows like Spice & Wolf the UK fans only recourse is to import the Blu-ray. I don't want you to do that, but there's no point BS'ing you about it.