According to a report from Screen Digest the Blu-ray market is suffering from a shortage of replication factories. European consumers bought a total of 37.8m Blu-ray (BD) discs last year. This includes both straightforward video titles and games (for PS3 players). However, when you include the number of movies (and extra video content) that needed an extra disc the number of actual discs is significantly more.

Screen Digest reckons that this year a total of some 85.7m actual discs will be needed, helped along by rising BD hardware sales. By 2010 demand will top 150m total discs, touching 250m by 2011 and topping 300m during 2012.

There is also a material shift taking place in what consumers are buying. Last year, says the report, games accounted for 72% of consumer transactions. The volume of games discs will increase this year some 35%, but the percentage of games vs videos sold will fall to 43%.

There’s another shift happening. Traditionally most games are created on single layer 25GB discs. Screen Digest says its research shows that most videos are being released on the larger BD50 discs.

And there’s not enough factory replication about to handle this year’s anticipated volumes. In Europe alone the pattern during 2008 was such “that the BD replication lines operational by the first quarter of 2009 could, if running all year at maximum capacity, have been sufficient to meet these manufacturing requirements with no additional investment.”

But this is not the whole story. BD demand is highly seasonal which means that some 30% of pressing lines are largely redundant through much of the year. Last year 25% of European BD sales occurred during the first half of the year, with 60% happening in the pre-Christmas quarter. This pattern will happen again in 2009, suggests the study.

Therefore, despite Europe’s current 59 production lines for BD, Screen Digest says another “minimum” 18 further production lines will be needed to be made operational in readiness for this second half/2009, in order to handle the Q4 seasonal demand.

© Rapid TV News 2009