DVD-Rs dip under $1!
General-purpose 4.7GB DVD-R media could easily be found on the Internet last month selling for as low as 88 cents a piece in modest quantities. Website qtccdr.com advertised a 540-count box of Princo 1X printable discs for $475.20. Competitor rima.com was selling 90-packs of the same brand media for as low as $83 each. Meanwhile, supermediastore.com was offering a 90-pack "DVDPRO" brand media for 94 cents a piece as part of a media and storage case package deal.
Industry analysts assert that Taiwanese media companies the likes of Princo, having frittered their CD-R profit margins, and frustrated by the European Union's recent anti-dumping duties on Taiwan-made recordable media, are eager to aggressively unload their DVD-R inventories into the U.S. market.
Of course, the U.S. market is hardly large enough yet to justify such glut of DVD-R media. "With DVD-R, you have much too much capacity for a product that is still looking for applications," opines Larry Lueck, president of Magnetic Media Information Services.
The cheap media has accelerated the development of a bootleg DVD market in New York City. Street vendors were hawking camcorder-recorded screeners of Austin Powers in Goldmember duplicated onto Princo DVD-Rs days before the film's July 26 theatrical release.
Still, prices of about $8 per piece of general-use media from companies like Pioneer and TDK rule professional applications like DVD authoring. Pioneer-branded "authoring" DVD-Rs command around $16 each. "We have actually had some issues with player compatibility that we traced back to the media, so it's not worth taking the chance," one president of a major authoring house shares. "If we send a DVD-R off for approval and the client can't play it, they automatically think that it is the authoring."
Of course, the U.S. market is hardly large enough yet to justify such glut of DVD-R media. "With DVD-R, you have much too much capacity for a product that is still looking for applications," opines Larry Lueck, president of Magnetic Media Information Services.
The cheap media has accelerated the development of a bootleg DVD market in New York City. Street vendors were hawking camcorder-recorded screeners of Austin Powers in Goldmember duplicated onto Princo DVD-Rs days before the film's July 26 theatrical release.
Still, prices of about $8 per piece of general-use media from companies like Pioneer and TDK rule professional applications like DVD authoring. Pioneer-branded "authoring" DVD-Rs command around $16 each. "We have actually had some issues with player compatibility that we traced back to the media, so it's not worth taking the chance," one president of a major authoring house shares. "If we send a DVD-R off for approval and the client can't play it, they automatically think that it is the authoring."
