AACS LA cuts Blu-ray fees

[David Mackenzie]

Got this email from Sonic Solutions yesterday:

AACS FEES SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED

Up to 75% Lower!

The cost of publishing on Blu-ray Disc has just dropped by up to 75%! If the high cost of AACS copy protection has been keeping you or your clients away from publishing your content on BD, then you’ll be very interested in the information below.

AACS fees have gone down for all content holders, but the most significant savings are for low volume and first-time publishers. For example, the AACS costs for a first-time Blu-ray Disc publisher (for a run of 2,000 titles) has dropped from $4,300 to just $1,000; that’s a saving of over 75%. If you've already been publishing on BD, the AACS fees have dropped from $1,300 to just $500; that’s over 60% off the cost of your clients getting their BD content on disc.

AACS has made the license fee payable in annual $500 increments instead of requiring $3,000 at the time of signing the Content Provider Agreement; and you can terminate your agreement at anytime. This one change makes it possible for first-time and low volume content holders to get going with BD with a much lower start-up investment and at affordable per title costs.

For those unaware, AACS copy protection is MANDATORY on the Blu-ray format. Any studio releasing titles on it has to hand over the cash for these fees.

Certainly, one studio I've worked with on DVD titles has stayed away from Blu-ray primarily because of these fees. On risky arthouse titles which might not even make back any money, the AACS fees basically made it pointless even considering BD.

Now that they've been drastically cut, we can hopefully expect to see more BD titles coming out from smaller studios, rather than just from Hollywood.

[Trollslayer]

Yay!