Sony Pictures on Tuesday became the first major studio to put a price tag on Blu-ray discs. At the same time, the studio unveiled to working on bundling various formats together to give consumers more flexibility and mobility.

Catalog Blu-ray disc titles will wholesale for $17.95, about the same as DVDs when that format hit the market in 1997. New-release Blu-ray discs will wholesale for $23.45, a premium of 15%-20% over what suppliers were charging for new theatrical DVDs.

Blu-ray discs likely will start showing up in stores by early summer, sources say. In advance of that, Sony is bowing a bundling concept to DVD and the Universal Media Disc (UMD) that it may migrate to Blu-ray.

“With the launch of Blu-ray, we’re going to try to introduce the managed-copy concept, where if you buy Blu-ray you’ll be able to get additional versions (of the same title) to use in your home,” Feingold said. “Ultimately, we might even get to the point where we’ll offer consumers the ability to have different versions of the same movie on different devices in the home — that’s something we’re working on.”

Source: Yahoo!

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