One of the more obvious advantages of any new video technology is it provides content providers a reason to re-issue a lot of its old titles in the new venue, which is what Walt Disney Studios is currently doing with a growing list of films burned to Blu-ray Disc. A few weeks ago it was "Pinocchio" and next fall it will be another animated classic, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." But unlike her animated colleagues, Ms. White will appear in Blu-ray many weeks before her DVD appearance.
The Blu-ray edition of Snow White will be available on Oct. 6, while the standard DVD version will not follow until Nov. 24, nearly seven weeks later. And while Blu-ray players are backward-compatible for standard DVD playback, DVD players cannot play Blu-ray, of course. So to prompt Blu-ray sales to those who do not yet own a Blu-ray player, Disney will include a standard DVD version of the movie with the Blu-ray version. (Thus, it is possible to get the DVD version earlier, but you'll have to buy the higher price of the Blu-ray package.)
While over the decades Disney has not always needed the excuse of a new technology to re-release its titles from what it calls the "Disney Vault," it's been using Blu-ray to re-introduce titles to disc in this staggered manner. This is mainly because standard DVD titles still continue to sell in far greater numbers than Blu-ray, even though DVD sales appeared to have peaked a couple of years ago.
All this marketing prowess typically relies on thousands of retailers understanding (and strictly adhering to) a studio's specific release dates for the same title in different formats—a prerequisite that has not proven very successful when Blu-ray and standard DVD versions of the same title have been released within only a few days of each other.
