The downside to be an early adopter of any new technology that might have competing, incompatible formats is that you could have chosen the wrong one. (Just ask all those Betamax buyers a couple of decades ago, not to mention current owners of HD DVD products.) But even if you went with conventional wisdom and enjoyed a popular format (i.e., standard DVD) for several years, when that format changes or upgrades, in the end it’s going to cost you.
The ongoing upgrade that Disney is encouraging is not the small one from HD DVD to Blu-ray Disc, but the much larger one from standard DVD to Blu-ray. As an incentive to begin replacing standard discs of film titles with their Blu-ray counterparts, Disney and Buena Vista are offering $10 mail-in cash rebates for a small list of their titles when consumers buy the Blu-ray version of the same title.
But Disney is making consumers jump through some bureaucratic hoops to get there—namely requiring them to locate their old DVDs and cut out the UPC codes, then snail-mail them to a special address in with rebate forms that will be included inside the relevant Blu-ray packaged content. Blu-ray titles eligible for $10 rebates are limited to:
- “Cars”
- “Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”
- “Con Air”
- “Coyote Ugly”
- “Crimson Tide”
- “Hidalgo”
- “National Treasure”
- “The Rock”
- “The Rookie”
- “Shall We Dance”
- “Unbreakable”
