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Purchase strategy?

J

jfh

Well-known member
New to K with a Strato system and trying to figure out purchase strategy for putting some favorites into my system. I’m waiting on some hardware to categorize existing discs in hope of good/great d2d offers. But it seems it’s not really worth it for some titles so it might be worth doing those first.

From what I’ve read Disney titles rarely have good d2d offers - maybe a dollar or so?
What other studios are stingy?
Are multi season TV series (e.g. Friends) worth waiting for? Is there ever full series pricing comparable to BluRay sets?

Is there any way to see d2d pricing before cataloging everything?
(Is there any benefit to cataloging discs other than getting d2d offers?)

Any thoughts on purchase strategies appreciate.
 
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There certainly are more experienced members than me, who probably will contribute here (I'm a fairly recent newcomer as well, been using Kaleidescape for less than a year). I haven't really set out to create a strategy, but I've reflected a bit on what I actually end up doing.

A few factors to consider:
  • effort spent cataloging/importing/buying
  • amount of money spent on movies in total (throughout your life as a Kaleidescape owner)
  • amount of money spent over a shorter period of time
  • quality of movies bought (SD-HD-UHD-HDR, Atmos)
  • willingness to buy movies multiple times
  • time taken to build your movie library
  • desire to exploit special deals and super bundles
  • desire to immediately have complete sets of movies.
I prioritize low cost, don't mind spending time and effort to build my library (I'm in no rush), but would like the highest quality available. As I dislike buying the same movie twice unless the upgrade price is low (say $5), I try to only buy 4K HDR/UHD at $9.99 or less. (Try, not necessarily succeed). I typically don't buy the movies I've got D2Ds for unless I want to see them, both to make my movie budget last longer and to see if the movies show up cheaper in a bundle. I get a surprising amount of pleasure from looking through special pricing deals, operating with a fairly fixed monthly budget and trying to guess if it's better to buy or to wait (the same movie can end up in different special pricing offers). Kinda odd, but what can you do :)

As for TV series I get the impression that having them on sale is a fairly recent development (those with longer history here can probably confirm or deny). There are a lot series not in the store. The pricing per season can be a little high I think, so again I hold off until there's a sale. Older series can be low quality SD, so it's a question of whether you should wait for HD or not. (Parks and Recreation got an upgrade to HD fairly soon after it was on sale, for instance). I usually end up buying a few seasons from series on sale, just to see if they catch my interest. Then again, if they do then they are no longer on sale, leaving me with the dilemma of waiting (forever?) for them to go on sale again or buy the remaining seasons full price. Haven't quite nailed this part down yet ...

If I wanted to quickly boost my library with movies through D2D offers, I would probably still focus on getting 4K HDR/UHD and buy those going from DVD quality to 4K priced at $8.59, and from HD to 4K priced at $4.92. I would skip going from DVD to HD at $4.50, due to the possibility of having to buy again if they suddenly became available in 4K.
 
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I think most D2D offers are giving you a discount between ~$3 (e.g. $24.99 to $21.12) and $30 ($34.99 to $4.92).
When you look at sales, MOST of the time, prices drop to $19.99, $14.99 or $9.99, and SuperBundles often are $6.99 or so.

Based on that, it should be easy to pick the D2Ds that are worth going for.
If you have 3 out of 5 movies in a series, chances are a SuperBundle will come along where you can pick them up at under $10 each, but often you have to buy at least 3 movies to get the deal.

I actually made a spreadsheet of all movies on my wishlist and those I bought, including list price, purchase price, and whether I used D2D to get the best price or not. My current tally is at about 2/3 of savings comes from D2D, and 1/3 from sales and bundles. That said, some of the sales came in lower than the D2D price, so for some of those, I did catalog discs.

I still have plenty of D2D offers open, even in the lower costs ($3.14 / $4.92), but tons of D2D offers are not interesting enough, and I'll likely wait till the movie is on sale instead. So over time, I suspect the tally will move to 50/50 or so on D2D versus sales.

Once you have a routine going, it shouldn't take you very long to catalog, and then you'll always have the D2D option available, even if it's only $3 off, just in case you need to buy a movie right then and there because the Mrs. wants to see it...
 
I cataloged my blu-rays over the summer. There were quite a few titles that had great D2D discounts. I think Warner/Paramount/Universal/Sony generally had been the most generous offers. For example, all the Harry Potter movies were under $5 each. Also Lord of the Rings, John Wick. But a number of studios offer very minimal discounts, most notably Disney.

"Friends" was a bundle sale at one point, with each season coming at $9.99. Recently a number of TV series had bundle offers, like "iZombie," and quite a few others.

So always worth waiting for bundles/special offers unless you absolutely *must* have it in your digital library right now.
 
What I really wish is a better way to catalog movies without needing to rely on borrowing an Alto or buying one used for $2k+ and not sure what the lifespan is before the drive craps out. I wouldn't mind if K develops a software that allows me to plug an external bluray drive to read my disc and catalog my movie. K can even monetize by charging something reasonable like $10/month to license that software. This could generate some recurring revenue and it won't break our bank.
Having taken advantage of the D2D discounts, I didn't hesitate to pay under $5 for my catalog movies.
 
alexbeans said:
What I really wish is a better way to catalog movies without needing to rely on borrowing an Alto or buying one used for $2k+ and not sure what the lifespan is before the drive craps out. I wouldn't mind if K develops a software that allows me to plug an external bluray drive to read my disc and catalog my movie. K can even monetize by charging something reasonable like $10/month to license that software. This could generate some recurring revenue and it won't break our bank.
Having taken advantage of the D2D discounts, I didn't hesitate to pay under $5 for my catalog movies.
Click to expand...
This idea would be even cooler if we could plug in an external UHD blu-ray drive for D2D pricing on 4k-to-4k. :cool:
 
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