DSA Case Study:
HDFR | Paris, France

Paris-based Blu-ray Mastering Lab Authors
17 Titles for Replication in 5 Months with DoStudio

What does HDFR do?
HDFR’s mission is to lower the cost of Blu-ray disc mastering so more studios and content owners can offer Blu-ray Discs (BD) to French consumers at affordable per disc retail prices. Most large Blu-ray labs in France charge 7,000 Euros for a simple BD and as much as 30-40,000 Euros for an advanced BD that takes advantage of Blu-ray Live and BDJ. This high cost of production translates directly into high disc prices. When consumers can buy a DVD for as little as 1 Euro, especially in these difficult economic times, many consumers are choosing not to buy a Blu-ray player. We want to change this. HDFR brings the cost to studios for mastering a simple Blu-ray title down to 4,000 Euros - that’s more than 40% less than the other Blu-ray labs in France.

How do you use NetBlender?
We got serious about entering the Blu-ray market about 6 months ago, and we were really turned off by the very high equipment prices from the two big authoring vendors. Doing some research on the Internet, we fund NetBlender’s DoStudio BD Authoring Edition (DSA) and have been using it for the past 6 months to author EMYLIA’s (HDFR’s sister studio) tiles and we are now ramping-up our business to provide Blu-ray authoring service to other studios in France and worldwide.

How has NetBlender helped your business?
Without NetBlender DSA, we quite simply would not be able to achieve our objective of lowering the entry bar for BD for French studios.  NetBlender has been a very cost-effective and high-performance solution right from the start, and it keeps getting better with every new release.  It seems like every month NetBlender is adding new functionality.  The NetBlender team has also been extremely responsive to our needs, even adding a feature to support EMYLIA’s partnership with D-BOX.

What results have you seen using NetBlender DSA?
EMYLIA recently launched 10 BDs selling at 9.99 euros each, which is just one-third the normal BD price of 30 Euros. These are some fantastic titles (all authored with NetBlender), including Dracula 3K, Portée Disparue (Presumed dead) and Sacre Mariage (Wedding Wish), just 9.99 Euros each! We’re getting the word out in Paris, France and Europe that BD is here and it’s affordable for everyone. This is how HDFR, powered by NetBlender DSA, is democratizing the BD experience.

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