That was Warren Liebfarb who believed in impulse purchasing pricing when he touted DVD as head of Warners home video division. He's long gone now but is working as consultant for Toshiba and MS.
Even Warners doesn't sell their DVDs, in those cheap paper cases, for $5 unless it's like a sale at Wal Mart the day after Thanksgiving. Or as part of buy 2 for $10 promotion.
But in those cases, it's not clear if Warners and the other studios are cutting their wholesale pricing or if the discount chains are using them as loss leaders to generate foot traffic.
In any event, those sales are limited to a few titles, especially old ones nobody was going to buy for $15 or more.
Unless Blu-Ray's manufacturing costs are horribly out of line, they should be able to price new releases at $15-20 like they do for new DVDs. It's just that they will probably try to command a premium for it (also probably true of HD-DVDs).
Besides the higher costs for the data layer, Blu-Ray will be burdened by the hard clear coat they need to protect the discs if they're not to be in caddies. The clear coat is nice, supposedly more protective than what is used in DVDs. They demoed writing over the disc with a Sharpie and the ink just beaded up and they wiped the ink off. Only thing is that this clear coat is costly and adds to the cycle times.
