Will this have any effect on the crappy authoring of some blurays, or does it mean more royalties and still no quality control?

A couple of thoughts:
(1) DVDs were more expensive when they were shiney and new. Now they're $30, but at one time cheap ones cost $100 and that was when $100 was a lot money.

(1a) Many companies will negotiate their own licensing deals, just like the article mentions. If you're going to bung a DVD burner into a $15,000 piece of high-end professional kit and only expect to sell 100 of them, $4.50 doesn't matter much.

(2) Methinks JJ was talking about buying movies/games, not blank media. An article headline like 'Blue Ray Sales Were Up 5% in February' usually doesn't mean blanks. Of course I've been wrong before.

I still would not care. You know why? Because BD is not needed, its obsolete.
I have not bought one and I wont be buying one either, especially with the prices of HDDs and SSDs dropping and with the cheap high definition Ethernet enabled media players available across the board. I can consume my HD content without BD, thank you very much, and so can the great unwashed through DRMd pay-per-view systems such as appleTV and such. I don't see a bright future for this one.

How dare people want to be paid for their research and development. Everything should always be free!

Sydney, NSW, Australia.

AU$8.00 per 50 bundle special from one of the shops near me.
That makes it AU$0.16 or around US$0.145

Does the licensing include a guarantee that, if someone else comes along who is not a part of this consortium, but who claims to have a patent that Blu-Ray is infringing, you will not have to pay up yet again?

I often by my DVD's for $14 for a pack of 50 or about $0.28 per DVD (all funds in Canadian)..

I am assuming the $0.08 in license fees per Bluray disc is in US $ so we'll say $0.09 CAD... That's about 30% of the entire cost of a DVD in licensing fees alone.

It's no wonder Bluray is taking SO long to take over...

That $5 is for the companies making the units. It would be more like $50 to the end buyer.

Here we go again, legalized price fixing. Shut your wallets, keep using dvd's and send the message to these as*holes running these companies that you won't fall in line. Take your hard earned money and spend it on something else until the as*holes figure out why their sales aren't increasing.

Where are you getting your dvd's for $0.16?

I'm just curious....doesn't Sony have something to do with this?

@ SV Guy.
A DVD costs 16c retail where I come from and you say paying 8c license fee to make a BR disk is nothing.
A DVD player comes in down to $30 ..... if there was a license fee of $5 on it then the price would increase by 17%.
You throw your money away if you like, but I have no such compulsion.

Such arrangements are typical in intellectual property pooling consortiums. They provide a mechanism for compensation of the original patent holders and simplified cross-licensing for new adoptees. Less than a dime a disc and $5 a player and you're whining about it? Grow up!