Shawne Keckner (CEO of Right Stuf/Nozomi) did an AMA today on reddit. I took this opportunity to ask about Nozomi doing Blu-ray releases in the future and specifically asked about the possibility of the Utena Blu-ray set coming to the states. Here was his response:

As I am sure you have noticed with other publishers, Blu-Ray releases have been a struggle due to Japanese concern, based on the shared region code, of reverse importation. They have thrown up holdbacks and "we have to release first" clauses, which often push releases back for years. I have talked about this extensively with other industry people, it's incredibly frustrating.
We have been closely looking at sales for Blu-Ray to try to decide what would be our best point of entrance based on the costs to be incurred by authoring and replication. Costs for Blu-ray are higher for both, although these costs have decreased substantially from when Blu-Ray was originally introduced. There are several potential titles we're considering. But with some of the niche and classic titles we have licensed, there likely isn't enough demand for us to release on this format profitably.
Another issue, honestly, comes down to materials availability. I'm not a super fan of the upscaling process used for some Blu-Rays, and it has been difficult to get to materials for titles that would be suitable for a quality release. Many 90s shows, for example, were produced on video rather than film and thus upscaling really would likely be the only option.

You can see the whole AMA here: http://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/ … _of_anime/