Who else thinks Blu-ray is doomed? I mean, other than Steve Jobs? ZDNet’s Robin Harris does, and he makes a decent argument.
Consider the following: only 4 percent of movie discs sold in the U.S. are Blu-ray discs; these discs often don’t play reliably on your more-than-likely expensive player (as I found out this week); it costs a tremendous amount of money to author Blu-ray discs, ensuring that only Hollywood studio-backed movies can be released on the format; upsampling DVD players are dirt cheap now—why spend $300+ on a Blu-ray player (in this economy!) when your “good enough” DVDs now look even better?
So what’s the problem with Blu-ray in general? According to Harris, formats take off when they’re adapted by that critical mass of consumers; playing exclusively to the techie crowd simply doesn’t work. In the Official CrunchGear Chatroom, we came to the conclusion that DVD really “took off” in 2000 alongside the launch of the PS2. After that, DVD was truly a mass market format.
As a result of the Blu-ray Association’s own mismanagement (pricing players out of the reach of everyday consumers, making discs so damn expensive, thinking that the death of HD-DVD would propel Blu-ray forward) and outside factors (read: the economy) has hindered any chance of Blu-ray being adopted by consumers en masse.
The result, claims Harris, is that Blu-ray will be all but dead within one year’s time, surviving only as a techie’s plaything.
This is like the idiots that warned magazines and newspapers would be obsolete because of the internet.
A value conscious consumer would have purchased a ps3 versus another console + blu-ray player. Over the span of 2 years the ps3 would be cheaper and more reliable as it is one of the few players that receive regular updates.
This is non-issue.
Yes, indeed… I’m agree :D
i guess we’re idiots then
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/29/AR2008102901960.html
@Jobs
You are greatly over estimating the amount of gamers out there. If everyone and their mom played games then your agrument would hold water, but the fact that this is not the case pretty much disproves your theory. Just look at the prices and the difference in quality and tell me if it’s really worth a roughly 50% price increase for most titles on bluray vs DVD.
It is absolutely worth it on larger screen TVs, especially when you have a nice home theater set up to go with it. Granted, consumers with such a set up constitute a vast minority of the population – but the point is still valid. The value, or perceived value, increases as you invest more into home theater.
Blu-ray is in a tough place – at a point they should begin seeing more market share and higher adoption – which leads to cheaper prices for everyone – they’re being hurt by factors outside their control such as the economy. They’re also getting killed where it hurts, on blogs like this, where people constantly criticize blu-ray as an unnecessary product.
DVD adoption didn’t have to contend with bloggers still bitter over the defeat of their preferred HD-DVD format, and bloggers didn’t have the same influence on early adopters when DVD came to market.
The value is there for some, whether this is acknowledged here or not. And the fact it is an improved product means that once prices fall, everyone will benefit. This is a good thing, and I’m not sure why some people seem obsessed with seeing this thing fail. When the prices do fall on this, everyone will benefit. I’m not buying blu-ray right now either, but I do have a PS3, and when the prices fall on the discs (which if you’re grounded in reality you’ll acknowledge takes time), I’ll be happy to make the jump. Until then, I’m content to allow others to weather the storm of high prices for me. That hardly makes blu-ray a dead format – just not a viable one at present. Given how every other product in history has matured over time, this will change.
I’d like to know where you get your numbers. Have you been to amazon.com lately? Many newly released blu-ray movies cost the same or only $5 more than the dvd. Also, video games are the fastest growing for of entertainment in history, nearly beating out television last year. I watch blu-ray on the internal player I recently installed in my PC (which cost me $150). With a 2560×1600 resolution monitor, not only is the couple extra bucks worth it, its necessary, DVD resolution just can’t stand up to my picture quality. But %50 increase? Get real kiddo, you’re way off.
If you believe that people only want to rent HD movies and content than I might buy your argument. If this is true I guess than all DVDs are dead also. But it seems that people are still buying DVDs so there is a wrench in the argument.
If you believe that HD does not count. Then is Blu-ray dead? Well how do we explain all those HDTVs being sold and people upgrading to HD cable?
Example, person gets married, wants a wedding video. Shot how? HD I would think as time goes on. Delivered on what a hard drive to watch where? I think not.
Blu-ray has its challenges, the Internet being the biggest. But I for one am not ready to declare it dead. In fact I see Apple losing video pros for NOT supporting Blu-ray for content creators. I have seen in my work (I am a video guy and consultant) long time Apple users switching to Adobe Encore and third party Blu-ray drives. In some cases to Windows!
Apple has seemed to have decided it will protect the iTunes Store and risk losing content creators by not supporting Blu-ray. Easy decision, consumer customers are larger for Apple.
Sony needs to get inexpensive players to market for under $100 (doable I think) and streamline licensing (also doable). They do need to do this ASAP.
Until someone owns the living room for HD content Blu-ray is NOT dead. It is as alive as all the rest.
First you declared vista dead. Now blue-ray. I eagerly await the “iphone is dead” article….heh.
I just realized that. That should be my gimmick, declaring things dead.
How long until this gimmick is dead? :P
I already watch far more HD off cable and On Demand than I would if I got a blu-ray player. Blu-ray might be a slightly better picture…but I’m happy.
Even if it was going to take off, the economy likely has now slowed it down enough that all sorts of streaming will catch up before it takes off.
I already watch far more HD off cable and On Demand than I would if I got a blu-ray player. Blu-ray might be a slightly better picture…but I’m happy.
Even if it was going to take off, the economy likely has now slowed it down enough that all sorts of streaming will catch up before it takes off.
i’ve been stunned at how bad HD cable looks. MPEG blocks and artifacts. if you don’t get a crystal clear signal you get MPEG droppings. it CAN look good, but the cable companies are degrading the quality to cram more channels down the pipe.
highdef my arse!
Not even slightly, the difference is seriously noticable between a HD steam and HD/Blu disk.
Not to mention all it takes is a signle lag spike to make your movie buffer right in the middle to ruin the expirence.
I don’t buy it – yet… Here are my thoughts.
It seems to me that the largest mass of persons with the money for big screens and high fidelity sound are of an age where they want things to work in a manner that they are already familiar with. “I have a DVD player. The Blue Ray player works pretty much just like my DVD player with a fancier cable.” I don’t see my 72 year old mother buying an Apple TV and thinking how long her DRM rental will last or how to go through the process of selecting a movie and setting the account up etc. But she does have a $2k TV and would spend $200 bucks to buy another player that works like she is accustomed to. The persons a little younger, the retiring baby boomers, are not techno babies – but they are not (as a generality not a rule) going to want to learn new hardware and software concepts/processes/expenses to embrace downloads.
Further, infrastructure for the broadband required just isn’t there and won’t be cheap when it is – at least for HD that is not highly compressed with lossless audio.
Are the people who squawk in pain at the temporary extra cost of the Blu Ray hardware and disk going to embrace increasing the monthly cost of their possibly existing but too slow broadband to get to the speeds alowing low compressed HD video/sound?
Also, not everyone lives in the city/suburbs. Rural and semi-rural areas are still only just getting true broadband. Many areas just have DSL speeds at best with some cable. Years to catch up. That portion of the market buys their DVDs and players at Walmart and often wants a big screen and good sound to go with it. Blu ray is going to be viable to them well before they embrace downloads.
Spoken like a true HD-DVD owner.
I’ll take that bet..put your money where your month is..I got a 100.00 that says your wrong.
BTW I just installed a Blu burner in my PC for home movies.
Once Blu-ray writers become reasonably priced, I’ll be creating Blu-ray discs from the HD camcorder. Will I buy movies for it? Probably new ones and a select few older ones if they are in the $20-$30 range. I’ll also use it to backup my computers on a different medium.
So no, Blu-ray will not be dead.
Blue ray is not dead, HD-DVD is :D
Well, at least one multiple layer blue ray disc could store hundred of hours of dvd quality movies, else you gonna bought 12 piece of dvd, and a week after, you’ll lost your 4th and 5th disc :( this is su*ks, believe me…
I had that idea too, but in reality, it would be too confusing and pointless to the consumer.
Anybody that sees a Blu-Ray disk will think “Its in HD”
Having a 10-DVD SD boxset put into one SD Blu-Ray disk will just confuse people when they pop it in and go “HEY! Why isn’t this in HD?”. Not to mention while I would certanely welocome this, most people don’t care abuot the convinence of having a multi-disk boxset on a single disk.
I agree. Just by price alone, Blue-ray disks (and players!) are way too expensive.
Get out into the real world and take a look around. BD player prices have dropped drastically, with a corresponding rise in movie sales (averaged 14% of total sales over the last three weeks) and this is only going to get bigger through the holiday season. And where’s the alternative? Upscaled SD DVD is not “good enough” for anyone with at least one eye, even Steve Jobs says downloads are prenatal, HD downloads are practically vapourware and the ISPs are putting the squeeze on bandwidth. Just “IMO”, but I’m pretty certain some folks, including that nutcase Robin Harris are going to have a fair bit of albumen on their fizogs come February.
Blu-ray is the new Laserdisc.
A high margin niche product with little appeal outside of the videophile circles and the PS3 game console types.
Outside of those devoted to cinema or the game console it is almost invisible and is undoubtedly likely to stay that way as the general public (already up to their necks in record levels of private debt) suffer the coming recession.
People might spend more on home entertainment during a recession but they do not go out and buy relatively expensive video players to play relatively expensive movies.
Not when they can have HD movies and HD TV all the time with a decent HD TV service & a DVR.
No matter what the zealots will claim $200 on a no-name piece of junk cheapo player is not value to anyone when brand name quality DVD players can be had for less than half that.
Those that care about ‘the ultimate’ in quality may moan and complain about this but it is what is going on.
The unfortunate truth for Blu-ray is that to make the most of it you need a very large HD TV and a very expensive set of audio equipment to even hear properly the new audio standards.
Then there’s the other little matter few HD fans will admit to……a lot of HD really doesn’t look all that.
Between poor transfers and low-fi sources there is a hell of a lot of HD available which is remarkably unimpressive.
No wonder a lot of people are happy to stick with regular DVD upscaled.
PS – “As a result of the Blu-ray Association’s own mismanagement (pricing players out of the reach of everyday consumers, making discs so damn expensive….” The guy looks old enough to remember how much DVD players and movies cost two years after launch. Even if you don’t take inflation into account, Blu Ray is still selling for about the same. Really, if people are going to play pundit, they should at least try and inform themselves about the subject they’re waffling about… talking about “$400-$500″ BD players is sooooo July 2008, don’t y’know.
I bet if the new mac books had blue ray drives this article would have a different title….
yea but you morons forgot the umd?
not eevertiting cool and new tkaes off
Huh? UMD is a proprietary format for the PSP it’s nothing like DVD or Blu-Ray at all. Using that as an example of what will happen to Blu-Ray is like saying SlotMusic will prosper because Nintendo sells loads of DS cartridges. It wont BTW. Ya big moron.
Can anybody make a Blue-Ray Disc by himself? I mean like a DVD. Authoring is an important issue, and as long as that isn’t working, for me Blue-Ray discs are not interesting.
OK, the quality is nice, yes, but the prices??? Right now it’s a DRM-startover for all Moviemakers and a huge market for the patent holders who want a bite like Philips with their CD or Matshusita with the DVD.
I have no need to switch. I watch DVDs on my PowerBook with a nice iPod hifi Sound – works for me.
I do agree in part with the essence of this post. Blu-Ray in part was dead before it even hit the market. However it does have some features that will ensure it is around for a while, and it may eventually replace DVD, it just is not going to happen as quickly as the Blu-Ray Association would like.
Blu-Ray always was going to struggle establishing itself as major format for movies. The jump from VHS to DVD was one of the fastest format adoptions in history. Especially when compared to Vinyl vs. CD. In both of these cases there was a notable difference in both technology and quality of the medium. This is really not as straight forward with Blu-Ray.
An upscaling DVD gives an image that is on par with a Blu-Ray player on a full 1080 display, most people will not be able to tell the difference any way. Also because DVD is still a major revenue for the studios, I can’t see any off them going Blu-Ray only any time soon. In fact the positioning of Blu-Ray has made DVD titles even cheaper. Add to the mix digital downloads, be it in DRM’ed format of plain DivX from BitTorrent provide a perfectly good viewing experience.
The problem Blu-Ray always faced was physically and technically it is still just an optical disk. The capacity and how it works is abstract to most people. Technically it is superior due to its storage capacity. But other than that it does exactly the same thing DVD does. It is because of this perception, adoption is going to take time. Sony’s strategy of using the PS3 to drive Blu-Ray is a stroke of genius without it Blu-Ray would not have even got ths far. Also the use of Blu-Ray in the PS3 has pretty much guaranteed Blu-Ray will be around for a while just because of the PS3’s lifecycle, which is going to be at least another 8 years.
Also the argument about Blu-Ray writers getting cheaper will ease adoption is also mute. In that hard disk recording is becoming the major format for recording. Every major comsumer electronics company already offers HD based recorders. Blu-Ray is more likely to become an archive medium for recordings from a HD recorder, much like how I use my DVD-R right now. The argument that older people understand the DVD interface so jumping to Blu-Ray is trivial is probably correct. However HD recorders have the same interface so they don’t cause a problem for the older generation either. I know this because my parents use a HD recorder and Sky+ without issue.
Another factor also slowing High-Def adoption in general right now is cost for services like Sky-HD, and until free-to-air services go fully High-Def in 2010, people in general are not going to rush out to buy Blu-Ray players. As a storage format use with PC’s is really going to be decided by cost of media, right now it looks like it will be a while before that happens.
An upscaling DVD gives an image that is on par with a Blu-Ray player on a full 1080 display,omg are u serious??? go and buy yourself a bluray player and watch it then comment.. how can u compared picture quality between the two format..
Tice “Can anybody make a Blue-Ray Disc by himself? I mean like a DVD. Authoring is an important issue, and as long as that isn’t working, for me Blue-Ray discs are not interesting.” I’ve been authoring Blu-Ray disks for over a year now, initially with DVDit and lately with Ulead. The ability to transfer my HD projects to disk was probably my main reason for adopting Blu-Ray over HD DVD, since it was apparent from very early on that writable disks and recorders didn’t even rank as an afterthought for HD-DVD, whereas with Blu-Ray they were there pretty much from day one. Jobs’ stupidity in not sticking Blu-Ray in Apple’s kit notwhithstanding, of course. Anyway, when it comes to authoring HD Blu-Ray is pretty much the only viable option as long as you remember Apples are not the only fruit ;)
I don’t know. I mean, I just finally bought an HDTV. I also bought a blu-ray drive for my PC, it was like $160. It also plays HD-DVD’s and burns DVD’s/CD’s. It really wasn’t expensive and blu-ray discs look significantly better than any HD content on the Internet, i.e. iTunes. The bit-rate is high quality. My DVD’s are upscaled quite nicely, thanks to my higher end video card. However, I enjoy the pristine quality of a blu-ray disc over regular DVD. I also didn’t buy my HDTV to watch 480p content. I am one of those “tech junkies” but I just now bought an HDTV.
BD may be like laser disc. As it stands right now, there isn’t much beyond the ‘cool’ factor for most people. Consider what is important to the average consumer:
- Cost: BD players and discs are not in the right ballpark … yet. We’ll see what happens after Christmas. Considering that Netflix rents BD for only $1 more per month, increased disc prices may not be a big issue.
- Reliability: Incompatibilities like those with the Ironman BD are a potentially deadly thorn. People don’t want to upgrade firmware. If BD doesn’t become as bulletproof as DVD, it probably won’t take off.
- Performance: How many people hate it when they buy a new computer that runs slower than their last one? Added bloat from new operating systems & ‘features’ they don’t use get in the way and encourage people to stick with their old technology. Discs that take 3 min to load are just as bad as incompatibilities.
I’m not buying BD yet because of these issues. When there is a player for $200 that doesn’t need any updates, plays fast & reliably, I’ll buy it. But until then, why bother?
$2500 Panasonic 1080p HD Projector
$49.99 God Father Blu-ray Boxset (part 1, 2, 3)
$370.00 PS3
Watching all three movies in 1080p glory on a 120″ inch projection with someone you care about, without spending a arm and a leg in a movie theater, without driving and wasting gas.
- Priceless.
For those who claims that Blu-ray movies are expensive. That’s BS, You can find BR player for about $150, you can find 13.99 blu-ray movies at Fry’s on weekly specials. James Bond movies were on sale for 14.99 last week. Pan’s Labyrinth were on sale for 14.99 the week before. Sunshine for 14.99 last month. DVD counterpart cost around 10.99 each. you’re looking at $3-4 difference. That’s a small difference in price, but the amount of audio visual gain is amazing. Blu-ray is long away from dead.
Can we get it over with and declare Crunchgear’s hate of high def dead already? Blu Ray’s market share has increased well above that old 4% figure, meanwhile the download industry hopes to total a measly 0.6% this year, and one of the biggest players says that downloads are so insignificant that he considers it a ‘hobby’. Player prices are well below the $300 price the author whines about, and upscaled DVD looks shite compared to a proper HD source, as anyone who doesn’t have spec lenses as thick as shuttle re-entry shields can easily tell.
You should have called it a day when HD DVD died, at least you could have said you were right about that.
*Chuckles*
It seems to me that the sites most vocal about Blu-ray death were staunch supporters of HD-DVD when it was still a viable format. Have these people even considered how stupid they’ll look when people look at a page like this 3 years from now in the archives?
Like it or not, Blu-ray is needed. Programs are starting to reach the limit of dual-layer DVDs, and a lot of them are now coming on multiple dual-layer disks. I’m sure downloading will matter for 3/4 of the people out there that don’t have broadband access… :-p
I’m sorry, but you’re about right up there with the National Enquirer when it comes to reporting, and I must say your bias is showing.