The death of Blu-Ray
I’d like to go on record as announcing the demise of Blu-Ray. Now, I’m not saying that people won’t buy it, nor that it may exist for many years as a format. Even Laserdisc survived for over 20 years with 2% market share in the United States. What I mean by this incendiary comment is that Blu-Ray is irrelevant. This is true for several reason.
First, the average person simply has no reference for quality. Therefore quality doesn’t sell. VHS beat Beta, VHS beat Laserdisc. VHS sucks. It’s not that people couldn’t tell the difference if they wanted to, but that, with the exception of a miniscule number of videophiles, they simply don’t care. Does the picture move? Do the sounds go boom? Good enough. DVD didn’t win, in my estimation, primarily because of quality. It won because it was easy-to-use, lasted longer, and was less subject to damage by children than VHS was. In addition, it was a lot cheaper to manufacture. Also, it was “familiar” in form-factor to the Compact Disc.
Next, while there is a growing number of people with high definition televisions, it’s still a minority of the market, and even more, the number of people with a 1080p set is effectively zero as a percentage. Is it zero? No, but it’s a largely irrelevant number. A huge number of people are still using CRTs and aren’t likely to replace them until forced to, i.e. when they die.
Finally, the Internet. With the rise of broadband penetration into the United States—never mind the rest of the world that left us behind long ago—video-on-demand is becoming more and more of a reality. Looking at iTunes gives you an idea of where things are going in the home movie-watching world.
I’d also like to point out that movies are 100x more ripe for rental use than CDs, but the reasoning behind that is best saved for a later post.
This entry was posted at 1:33 pm on 4 May 2008 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
Roger,
You bring up a great point regarding the intrusive nature of DVDs. Not having any children, I certainly can empathize with you. maybe it is good that I don’t have any because I’d be worried about them around my new Sony Bravia 1080P tv.
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re: ”[DVDs are] less subject to damage by children”—- funny, it was the mix of kids and DVD which brought home the frustration of all the copying restrictions to me. Even kids not prone to wanton destruction—- the kind that would open a VHS cassette to yank out the tape—- could too easily scratch the surface of a DVD. But the corporations would argue that making backups was stealing.
Anyway, DVDs marketed to children are a little weird: some are completely hostile, forcing ads and previews that cannot be skipped, having no chapter codes, etc.