More than that.
I have an upscaling DVD player in the living room, a regular DVD player in our bedroom and one downstairs in the rec room. I also have a portable DVD player, as does our eldest rug rat. Then we have a DVD player in the back seat of the van.
If I have a choice between buying a $35 disc I can only watch in one room of my house, versus a $15 disc I can watch in six different places, plus my PC, plus rip it to my Palm TX, it will be, and has been, an easy decision.
absolutely. same could be said for cd and dvd vs tape and vhs respectively. the primary question for bd is the value of the improvement in picture and sound to the consumer. prices will come down on bd material once more players are out... chicken and egg problem for sony though. studios are happy selling dvds. studios like bd as opposed to pc-based solutions though because they feel they have more control over it... if they gain enough comfort with downloaded HD content (at BD bitrates), bd might just be doomed. As it is, just because you upscale a standard def picture to 720p, compress the hell out of it, and offer over the internet, does not mean it is comparable to bd for everyone (thought it is for those with small displays). things still need to shake out more. I bought a combo bd/hd-dvd player with a nice scaling chip open box on clearance for what the better scaling dvd players run. I certainly would not have paid the full cost for the player given the uncertainty, and I only buy the discs at a reasonable price (<$20 on sale or used, with a number of hd-dvd discs bought on closeout for <$10). win-win as I see it. At worst, I have the best upscaling dvd player on the market :)
Seriously. What Sony should have done is make DVD's that would be read like a DVD on a DVD player, but read like a Blu-Ray disc on a Blu-Ray player. They had the technology years ago, but never did anything with it. Instead companies went with dumb double-sided discs or packaged a DVD with a Blu-Ray disc.
If Sony had just sold all their DVD's with a Blu-Ray layer for a couple of years, then they could just tell customers that they can take advantage of the movies they already own when selling the Blu-Ray players.