How prevalent are blue ray discs selling now that HD DVD bowed out of the way? How many computers are shipping with BR players? From my understanding, they aren’t selling well at all. Apple won’t put blue ray in their computers and Steve Jobs publicly ridiculed Sony/BR for it’s excessive fees stating:
“Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.”
“Phil Schiller chimed in with ‘We have the best HD movie and TV options in iTunes.’”
http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/10/14/steve-jobs-calls-blu-ray-a-bag-of-hurt/
Maybe Apple should use their iTunes strength to sell high definition H.264 DVDs at kiosks in their stores, and allowed for similar DVDs to be burned off iTunes when videos were purchased.
If only AppleTV had a DVD drive in it, they could have had it all.
Like the article said, up convert DVD players playing a widescreen standard DVD looks pretty darn good. Way cheaper. Also, there used to be a line of DVDs called “SUPERBIT”, looked great on a standard DVD player hooked to a HiDef screen. They used a higher sampling rate than most DVDs. SONY killed it off.
The last laptop I bought for our firm had a BlueRay player, oh wait, it was a Sony. I told the CEO it had one and he said, “so what”, he gets his laptop movies from the iTunes store.
BluRay is dead to me. My Plasma is a 1080i and looks great playing upconverted DVD from my $100 Toshiba, why change?