> Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product.
I think there’s an FR topic (and forgive me for not checking the rest of this one) regarding the recent statement by Sony that Blu-Ray will be the last optical format. Not only d/ls, but also the crashing price, better portability, and lower power requirements, and ease of reusing, of flash memory products will have some kind of impact. Also, hard drive densities have gone up and price has dropped. In the summer of 2007 I saw my first terabyte drive (external USB), which was around $400. Now, it’s trivial to find a 500 gig external for $100, making the price per gig $200, so the price per meg (which used to be a standard, heh)...
Flash drives (iow, not just the camera chips, but the USB gizmos with the RAM installed) have really fallen in that same interval. I think I paid over $40 for the 4 gig flash drive I carry. Those are under $20 at the wholesale clubs (probably in the big office supply chains as well), and the 8 gig drives are about $30 I think (I was in a couple of the clubs yesterday, but can’t remember exactly, the prices had fallen since the previous visit); WalMart has 16 gig (I think SanDisk) for under $60 I believe. Obviously this is tiny compared with the terabyte drives, but they use little power, are tremendously portable, and last I knew Samsung has a 128 gig flash drive coming out early next year (if not sooner).
Optical is still king for distribution though. Even “broadband” requires a very long wait to download a highly compressed, standard-definition movie. High definition requires very high-speed internet, and usually streaming so that people don’t have to wait forever for it to finish.
Secondly, while a $10-per gigabyte flash drive sounds great, DVDs cost less than 30 cents per disc to press. And even early in its inception, Blu-Ray only cost $5 per 25GB disc to produce. Flash has a long way to go before it breaks 20-cents per gig.