Shoot! I'm sticking with Betamax!
Posted on 05/06/2008 11:04:35 AM PDT by Notary Sojac
Mid-February was a good time to be a Blu-ray backer. Media moguls who had championed the technology were busy floating on yachts in the Pacific, chomping cigars, and stroking white longhaired cats; the billion-dollar payday was at hand. But numbers out last week indicate that standalone Blu-ray player sales plummeted in the early part of this year, and enthusiasm for the hi-def format appears as lukewarm as the applause at an REO Speedwagon concert. Where did all the buyers go?
Last week, both ABI Research and The NPD Group delivered the news: the standalone Blu-ray player market did not suddenly rise up and walk after HD DVD quit the market. Instead, it remained in its bed and took a turn for the worse. NPD reports that player sales dropped by 40 percent from January to February 2008 and increased by only 2 percent the following month.
ABI argues that the Blu-ray player market won't improve to full health for more than a year, perhaps as long as 18 months. "BD player prices remain high, and supplies are limited," says ABI Research principal analyst Steve Wilson. "This is good for the market because most current players do not support all the functions that studios place on the discs. Lacking support for—or upgradability to—BD Live! or Bonus View (picture in picture), consumers cannot utilize all the available options. Manufacturers would rather sell more fully-featured models."
This is "good" only because the collective companies involved in supporting Blu-ray haven't been able to get their collective act together. In fact, the only real beneficiary of the current high-prices, underperforming standalone players has been Sony's games division, which produces the PlayStation 3, a solid (and future-proof) Blu-ray player in its own right.
In answer to the question posed above, it appears that buyers have gone in several directions simultaneously.
PS3. The reported declines in Blu-ray player sales aren't actually declines at all; they only apply to standalone players. Sony's PlayStation 3 has been moving serious units, and while standalone player shipments can be numbered in the thousands, Sony sold 257,000 PS3s in March 2008 alone. That represents a 98 percent growth rate in year-over-year sales. Given the high cost of standalone players and the fact that the price didn't fall after the HD DVD announcement, it's clear that most people are getting their Blu-ray fix from the PS3.
ABI believes that PS3s will account for a full 85 percent of all Blu-ray players in the wild by the end of 2008. Despite dire headlines regarding Blu-ray that are based on the recent ABI and NPD reports, it's clear that the format is actually growing the number of players in the field, and in significant ways.
Upconverting players. HD players from both contending formats have long had to face questions about whether the quality boost they offer is "good enough" to drive users to make a pricey upgrade away from a DVD player. While the PS3 represents a good value for money, standalone players typically don't. They still exist far above the $100 magic number for broad adoption of new consumer electronics devices, and upconverting DVD tech continues to look quite good. On my new 52" LCD TV, for instance, Battlestar Galactica upconverted over an HDMI connection looks simply spectacular. Sure, it would look better in HD, but good enough that I want to drop hundreds on a new player?
NPD notes that upconverting DVD player sales are up 5 percent in the first quarter of 2008 over 2007, while those that cannot upconvert dropped by 39 percent.
Download services. But not everyone sees the need for a disc-based player anymore. The 360 has a well-regarded content download service that delivers HD movies right to the console, for instance, and Microsoft has been talking up to the direct download model for content distribution now that its pony is out of the race.
Apple has its own iTunes infrastructure that can serve up video content to iPods, iPhones, Macs, PCs, and TVs, and it now offers 720p rentals for the Apple TV. Amazon and TiVo provide further video download and rental options, while Netflix has been adding to its ever-increasing stable of films that can be streamed online instead of ordered through the mail.
Given the array of such services available, it's not hard to see how even tech-savvy folks might hang on to a decent DVD player as backup but make use of newer streaming and download services to grab on-demand fare.
HD DVD is dead, and Blu-ray is arguably well positioned to take advantage of that fact. But the format has a long way to go before it supplants DVD as the physical media of choice for the living room. Remember, it took nearly a decade for sales of DVD players to overtake those of VCRs. It was only when DVD players began dropping down around $100 that they truly took off, and Blu-ray has a long way to go before it gets there.
I also watch DVD's on my home LAN, and I can't easily rip Blu-Ray for HD storage as I can a DVD.
I think it will be quite a while before anything other than a good ol' DVD crosses my threshold.
“I think it will be quite a while before anything other than a good ol’ DVD crosses my threshold.”
That may be true, but as the article points out PS3 alone will drive plenty of Blu-ray adoption. Since Blu-ray players also play DVDs there’s no issue with losing access to the old library.
As to ripping Blu-ray discs, I thought software was already out there...
BluRay will slowly filter in as people replace DVD players but only if the costs fall to a level where people decide it’s worth it.
It’s the price. How much easier can you get than that? DVDs didn’t EXPLODE until units hit the magic $100 price point. At this rate, we’ll have to wait two years(excluding inventory clearing black Friday sales) before we get to that point with BluRay.
This isn’t rocket science.
THere is no advantage to Blu-Ray in your van. You need a large screen TV to appreciate it.
It is truly amazing though. HD is fuzzy in comparison.
Blu-ray will take off when there are more titles available.
While the economy is touch and go and people are having to cope with $4 gasoline and their home equity going “poof”, $400 “new and improved” video players ARE NOT APPEALING TO THE MASSES! Rocket science it is not!
The problem is that Hi-Def junk is still junk. DVD resolution is just fine for all of the film classics (and classic TV) that folks really want to own. Beyond that, the real difference between upscaled DVD (which all current DVD players do) and BluRay is marginal. And then there’s the “benefit” of BluRay’s DRM features (remember, HD video was never about delivering a better product to the viewer, but all about closing DRM holes in the DVD format).
Bottom line: Movies/Programming which isn’t worth watching isn’t worth buying in any format.
--chuckle--
Sony is the only company who can lose a one horse format race.
The death of a competing HD format was supposed to be a good thing. I didn’t get it then, and I don’t get it now.
Is that why HD-DVD was killed by the other manufacturers?
How can Blu-Ray be higher def than HDTV?
I have HDTV and the images are very nice- my question is technical- it can’t have higher definition than 1080p (or i), which I receive digitally
Or if the price of gas ever comes down...
They bought their players. It's a capital investment, not a consumable. You buy one, you have it.
Those who didn't buy one probably don't have HDTVs to plug one into, so there's no point in getting one. Authors of such articles seem to forget that the ~$400 players need a ~$1400 monitor to plug it into ... and most people still don't have HDTVs, and most of them aren't in a hurry to get one.
I keep looking at HDTVs, and keep not getting one. The compression wrecks the potentially pristine image, LCD panels have a jitter that bugs me, Plasma panels have a finite (improving, but still finite) lifespan, rear-projection systems are unwatchably bad (move slightly to the side and image rapidly fades), laser systems just aren't here yet, and whichever way I go the entry cost will be realistically upwards of $4000.
I'll stick with my 27" CRT and Netflix DVDs for now, thanks.
such as?
with DVD players below 50 dollars there is very little incentive to fork out 300 for a blue ray to watch the same garbage.
What is out there?
Anti-amerirca themed movies?
Just look at what bombed at the box office recently.
The content is just not there.
Actually, there was a lot of applause at the REO show I went to in 2002. So there.
Hmmmmf.
I would be in seventh heaven if they ever start remastering some of the old music I like (60's particularly) and putting into one of those HD Audio formats.
When laser systems are cheap enough, that’s probably when we’ll get one.
It took years (unto decades) for CDs and DVDs to penetrate the market to a degree these people are looking to achieve in months ... and those involved formats that didn’t require a whole new audio/video monitor to achieve any benefit at all.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.