Is Blu-Ray a Failure?
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There was a minor flap in tech news last week when the CEO of Activision, a huge video game company, called on Sony to drop the price of its PlayStation 3 game console, suggesting that if Sony didn’t follow this advice Activision would consider withdrawing support for the game platform altogether. I hardly expect Activision to withdraw its PS3 support, nor do I expect Sony to dramatically reduce the price of systems that have already effectively dropped 20 percent or more in Sony’s top market, the U.S., because of the weak dollar. To the astonishment of hard-core gamers, in fact, I’d suggest that this little drama has nothing to do with game sales or games at all, but is instead directed at the Blu-Ray optical disk drive inside every PS3. The dude from Activision, sensing blood in the water, is trying to look like a shark, for there is growing sentiment in the industry that Blu-Ray, as it was originally intended, is a failure.
How can that be? Wasn’t it just a year ago that Blu-Ray, with its greater data capacity, triumphed over the opposing HD-DVD standard? Well promises were made to achieve that victory and now it appears promises may have been broken.
Understand that the success or failure of Blu-Ray has little to do with games and everything to do with movies. Two historical events informed the battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. First was the epic and costly 1980‘s competition between the BetaMax and VHS tape cassette standards. Second was the triumphant succession of DVD over VHS, when we all replaced our tape libraries with disks, gladly paying anew for what we already owned, buying every Hollywood exec a new Mercedes in the process.
Re-fighting the battle between BetaMax and VHS was something the industry wanted to avoid when it came to an emerging HD video standard, There had been for a moment such a potential conflict for DVD but the opposing forces were brought to a compromise by the movie studios, themselves, and a single technical standard emerged, pumping billions into the movie business as a result. That’s the same goal that all sides had in the HD video fight — to get it over with quickly and get us all replacing our video libraries with HD.
According to Hollywood insiders who speak with me, the HD video battle was again decided by the studios when Disney and 20th Century Fox went with Blu-Ray in 2008. The leader in that decision was reportedly Disney, which had 35 animated classic films it envisioned bringing to market in a data rich format with lots of extra material — so much material and games that HD-DVD, with its lower capacity, couldn’t hold it all on a single disk. So it was Blu-Ray’s greater capacity that swayed Disney, along with Sony’s promise that the rampant success of PS3 game machines would quickly put Blu-Ray drives in most American living rooms.
The Disney fantasy was that Blu-Ray would triumph, PS3s would be everywhere, and American families would, all over again, buy enhanced copies of the 35 animated classics, sending up to $7 billion to Disney.
Well so far it hasn’t happened.
Yes, there are millions of PS3s in use, but millions more xBox360s and Nintendo Wii’s. PlayStation 3 is the third-best-selling next-gen game console — third out of three, which is the wrong place to be for any competing tech standard that hopes to dominate. Game consoles that have already been on the market for a year or more don’t suddenly win from behind like Seabiscuit. Sony sells more PS2s still than PS3s. PS3 was a year late to market, had supply problems, fewer game titles, and those titles usually cost a bit more than on other platforms. But what really killed it for the movie studios was something completely different and unanticipated — the need for an HDTV to go with each PS3 Blu-Ray player.
Both the VCR and DVD revolutions required that just a single revolutionary (in the case of DVD, evolutionary) product be successful. Your TV remained the same. You can play a DVD on a DuMont black & white TV set from 1956, but Blu-Ray — unless you are not taking advantage of any of its, well, advantages — requires a whole new TV. The chances of people buying simultaneously an HDTV AND a PS3 were lower and so was the dual penetration with the result that Blu-Ray disk sales, while not terrible, are also not material, yet, to the movie industry. And the question now is whether they ever will be material?
Blu-Ray will survive, but will it be just for cinephiles? That depends on how the 1080p download market evolves (which is why Apple has yet to sell a computer with a Blu-Ray disk installed, seeing it as eventual channel conflict with iTunes) or whether a new HD-DVD standard will emerge to compete again with Blu-Ray.
And don’t forget the impact of up-converting progressive-scan DVD players, which even Sony sells: I just bought one for $44.77 at Wal-Mart and driving the 720p display in my RV makes a standard-definition DVD of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory look amazingly good. Not good enough for a cinephile, but that’s five percent of the video market, tops.
Yes, Blu-Ray is better, but for many people the incentives aren’t there, which leaves us still looking for a higher-density data standard that ideally costs less than Blu-Ray. That particular need, especially in the PC industry, never went away.
This alternate standard is coming, I’m sure, and don’t be surprised if it turns out to be pretty much the same HD-DVD that lost-out a year ago, though this time probably not under the Toshiba brand. It would make a superior archival platform and might even be used for HD video, too. Retooling a factory to stamp HD-DVDs costs millions less than upgrading to Blu-Ray and the eventual disks are significantly cheaper.
But that The Making of Bambi featurette may have to go.
Blue-Ray’s (and HD-DVD)window of opportunity has closed. The time when 20 G of data was cost prohibitive to transport any other way has passed. A 1TB HD can be had for less than $200. Many people now have 6Mb or faster broadband. There are too many other cheaper and simpler alternatives to get HD or near HD content. Cable operators will provide HD rentals of video-on-demand movies for like 6 bucks. Apple-TV offers near HD content for 4 or 5. And as was said, unless you have a fairly large (over 48″) 1080P monitor, even upconverted DVDs look damn good. Why spend $300 or more for blue-Ray? Sony and the HD-DVD camp blew it.
Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1TB 3.5″ can be had for $129.99 with free Shipping…Good buy Blue Ray!
The thing(s) that stopped me from diving into BluRay is that I can only watch it on my main HDTV. I have other TV’s in the house – all SD. Then there is the vacation home. All SD. I can’t watch BR discs anywhere else, and there aren’t any portable BR players with built in screen like there are for DVD. Even if there were, they’d be cost prohibitive. I don’t see many notebook PC’s with BR players. So, even if I get the PS3, I might buy the odd BR title, but I would still buy mostly plain old DVD’s for their portability and compatibility.
This doesn’t bode well for BR. The problem is that the standard is owned by Sony, and they, like the mafia, get their cut on every unit. Prices stay high, BR die…
Bottom line, people are getting very tired of getting screwed.
Formats are changing way too fast.
When I switched over from records to cd’s I was okay with it for many reasons, it was better in almost every way. And although the music industry was getting paid yet again for re-purchases they also made it worth the effort. If you remember at the time they couldn’t make every title on CD, so a whole crop of Greatest hits and Collections came out, this helped encourage sales. You could now have a lot of your favorite songs on one very portable disk – cool! and cost effective.
I still to this day don’t understand why so many people re-bought songs for their Ipods (Speaking of the demographic that already owned the music on CD). I realize there was a lazy factor but the idea of anyone making money YET AGAIN! on me buying the same damn music never sat well with me, so I never bought a song I already had, just copied it from my cds. I actually never owned an Ipod, my LG phone works just fine for that. ( I also can’t stand Apple and their monopolistic ways and how they get away with it because they seem cool, but that’s just my personal issue)
Sorry for the tangent.
Back to Movies, I buy DVDs because I love watching movies, my speakers alone are worth more then most people systems, I’m not bragging, I’m trying to make a point, I am someone who appreciates quality and LOVES to watch movies, if it wasn’t for movies I probably wouldn’t own a tv, that’s the truth. I love the experience only a movie can offer. And with that said I still don’t own a BluRay. I just can’t justify the cost and the obvious screwing of the public.
The cost in no way justifies the upgrade for the machine or the discs.
And why would I believe that this format is going to stick around more then 10- 15 years?
I’m only 40 years old, I’ve owned 8 tracks, cassettes, 45′s, LP’s, CD’s, mp3′s.
Movies went through less formats but still keep changing and we already know that a hard format is a dying bread. How many years will it be until downloading movies and saving them to a hard drive because the standard?
Unless the costs are the same as standard DVD, players and disc, they are fighting a tough battle. Especially in this economic environment.
Which brings up one more quick point, people only have so much disposable income, and I think people are realizing just because it’s new and shiny doesn’t mean it’s worth money that could be better spent elsewhere.
-dan
Dan, in OUR generation there were a lot of good music groups and they produced a lot of songs and a lot of albums. You can pick any popular group of the era, then randomly pick one of their albums and chances are you find at least a dozen good songs on it.
Now move to our kids generation. They have a favorite group, go to the store, shell out $15+ for a CD and on it are one, maybe two songs worth keeping. Worse, often some of the other songs would have very offensive material. The kids felt like they were being ripped off, and they were! They took matters in their own hands, and file sharing became popular.
Today we have iTunes in our house, several iPods, and a lot of music. I used to be worried about Apple, but I am not anymore. Apple changed the industry. They made it easy to buy individual songs or whole albums. They got most of the recording industry into the 21st century and selling songs electronically. Once that door was opened, others could do it too. Walmart is a big seller of electronic music. There are others. My kids have bought music from Walmart and loaded it into iTunes. We use iTunes primarily to manage our music and put it on our iPods. For that purpose it works very well. We do buy some music from Apple, but not that much. Most of our music came from CD’s or other legitimate MP3 sources.
There is a common assumption that if you have an iPod, you HAVE to buy your music from Apple. NOT TRUE. You can buy an iPod, NEVER purchase a single song from Apple, and still enjoy owning a great electronic music player. Thanks to Apple you can now buy most of your favorite music electronically…and from others.
Thanks to Apple you can now buy someone else’s MP3 player and all of your music from someone else. Apple brought the recording industry to the table and got them to agree to some reasonable pricing and terms of use for their music. Think about it…
Last weekend we went to a small summer concert in a local town park. The performers were a local group that is completely unknown outside of our community. They had produced a CD and were proudly selling them at the concert. They were also proudly giving away business cards with instruction on how to buy their music from iTunes.
Our kids didn’t have the multitude of great music choices we had growing up. One of the reasons for that is the recording industry stopped doing talent development. Today it is even harder for promising groups to get discovered, to get promoted, etc. With iTunes (and other services) there is now another way from them to get their music out into the world.
This seems like an appropriate topic on which to share one of the funniest bits I’ve seen in a long time. It appeared last February in The Onion. If you’ve never seen The Onion, imagine if Penn & Teller teamed up with the folks at Mad Magazine and took over CNN …. (Hey, that’s a hell of an idea on its own).
The Onion does a “news story” about Sony releasing a new product that doesn’t work and confounds its customer base. It’s hysterical.
Follow the link. You’ll love it.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/sony_releases_new_stupid_piece_of
I agree the music industry has lost it’s way, and I will also agree that mp3′s are a great format, but kids these days still have access to all the old music. Yea it’s different, but it’s still there to enjoy. I’m amazed at how much older music my nephew listens to. He’s almost 14, but he loves older music, and I suspect he’s not alone.
I was under the impression that Ipods had their own file format, which I’m sure can be converted but the normal consumer would never learn or take the time to do. Plus the security encryption added on, again I have no idea how bad it is, but I was under the impression you can’t keep moving the songs around from player to player. I have a real problem with this. If I bought it, I own it, I should be able to keep it forever, not the lifespan of my computer or mp3 player.
I know you can download music for free (steal it) but I honestly have no problem paying for something I want. I have issues with re-paying for it. I also have issues with who gets the money.
As far as new music and the industry, they are short sighted idiots that shot themselves in the foot, and the only way they have survived is because of a technological win fall. They don’t invest in talent they only care about quick turnovers and pop sensations.
All and all, in my opinion it comes down to people wanting to make money without actually creating anything new. I’m pretty sure the Stock Market led this movement.
I don’t want to finance every new technology, only to wake up tomorrow with another collection of outdated formats.
Life cycles are way too short, and way to expensive. And I think people are starting to get tired of it.
iPods do not have their own file format, the format that Apple sells on the iTunes store is MP4 which is the official (non Apple) update to MP3, it’s a more efficient standard that compared to MP3 can either give the same sound quality with a smaller file size, or higher quality at the same file size. But as the commenter said earlier you do not have to fill the iPod with iTunes store tracks, it also supports MP3, AIFF, Apple Lossless and Wav formats. iTunes does not copy protect the tracks any longer, so you can move your music around as much as you like.
I have a little over 8,000 tracks in my iTunes library, most of these were ripped from my own CDs and vinyl records and because I am particular about sound quality they are all in lossless format. So there really is no lock in with iPods, this is FUD which Apple’s competitors used as an attempt to gain customers.
I meant to say AAC NOT MP4 (MP4 is a video format)
My bad
[...] Blue ray failure? – Robert Cringley tries to reason out the lame take-off by Blue-ray. [...]
SPAM
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?” The original “Willie Wonka” is a much better version!
What Blu-ray needs is a killer app. 3D, anyone?
I think the price slash is the reason of blu-ray failure that may be economic crisis.
Things that are killing Blu-ray (none of which are “needing a new TV):
1. “The Lord of the Rings (Extended Editions)” is scheduled to be released on Blu-ray in 2011 or 2012. Same goes for other modern classics which people want to buy (rather than rent). Two years until there’s a compelling blu-ray release aside from “Planet Earth”. Blu-ray will always win A/B tests, but it can’t make a bad movie good.
2. DVD. DVD continues to look great, and always will. The resolution advantage of blu-ray is meaningless on 99% of televisions. Colors are what make video look great, not resolution.
3. Price. The only people buying blu-ray are the wealthy, and Netflix users.
How can Blu-ray succeed? The only way is for disc prices to drop to the same as DVD, and this has to be done soon. Blu-ray is less useful than DVD: you can’t play it in the DVD players that you have attached to all of your other TVs, you can’t play it in your laptop or portable player, you can’t play it in your minivan, you can’t rip it to your ipod, etc. This is negative value, and i estimate that it equals or outweighs the technical advantages for most consumers. As we learned from MP3 vs CD/SACD/DVD-A, convenience wins over minor quality differences.
Blu-ray doesn’t have the luxury of time that DVD had. When DVD (4-9 GB) came out in 1997, computers came with 2 GB and 4 GB hard drives, and there was no ipod. When Blu-Ray (25-50GB) came out in 2007, computers came with 250-500GB hard drives, and ipods had 80 GB drives. DVD had many years of storage size and cost advantage, while Blu-Ray has none.
Blu-Ray is on a path to failure, but can still be saved.
[...] “Is Blu-ray a failure?” is an interesting article by Cringely which essentially makes some of the points I made late last year, but fails to really provide a firm answer to the question. Here’s a simple way of looking at it: [...]
Another kick in the azz being standard def dvd not using anywhere near full capacity for most movies. Between 4 and 6 GiB is average space utilization for the typical DVD9 title and the transfer from film is highly variable at that. Anywhere from 30 to 50% worth of MPEG2 left to waste but for over compression. Trailers fill some of the space but getting back to transfer quality, a great many standard def DVD’s are pressed with pure VHS quality crud. With SD DVD we seldom get what we expect paying for. Bottom line.
Now, lets look at the possibilities anew. How much video and audio improvement could be realized in nearly 9GiB of x.264 on a standard capacity DVD?
Precisely. We don’t need a new disk format, we need studios to take advantage of what we already have in SD capability and HD is a matter of taking advantage of codec improvements. And due note that every BlueRay performance I’ve seen to date comes nowhere near the capability of that technology and in fact demonstrates all of the artificial limitations impressed upon existing standards.
Most of you have it right. BlueRay is just an excuse to repurchase media.
I think broadband, usb flash drives, solid state drives, faster usb specs and cheap multiple terabyte platter drives are all going to make blueray/any removable optical disk media redundant, really, really quickly.
[...] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Is Blu-Ray a Failure? – Cringely on … [...]
#1. Sony has lost its mojo. You look at their products and will notice a definite decline of design and build quality from 80s and 90s, when they lead the electronic industry and everyone can only hope to catch up to its reputation. But they’ve caught up, and Sony in recent years has focused on polishing a few high end products for big margins but they made bad decisions everywhere in earning their bread and butter. Even Steve Jobs once admired Sony like everyone. Very soon Apple+Pixar will overtake Sony (+Disney; isn’t that interesting?) as the electronic and multimedia entertainment industry leader, even if not in pure sales volume but in technology and standards in user experience.
#2. Recession. Sony hoped every new home bought during the housing boom will also put in a new HDTV and Blue Ray player. That was a mirage.
People are happy with DVDs the way they weren’t with VHS – smaller, better quality, no rewinding, easy scanning. When price came down, it was an easy sale.
Blue Ray was better quality that less than 5% of the audience may care about. Blue Ray can store more content when the added content is is of questionable value. People are buying a movie.
And with many on-demand cloud options, and dirt cheap DVDs, the incentive to buy Blue Ray is tiny.
Blu-Ray’s problem is that while it was duking it out to become the physical HD standard, physical media and expensive single purpose devices became so 20th century. Consumers were not going to invest big bucks in upgrading their equipment and media until a winner in the HD wars was crowned. Blu-Ray finally won in 2008. By 2008, people had the ability to carry around thousands of songs and dozens of movies around in their pocket with an iPod. They could not only play games but could also watch t.v. programs and movies on demand via their XBox 360. With a computer they could access the same content using Hulu, YouTube, Joost, Amazon and Apple to name a few. And in 2008, many of these alternatives were also in HD (720p). It seems like everyone else saw the ‘physical media is dying’ writing on the wall except Sony. Sony/PS3/Blu-Ray may have won the HD battle, but unless they lower the cost of the devices and media, they’ve lost the war, especially to their arch foes Microsoft/XBox360/XBox Live and Apple/iPod/iTunes.
The barrier to entry for Blu-Ray has gotten significantly lower, $148 Magnavox
player at Walmart store. This player is not offered online but there is Sylvania
model for $178, http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=10902735.
Formerly the best deal was to purchase a PS3 to get Blu-Ray.
My prediction is <$100 by Christmas which will make Blu-Ray compelling whether
it is dead or undead
How about some thoughts on the coming unlock of cell phones from carriers?
The current model is throw back to Ma Bell when you had to lease your telephone
from the benevolent dictator.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_12762685
Christmas came early. Price has rolled back to $98.
PS/3 “slim” $299, http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10312144-1.html
Netflix on the PS/3, http://www.netflix.com/ps3
We already have a replacement for Blu-Ray, it’s Limelight/Akamai/Google delivered MPEG4 video over VDSL, DOCSIS 3.0 or GEPON fiber. We’re not there yet in 90% of the developed world, but 3Mbit Netflix is already as good as DVD and it runs on everything.
Existing edge networks have no problem pushing the required 10Mbit+ video streams over high speed broadband. They might need a bit more DRAM to handle all the requested short tail hits, but Metaram’s already peddling 16GB DDR3 DIMMs, so that’s easily solved in a few years by Moore’s Law.
On Price: There seems to be a possibility in BluRay versions of TV seasons.
The idea is that you can get both better quality and less disks and thus save on packaging costs as the whole season will fit in a standard slim BluRay box.
I hadn’t intended having my BluRay player for much more than having the *possibility* of playing BluyRay disks – mainly intending using it for upscaling – but when I found I could get Season One of the UK TV series “Life on Mars” for 10% more than the DVD version, I bought that version.
Paying real money more (starts at maybe 20% more) and I wouldn’t have done so.
Compare this with BluRay vs DVDs of single films.There you still have the same size packaging and the same number of disks (1) so there is no real incentive for the manufacturers to keep the pricing close to the DVD price.
[...] Is Blu-Ray a Failure? [...]
IMO the future is neither HD-DVD nor BlueRay, it’s solid state memory.
Think about it: today the cost per GB of an USB key is “almost comparable” to the one of a rewritable Blue Ray disc; but while the former is following a moore-like curve, the latter would require a “new standard” (new readers) to do “big steps” in terms of capacity.
In a couple of years a 64/128 GB USB stick will cost less than a “rewritable” Blue ray support at the maximum expected capacity, and likely a “read only” one will cost less than the industrial cost of a read-only disc.
This not mentioning the advantages of being solid state (smaller, more quiet, less power consumption), of not having a “reader” (you don’t have to upgrade/replace your interface to a solid state device, unless you need more speed) and, mostly, the possibility to include DRM/antitampering circuitry (which have house in a device, not on a support..*).
Did anyone notice that modern game consoles are moving to solid state memory for the games ?
Ciao,
A.
*) Not that I like this, but is a fact that who distributes movies, music or software.. will like it.
Funny how something old is new again.
All videos games were originally ROM based ala Magnavox pong,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong.
The only original ideas in computer science are the 1 and the O
My old Toshiba DVD player – so old that I paid over $200 for it – is dying. I’ve popped it open and fixed it a couple times, but the bushings in the motor are going to go before too long. So I thought I would give BR a look, now that it is the de-facto standard, and the thing that struck me is how few decent players there are at the same $200-$300 price point. That’s about as much as I want to gamble on a standard that has an ‘iffy’ future, and almost every player (there are not many) has serious downsides (lousy loading times, poor design, limited interface choices). As you mentioned, I can get up-converting players for 1/4 the price and still have a pretty great picture.
I’m not a bleeding edge buyer, but I’m in the wave behind, and if you can’t sell me BR, it has a limited future.
Imagine a wireless technology that was fast enough, reliable enough, cheap enough and universal enough to perfectly, instantaneously and simultaneously stream multiple HD movies to your hand-held devices as well as the bigger screens around your home.
That doesn’t technology exist yet, and investment in the current and new technology to push it towards actually coming into being are (unsurprisingly) fraught with an even higher level of infrastructure worries, technical problems, market unpredictability and format wars than Blu-Ray is experiencing.
But, and here’s the big question, when this technology does eventually exist (and it will – give it time), why would anyone give a damn about holding a hard-copy in their hands any more?
I predict that Blu-Ray will be the second-to-last major hard-copy media format to be released. There’s life in the physical universe yet – but it’s dying for sure.
It already exists. It’s called Ultra Wide Band. The problem is the fricken FCC won’t allow it to be broadcast at high power.
We are talking about archiving, not straight storage. Firstly you shouldn’t be archiving on hard disks, no matter how much storage capacity you have. It simply makes no sense from a technical, functional, compliance, and archival perspective. Archives must be on long term removable media that will require no migrations every few years, cost astronomical amounts to power and cool (between spin ups and spin downs), unpredictably fail (we all know about how disk clusters fail), must be available in the long term and more importantly must be written in non proprietary format. Hard disk does not meet any of this requirements regardless of how large a capacity you have.
When organizations talk about archiving it’s because they already have disk clusters and are referring to professional grade information archiving based on ILM (information lifecycle management) protocols. As of a week ago, Toshiba gave up it’s HD pipe dreams and joined the Blu Ray consortium. This is an indicator of whats to come. I think even you Mr. Cringely are being a little too forward. These market processes take time, especially in unpredictable economic situations. As you can see for yourself, the adoption rate for blu ray at both levels (consumer and enterprise) has not only been steadily growing but particularly in the enterprise space it’s been on an upward trend. For those who keep basing blu rays economics on events of last century, let me remind you that you can’t solve todays problems with yesterdays solutions. Neither can you analyze todays trends based on last centurys events. People are much more educated and technically inclined than they were during the HD/ DVD / VHS / Betamax wars. When people buy a piece of media they are really buying the movie and when a company invests in blu ray as their optical archiving media of choice, they are adopting an information lifecycle management strategy.
I rest my case.
Alani Kuye
Phantom Data Systems Inc.
http://phantomdatasystems.com/opticalstorage.html
As blu ray disc is rage right now I don’t think it can be considered as failure.
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[...] Journalists Describing Blu-ray Pro’s and Con’s You can’t argue with the improvements in picture and sound quality of Blu-ray discs over DVDs but do some homework before you buy a Blu-ray player this Christmas. It could be wasted money if you don’t have a full-high-definition screen and good sound system to hook it up to. … The other point is that most Blu-ray discs cost about $10 more than their DVD counterparts, which means you have to really want the improvements in picture and sound quality. I tend to buy Blu-ray versions of movies only when the vision or sound is critical. Otherwise I buy the cheaper DVD variants and rely on the video upscaling to bump up the picture quality. – Sydney Morning Herald Both the VCR and DVD revolutions required that just a single revolutionary (in the case of DVD, evolutionary) product be successful. Your TV remained the same. Blu-Ray – unless you are not taking advantage of any of its, well, advantages – requires a whole new TV. … Blu-Ray will survive, but will it be just for cinephiles? Don’t forget the impact of up-converting progressive-scan DVD players, which even Sony sells: I just bought one for $44.77 at Wal-Mart and driving the 720p display in my RV makes a standard-definition DVD of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory look amazingly good. Not good enough for a cinephile, but that’s five percent of the video market, tops. … Yes, Blu-Ray is better, but for many people the incentives aren’t there. – I, Cringely [...]
If Blu-Ray doesnt gain mass adoption this year (2010), I’d agree, it’s a failure. What appears to be in the lead is DVD/DVD Upconversion and streaming internet HD video.
I for one, am not going to replace my extensive DVD collection with the Blu-Ray equivalent until a) the prices drop significantly or b) my DVD player breaks and I cant find a replacement.
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Where do you download some blue ray movie trailers in HD ?*:~
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