Blu-ray not yet finding a home on PCs
Blu-ray players are becoming a hot item in the living room, but they have yet to attract much attention in the office, according to a new report from iSuppli.
The market research firm found that 3.6 percent of PCs shipped in 2009 will feature Blu-ray players. By 2013, the company expects 16.3 percent of PCs to sport a high-def drive. During that period, DVDs will still reign supreme.
"BDs won't be replacing DVDs as the primary optical drive in PC systems through at least the year 2013," Michael Yang, senior analyst for storage and mobile memory at iSuppli said in a statement. "They eventually will find success, but during the next five years, that success will be limited in the PC segment."
iSuppli believes that Blu-ray's lack of adoption in the PC market is centered on two main factors: a relatively small number of available movies and the cost of adding a Blu-ray drive to PCs. iSuppli said its findings suggest consumers will be more likely to add Blu-ray drives to their PCs once the cost of those drives decreases.
Although the results weren't ideal for the Blu-ray Disc Association, iSuppli said that they're not uncommon. According to the company, new media formats in PCs have enjoyed success only when the cost has decreased to a suitable level. That success also depends on whether or not consumers feel the technology's value proposition is high enough.
iSuppli cited the 3.5-inch floppy's 15-year lifespan as proof that consumers will use media as long as they perceive value. Currently, those same consumers believe there is more value derived from DVD drives.
"It's undeniable that Blu-ray delivers a higher-definition picture, better sound quality and larger storage space for home entertainment," Yang said in a statement. "However, these benefits may have little or no value when viewing the content on a smaller desktop or laptop PC screen and using poor speakers."
The other side of Blu-ray
Blu-ray's struggles in the PC market don't extend to the home-entertainment space. In fact, the format is growing at a rapid rate.
In April, Adams Media Research reported that Blu-ray disc sales doubled in the first quarter compared to the same period in 2008.
But it gets better. Last month, the Digital Entertainment Group reported that U.S. Blu-ray disc sales were up 91 percent in the first half of 2009. Toshiba, once Blu-ray's biggest competitor and backer of HD DVD, announced earlier this month that it couldn't be a Blu-ray holdout any longer and would bring Blu-ray players to the market. It was another major victory for Blu-ray.
So as Blu-ray tries to find its footing in PCs, it looks like it has found its place in the living room.
Check out Don's Facebook profile, Twitter stream, and FriendFeed.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
You can actually find WD and hitachi 1TB drives for under $70 these days with various rebates. The value proposition of bluray, as you've mentioned, doesn't look good unless they get REALLY cheap
The problem is much less common than a simple scratch destroying the entire optical media and with it, your data. That, coupled with the limited life of the optical media. I have had CDs/DVDs go bad in 3-4 years even though they were not abused in any way. Optical media is too unreliable for anything critical.
I don't particularly agree with the idea of not needing a drive, but I completely agree with the statement of just using a external drive. BD blank media is just far too expensive, and like DL dvds it just won't ever take off until prices drop *drastically*.
So, what you're saying is, the installed base (and associated media sales) of the 15yr-old, incumbent technology is greater than that of a technology that only recently became *the* next optical media standard? You don't say. Who would have thought it?
What makes you think distributing on flash cards would be cheaper? They cost more per card. Period. Forget the fact that simply do not have the capacity to store an HD movie at transparent bit rates, except for maybe the 32 GB ones that retail for $70, and those would only work for shorter films.
Many new computers are coming with blue ray, but there is not much content being shipped on Blue ray so umm why buy it?
Yes 15 years for the Floppy 1982-1997 DVD rom arrived on the market in ? 1995-97 odd that is? CD Rom though was around for while before that, you missed that part in your article.
We went from floppy to cd since it made mode sense then shipping 20+ cd's
CD's went from CD to DVD when we hit the 4-5 cd's for big games. But I have not seen to many multi DVD programs or games yet.
Wow, Don 2 Blu-ray is dead columns in one week. Either you are running out of material or you are banking up because you are going on vacation.
Who is going to pay $30+ for one blank BluRay disc when you can buy a 100 disc spindle of DVD's for $30 or less?
The high cost of BluRay makes it too expensive as a storage medium for PC's.
Personally, I'm holding out for my 1TB 1024x-speed microSD cards. I want to be able to store a half-dozen copies of the library of congress in a thimble or hide the entire Harry Potter movie series, in HD, in a nostril.
Most (about 90%) of Blu-ray Disc movies are region free (mostly stuff from Europe is not, but even that is changing), and all of the stuff from Japan is within the same region as the U.S. so there is no region playback problem there.
A BD recorder cost far far less than "terabyte(s)" of hard drive space, and at $10 for blank BD-50 disc the cost of backing up to Blu-ray disc is less than half of backing up to a external hard drive. You obviously do not remember when CD burners cost $400 and blank media cost $10 dollars. We did not always live in a world when Walmart sold blank CD's for $0.10 and burners for $20.00
As far as the industry abandoning the format; that will not likely to happen for at least 10 years. Even so, if Hollywood abandoned the DVD for Blu-ray and/or digital downloads would people still not buy blank DVD's and/or CD's? Would not software (both PC & Consoles) still ship on physical media?
You are basically saying that all physical media is doomed to failure because everybody will move to the cloud and just back up to hard drives.
25GB disk $3 = $120/TB
50GB dsk $10(?) = $200/TB
1TB Hard Drive $100
So currently using BluRay disks to do backup costs $20/TB over hard drives and you never amortize the cost of the drive itself.
Then there's the issue of convenience, the hard disk just sits there with no intervention for months, the BluRay drive has to be fed disks which makes overnight backups annoying.
As far as using a computer as a BluRay player, it's currently far too much of a science fair project. A good hobby for those who like playing with the software more than watching the movies themselves.
I have a feeling he thinks that will never happen, but he also doesn't want to offend Sony.
Blueray is a bag of hurt.
With more and more people getting their jollies from other than TV and movies, Bluray is clearly an unnecessary expenditure, very much to the chagrin of media-moguls.
And of course there is the DRM (digital rights management issue). Last time I checked, which was quite a while ago, so I admit, these things were fully laden with digital contraptions to ensure the viewer can NOT enjoy watching a movie other than laid out by the rules of the American Motion Picture Association, preventing the ordinary user to do simple things like taking a backup of legally purchased media.
Only one word for it: FAULTY BY DESIGN
Arthur
1. Get rid of Sony's high royality rate.
2. Get rid of the players needing to phone home to play certain discs.
3. Sell BR-R or BR-RW with DVD-RAM features in DL at 100 discs for $20.
4. Sell recordable drives for both computers and TVs for only $50 and take a loss on hardware.
5. None of this will happen, so while Blu-Ray stuggles to find an actual audience in a bad economy that's going to last to 2014 at the least, the rest of us will have moved on.
6. Blu-Ray has been around for four years now and still is regarded and new and niche.
- by Mr_7235 August 26, 2009 10:18 PM PDT
- The day Sony drops hdcp or buys me a new, hdcp enabled DVI monitor, I'll consider getting a blu-ray drive. Until then, I'll stick with dvds, hulu, crackle, etc, all of which work on my 3 year old Dell display.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
Showing 1 of 2 pages (49 Comments)