Comments on: Believing Blu-ray will succeed doesn't make sense

Despite winning the popularity contest over HD DVD, the share that Sony's high-definition video disc format has of the market is slumping. Does it have a chance?

[kyle2dotcom]

blu-ray is the future of physical format whether people like it or not. The copy protection is logical. I mean think about it. Why would they not use it. iTunes and other digital movie stores have crazy DRM. Explain to me how cnet will go on and on how bad DRM is on music is, but some how DRM on iTunes movies is great. Sony's digital movies make more sense because i can have them on my PC, PSP, and PS3 AND I GET THE DISC. Also the DVD to Blu-ray difference is better then VHS to DVD as long as you don't buy your "HD" tv at Wal-mart. I assume you did this and don't understand quality because you still own a VHS player.

[rouse51]

Did this guy actually say pop in a VHS then a DVD then a blu-ray? OK I guess you brought a Visio. When I drop in a DVD and compare it to on my blu-ray on a 46" 1080p Sony running at 24p I see a huge difference. Then I crank up my DTS HD reciever and compare it to DTS and I hear a huge difference. This is by far the dumbest article I ever read. I remember when people said the same about VHS to DVD. Average TV sizes were 20" to 27" with basic AV connections. VHS and DVD were not the different. Then TV's with S Video connections got cheap along with progressive scan TV's along with the PS2 and DVD blew up. What reallly made people adapt was that hollywood got tired of people bootlegging VHS and simply stopped releasing movies on VHS. I see the same thing happening with Blu-ray. Yes media is an option but I was downloading VHS quality video off the internet for free and still buying movies. Why? Because it was simple for my kids and simply to buy a movie as a gift. Do I stream movies, yes. I have Itunes and a PS3 along with netflix on the PC. Compared to Blu-Ray even the HD rentals online suck. It is compressed and the HD sound is gone. If you have ever worked in a consumer electronics store like I have you would realize that the people that buy movies are collectors. They are also for the most part technology ignorant. Downloading movies is not there thing.

[SWLinPHX]

When all movies are produced on Blu-ray for rent or purchase, a large percent of consumers have large screen HDTV's and comparable sound systems, and the price goes down (which it already has begun to) there will be substantial gain, especially when those large HDTV owners get used to viewing HD broadcasts thru their cable or satellite companies then compare it to SD DVDs.

However, it is foolish to think that of all home movie viewers, most are the audio and videophiles that have those nice HDTVs, HD broadcasting service, or even the money (especially now) to warrant them. Many just don't care or differentiate that much. Remember, the majority of the world is not those of us reading, following and posting on CNET.

[SJ2571]

The problem with Blu-Ray is that it's only the picture and sound that's better. No other advantages over DVD. I have a collection of 400 or so DVDs. Why does Blu-Ray think I'm going to pay for them all over again, just so I can see and hear a slight difference? Blu-Ray is like BMP and DVD is like JPG, but who stores BMP images instead of JPG for their photos? Exactly. The difference is there but not a necessity. Blu-Ray won't last. Wait and see.

[jcarys]

We don't have to "believe" anything about Bluray - the long term sales positive sales growth tells the story.

All of your comments are exactly the same as 10 years ago when DVD began - customers don't care about quality, VHS is good enough, it's too expensive, etc.

Why is it that technology writers are so bad at predicting the future? Jump 3 years ahead of now - Bluray players sell for $100, discs for $15 and every new title is released on Bluray. Sound familiar? Like the DVD market currently. That's exactly what the Bluray market will be - this is a very smooth transition from the DVD world.

Yes, downloading will take an expanding fraction of the market over the years, but it will also remain a very small part of the market for long form titles for many, many years.

[SJ2571]

Rubbish, there were no such comments when DVD first came out 10 years ago. Don't peddle BS, please.

[pantuky]

Oh boy... here we go again. You folks at CNET sound like a broken record, or a one-string guitarist. This is about the 20th piece you've published declaring the death or failure of Blu-ray. Were I marginally intelligent I might have noticed that you get a flurry of negative responses each time CNET does this. Ergo, I might conclude you do this to drum up interest in your increasingly banal little site. In other words your are engaging in baiting behavior.

If the sales figures for any electronic device don't happen to look good right now, I remind the poppycock mongers that we are in the midst of serious economic crisis right now, featuring the worst banking collapse since the great depression began in 1929. This is not a time when people are spending a lot of money for optional things.

[The_Omega_Man]

It would seem, from my observation point, that the majority of comments on this blog, appear to agree with Don. Thus, reflecting a "flurry," of Positive responses (depending upon your perspective, of course).

[The_Omega_Man]

Don, while I fundamentally agree with where you and the industry appear to be going, with all of this, I do believe that this holiday season will be the true litmus test for the potential of BD to ultimately be a mainstream product, versus a dead end niche product.

If there are not significant sales of both BD Discs and BD Players, then in my opinion, then the people (out side of Japan) will have pretty much spoken with their wallets! If the BD sales do jump and continue into the first quarter of 2009, then I would say that there is some real potential for BD to go mainstream.

Bottom line, the timing for this is just not right, and potentially, it may never be right.

[i_am_still_wade]

As an owner of both HD DVD and Blu-Ray I have to say HD DVD was better. If the BDA didn't bribe Fox studios to stay with Blu-Ray, it would have lost and HD DVD wouldn't have this problem of adoption. The reality is people have no clue with Blu-Ray is. Some people have no idea about the digital TV transformation despite all the commercials and ads. How much more Blu-Ray, whose very name is ambiguous. They hear it and see it, but don't know what it is. But people know what HD is and they know what DVD is, therefore they know HD DVD is better. Add to the confusion profile 1.0, 1.1 or the "final profile" (a misnomer), and 2.0. Perception is everything.

Plus, the economy is down and going to be down for some time. The very nature of capitalism is that the economy always ebbs and tides naturally. With a down economy, people are going to cut back. This downturn is a bad one, thus people are changing their lifestyle. That means less spending on non-essential items. The economy will rebound, but by then something better may be along.

(Yes, Fox was going to abandon Blu-Ray, and WB was going to follow Fox just to end this war. Toshiba execs were on a plane to CES to announce this when Fox decided not to switch sides, thus WB, despite their investment into HD DVD, followed Fox. When the Toshiba guys landed, they found out the news.)

HD DVD is better because most of the movies wisely used Microsoft's VC-1 codec, which provides the best picture quality with the least amount of space. Blu-Ray studios mostly used MPEG-4, which is visually worse than VC-1. They still do. Blu-Ray supports VC-1, so why not choose the best? Probably because they would have to pay one more tax on top of all the other taxes the BDA members exact.

[Tracy Valleau]

If this situation changes, it will be when the Profile 2.0 if finally released, allowing for internet interactivity, and whatever the creative brains at the studios can come up with that is compelling about it... such as personalizing movies; alternate endings; feedback; HD downloads; games... etc. The other thing they could do to speed up adoption is get the price of burners down, and more so the price of blank media. Get it out there among the people, and quit skimming the creme off the top, else it will die an agonizing death.

[NipGrip]

Don, your bias is showing and it's not too pretty.

Analyst believes PS3 will win war and I laugh
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1...

Why Microsoft will announce an Xbox Blu-ray player soon
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1...

Why the Xbox 360 will win the console war
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1...

The Xbox 360 should win this console war (yes.. TWO articles..)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1...

Is Sony as desperate as it looks?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1...

Six reasons you shouldn't use the PS3 as your Blu-ray player
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1...

Blu-ray is doomed (Yep.. Another SECOND article on the same topic)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1...

Blu-ray will not be the success other formats have been (OMG ANOTHER ONE!!)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1...

Five reasons you shouldn't buy a Blu-ray player yet (Ok man.. WE GET IT.)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1...

[Some_One_Plays]

Where this article fails is that there are only 30% of the population that have upgraded to HDTVs (High Definition Televisions) and only 23% of the population want Blu-ray discs. 30/2 = 15 so 15% would be half of the population that have HDTVs and 23% would make 76.59% (est. 77%) of the HDTV population want to upgrade. If you ask me that's pretty good considering the number of HDTVs in people?s houses that run up to 1080p.

What I never get is that why do people always bring up that you have to re-buy your DVD collection when upgrading to Blu-ray discs? This isn't like the last format VHS (Video Home System) to DVD (disc); it's now disc to disc meaning you can keep your collection, go figure. The two strongest points of this article has already been contradicted by facts and not twisted or sensationalized in any way. The study if I do remember correctly was showing that it was the ages of 21-34 that bought HTTVs caused a spike in sales.

In other words don?t be asking grandpa about HD because he isn?t interested. Generally anyone who works with technology will love it or the younger generation. We have more incentive like buying it for a PlayStation 3 for gaming and movies. Like my situation I?m using an HD monitor for gaming, but I am planning on buying a full HDTV for all my entertainment needs.

Sorry Don Reisinger (Author), but you've failed like all the other articles about Blu-ray discs without actually looking at the popluation of people who actually bought HDTVs (720p/1080p).

[ddanckaert]

Blu Ray will succeed. It's portable, high quality, works well, and doesn't tie me to a particular computer or service. I can take my discs to a friend's house, take them with me while traveling, etc.

I have used HD download services and they all take hours, or are compressed HD (like the Apple TV HD downloads) and thus don't offer the same level of quality as Blu Ray.

It's already possible to duplicate or copy to a media server using products like AnyDVD. The only issue is space as HD files are so much larger than DVD. I have no interest in building the storage infrastructure (e.g., RAID and protected by backup drives) I would need to house HD movies.

I like Blu Ray's quality. The price is the only issue, but it was a similar issue when DVD came on the scene. Compared to Renting HD movies online, I could drive to block buster, rent a Blu Ray movie, watch it, take a nap, drive back to the store, eat dinner, read a book, and by the time all those activities are done, maybe my download will be finished. And that's with a 16Mbps Comcast connection.

[kknights]

"As an owner of both HD DVD and Blu-Ray I have to say HD DVD was better. If the BDA didn't bribe Fox studios to stay with Blu-Ray, it would have lost and HD DVD wouldn't have this problem of adoption"

The same goes for HD-DVD group, if they didn't bribe Paramount they would of lost the format war a long time ago because BD was outselling HD-DVD atleast 2:1 and in Japan 9:1. Fox studios going to HD-DVD is just a rumor. It's unlikely that would happen since Fox is part of the BDA group, they also emphasize about anti-piracy and Blu-ray was the best choice obviously.

"HD DVD is better because most of the movies wisely used Microsoft's VC-1 codec, which provides the best picture quality with the least amount of space."

*LOL* MPEG-4 AVC was constantly getting better results compare to VC-1 according to highdefdigest, Blu-ray movies were consistently getting better PQ scores then HD-DVD. The reason why HD-DVD uses mainly VC-1 because other video codec can't fit on their 30gb space where Blu-ray has 50gb. HD-DVD was slightly getting the inferior PQ and AQ due to limit in space. The only advantage that HD-DVD has over Blu-ray is better pricing for their players, that's all. BD-J is superior then HDi. Nearly all Blu-ray movies comes in loseless audio (identical audio to the movie theater version) where as HD-DVD wasn't. Blu-ray video codec was getting higher bandwidth video codec due to the extra space. Blu-ray discs are scratch-resistant though this is debatible as to which is more durable but when I was renting movies, 1/3 of the HD-DVD discs were unreadable.

I'm glad that Blu-ray won because I wouldn't want an inferior product to succeed. Micheal Bay was right, Microsoft didn't give a rat's ass about the format war, they wanted to prolong it so their digital movie downloads can take off... Now that Blu-ray has won, where the hell is their Blu-ray player add-on for the Xbox 360? They wanted to give cosumer choice, yeah right! That's a load of crap.

[Firetaw]

Holy **** you guys make me mad sometimes boohoo hd-dvd didnt win, and blueray isnt selling that much so it wont survive either boohoo. get the **** over it you **** twits. you guys keep complaining about how ps3 and sony is going to fail with blueray. well guess what there making more **** money then you are, and they cant **** do any worst then Microsoft can. and anyone who cant tell the difference between vhs dvd and blueray [HD Format in general]. you **** need to get a **** eye exam cause your **** blind or get your self a giant 56" tv and tell me if your DVD still compares to HD. and sit closer then 20 feet away any further then that doesnt count you ass. oh btw the economy is in crisis so dont mind us if were a little cheap. next time you want to report a **** news article try looking beyon your **** front lawn.

[synthetikz]

THIS IS THE MOST ASININE AND SPECIOUS ARTICLE I'VE READ ON CNET.COM, and there have been some whoppers. I want to make sure i'm understanding you here, Don. You're saying that somehow despite the rapidly accelerating acceptance and adoption of HDTVs.. the only remaining high definition media (blu-ray) will somehow just tank... out of the blue? This sort of thoughtless nonsense, ignores the simple fact that even DVD's themselves took quite a long time before being widely adopted, and more importantly that DVD's didn't have the technological bottleneck of widespread public HDTV adoption constraining its growth. Everyone had a standard definition TV to attach their DVD player to, but not everyone has a HDTV to attach a blu-ray player to.

Then to add insult to injury you bring up the pedantic issue of "Mobility" as a reason why DVD's succeeded and Blu-Ray's won't, as if though portable DVD players and drives were just magically available on day 1 of DVD, and that it didn't take several years for them to hit the market. Just like with anything else, the portablity of Blu-ray will take some time. Even as we speak we're seeing a significanly increasing inclusion of blu-ray drives on laptops and desktops.

As HDTV's become more prevalent in households, the bottleneck will lift, and the sale of Blu-ray's will comprise an ever-increasing segment of the market. And there is no doubt about it... as the only media format attached to the heir-apparent HDTV format, Blu-Ray will succeed much as DVD did in its hay-day. To think otherwise is aboslutely ludicrous. Even if digital transfers, and set top boxes like Roku do become increasingly prevalent, to think that they will replace actual physical media is the hallmark of black and white thinking... in other words, elementary thought.

What's amazing about your article, Don, is that you DO THIS FOR A LIVING.... and you're still bad at it. This article lacks an amazing amount of foresight... and a disturbing amount of hindsight. I congratulate you DON, on becoming the frontrunner in CNET's recent litany of pedantic, trite, and foundationless articles. It's like reading the handiwork of some high school kid who had a topic assigned to him and had to shoehorn facts in to come to the desired conclusion, as outlandish as it may be. If CNET knows whats right for it, they'll fire you, and everyone like you.

And to quote Billy Madison - " Mr. Reisinger, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent article were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

[brianunderwood]

Blue-ray is over priced, I thought the prices would drop after the HD-DVD competition bowed out gracefully but the prices have gone up. Who in the hell is going to pay 25 dollars for a movie when they can rent it for 5 dollars and return it whenever they want via netflixx ???

[sythara]

So netflix doesent offer blu-ray for rent?

[sythara]

I can see so much history repeating itself. When DVD first came out no one could afford them (ok, most people couldn't / wouldnt). It took an agressive push from rental stores at the time to get DVDs into mainstream. What sealed the deal is the adoption of DVDs into computer market and availability of DVD burners and cheap media to burn it on. Thats when DVDs were pushed from a luxury item to a common household appliance.

Folks, for blu-ray to succeeed its not the movies that have to become available, its the computer market. Furthermore they need to start releasing standard defenition shows and such on blu-ray disks. Thnik about it, if you have The Office show and you can have all shows on one single disk that would be a seller for me. I like convenience, I like to have a single disk to everything, and I hate searching around through stacks of disks for just to see the episode I like.

While that may only be me, I do believe there are many fans of TV shows they own on 30 DVDs would be much happiers if they only had 1 disk to worry about.

Why not release 5 DVD quality movies on a single blu-ray disk? Imagine all Star Wars movies on single disk? Or Indiana Jones, etc. Yes people want HD, but that shouldnt be the only market for blu-ray. HD is not a requirement these days.

[lordtorka]

i would rather have them all on a solid state flash drive

[Seven_Red]

Something else you guys haven't been mentioning. I have an HDTV Tv 36" that does 1080i, that should play Blu-Ray no problem. However, it only has the DVI input so I would need a convertor. So, due to security protocols built into the Blu-Ray spec, as my TV input isn't right, the picture would drop to 480 if it would display at all. Sure, in theory I could connect through through component, but that would limit me to 720, and I don't think there would be enough diff between 480 and 720 to justify the Blu-Ray player.

That, to me, is the biggest problem with Blu-Ray. Not only do you need an HDTV, but it has to be new enough to have the correct version of the HDMI connector. It isn't just the connector itself. There are security protocols it needs to be able to deal with otherwise the output drops to std DVD resolution. So, unless you have a fairly recent HDTV ( and mine is only 4 years old and doesn't have the right connectors) you might as well get an up-converting player and save a bunch of money.

I couldn't even watch on my PC. My PC is plenty fast enough, and my video card will do Blu-Ray, but my monitor isn't new enough, so I couldn't go that route either. So, personally, even if they were giving the players away, it would be a waste of time for me.

[sythara]

Yes the security is outrageous. Blu-ray needs to be released as an open source media, and high def movies should be played at their native resolution regardless of your hardware (as long as its supported). The whole deal with HDMI is horrible anyway, why do we have to use propriatery connector rather than stuff thats been around for ages.... but yeah thats totally for a different arguement.

You're turning into a lame Xbox fanboy, Don. You're dislike of Blu-ray stems from the fact that you're blatantly anti-Sony/PS3. Either that or you're taking a page from Dvorak and trolling for page hits.

[BluFan]

I think it's ridiculous to think that Blu-ray is somehow in trouble because it showed a drop in the last WEEK. Overall trends show that BR adoption is steadily climbing, especially as big summer releases become available (Ironman today and Dark Knight coming up), we're going to see those trends grow even more.

Also, I think one of the big issues with BR adoption has to do with the fact that only a small percentage of households (those with HDTV's - like 14% in US) can even utilize blu-ray to its full capacity. Now there's no question that HDTV's are now the standard for new TV purchases, however, many people are still using older CRT TV's and don't have any intention on switching any time soon. However, once they finally come into the fray and switch to HD, they're going to want to see what the format can do and I think that's where Blu-ray comes into the equation. It'll take time, but it's still seeing steady overall growth. I've actually been working with WHV on some projects and they're really backing the format.