This isn’t really a huge surprise to me, but apparently BlueRay sales aren’t doing very well at all. In fact, sales of BlueRay went down last month compared to the month before.
There are probably a lot of reasons why other people aren’t buying them, namely the high price of current BlueRay players. But in terms of me, I’m not buying one simply because I’m still pissed off from the whole HD-DVD/BlueRay battle. On my shelf at home is a now useless HD-DVD player, which I purchased thinking HD-DVD would be around a little while longer. Since the industry basically screwed consumers with that whole debacle, I’m fighting back a bit with my wallet.
Sony hoped to have a 50% market share this year, and right now they are sitting around 8% I think. Given that internet speeds are climbing fast, and that Apple TV now rents pseudo HD films, I’m not really sure the BlueRay HD market is ever going to take off.
Yeah that and the fact that the US economy is eating itself alive.
Good point.
I’m holding off on any major electronics purchases for a while. What I have now still works fine. The home theatre system may be 7 years old but it still delivers pretty decent sound. I did get a newer DVD player, but only because it was easily hacked into an all-region player. 😀
Physical media is dead, plain and simple…digital downloads (legal or otherwise) are the future. I’m sure media companies love not having to produce a physical item and yet charge almost the same to distribute it electronically (bandwidth costs notwithstanding).
I’ll probably still buy another DVD or CD at some point but it will have to be something pretty special or unique…otherwise a digital download/rental/etc will be the preferred option.
Ironically, I’ve started seeing more movies in the theatre again which is still surprising me.
I still buy regular DVDs. I would buy BlueRay is I had a player or a HDTV to play it on.
I don’t like download media because I can’t play it easily on my TV without hooking up some other device and the TV i have doesn’t even have sVideo inputs 😉
I’ve bought a couple of BluRay movies in the past couple of weeks but only to see how they looked on my LG Scarlet. The quality is really good, but when I popped in a regular dvd, I couldn’t tell the difference.
Are movies that you rent on iTunes meant for use on a TV? I was going to try renting one (because my MacBook is hooked up to my TV) but I wanted to make sure. I’d love to be able to just rent or buy movies from home.
@John – I basically agree with you, but I know a lot of people who refuse to give up physical media, mostly because the downloads just don’t have the same quality, or come with DRM restrictions.
@Pamela what sort of cabling are you using? Is your TV able to do 1080P resolution? I can tell a different between HDDVD/BluRay and regular DVD.
@Tyler – Surprisingly the difference is fairly small on a lot of configurations. I have a background in video and I find it hard to tell the difference sometimes between a really good DVD that’s upsampled and a HD program on Apple TV (which in theory, should have a lot of differences). That’s more of a result of Apple TV supporting only low bitrates and 720p, but the difference in most consumer configurations isn’t that noticeable IMO, the exception being if you can display true 1080p over HDMI.
Tyler: Admittedly I don’t have the highest end system/tv/etc on the market but I can tell the difference between HD content (BR or HDDVD) and regular DVD quality.
That said, the difference is subtle in most cases and certainly not enough to warrant new hardware. Even my LCD tv does a great job of upscaling a plain old dvd on a regular (non-upscaling) dvd player.
Only reason I got an upscaling model was that it also has a usb port for those divx/avi downloads via thumb drive and they go for under $60 now just about everywhere.
I think this is why people aren’t buying up the Blu Ray hardware and media – most people (this excludes us geeks) can’t tell the difference (as Pamela said) unless they upgrade to the high end of the gear spectrum and don’t like the fact that a Blu Ray dvd costs $10-30 more in some cases than the regular version with little value add than higher bit rates (which the average person doesn’t understand anyways).
There is also the green angle with physical media and packaging overkill…although green and technology rarely go hand in hand unfortunately.
@duane Cool makes sense and thanks! though I still feel like I am missing out on a decent picture with my TV that is like 12 yrs old! lol
@Tyler – I’m not too sure on the cables, I do know that there is only one cable coming out of receiver (where everything else is hooked into) to the TV. My tv is capable of 1080p and 120hz. Maybe if I put them side by side I’d be able to tell? Too bad I only have one HD tv.