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New Study Finds Low Interest In Blu-ray
PHPNerd writes "A new consumer survey recently released chronicles the woes of the winner of the hi-definition format war: nobody wants it. While consumers were very happy to embrace the DVD standard when it came about because it brought a huge jump in quality over VHS, the pros of switching to Blu-ray are not as obvious. From the article: 'In contrast, while half of the respondents to our survey rated Blu-ray's quality as 'much better' than standard DVD, another 40% termed it only 'somewhat better,' and most are very satisfied with the performance of their current DVD players." Another reason cited was that a Blu-ray investment also dictates an HDTV purchase, something consumers are reluctant to do.'" Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars.
I'm a HD fan - in fact, I rarely watch SD any more when it comes to OTA programming. I just don't seem to care much any more about HD over DVD quality programs. As the summary says, line doublers while they aren't great (nowhere close to 1080p quality) work 'okay'. I held off because of the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle, and that showed me that there really wasn't a need for either.
That, and the fact that many Blu-Ray discs take 90+ seconds to go from insertion to movie watching is just stupid. If I buy a copy of a movie I want to watch it, not play with it. A 'quick-play' mode (and note that I'm not even talking about watching mandatory trailer-crap, just getting the damn thing 'loaded') would dramatically increase the odds that I'd buy into it.
I'll probably pick one up when my current DVD player finally dies... but there's no compelling reason to do so before it does. And this from a self-confessed geek who at least used to have a ton of home theatre stuff.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I don't buy the conclusions of this article. There is a clear difference in quality with true HD versus DVD. But it's true that at some point, you can't tell the difference anymore, so nobody cares. Sort of like why does anyone want a 4 GHz Pentium processor for Microsoft Office, is that really useful?
The same will happen for HD for maybe 10 years: there will be only minor tweaks, prices will fall, but no new jump in quality. What I see (hope) as the next jump is "experience immersion". When I take a picture or short movie with my digital camera, I want the audience to fell exactly what I felt. When I hike a mountain at 5,000 meters, it's freezing, breathing is hard... I snapped a picture, but you can't see what experience it was. I'm willing to wait another 10 years, but this has to happen at some point. It's all about sharing our experiences, after all.
Alain - fairsoftware.net
People thought the same at the beginning of DVD, or worse.
DVD Will Fail
People say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why? Is there any shortage of bad ones?
I'll admit it, I'm a Sony hater. Been bit too many times by their crappy proprietary media, computers, interfaces and software. It's plain old DVD for me for the foreseeable future. In my mind BlueRay==Sony.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I have made the purchases of course, knowing that I would want to get an HDTV eventually, my wife and I went and bought a good one that should last us a while. We also got a PS3 after careful consideration, and I have to say the Blu-Ray movies are *much* better than regular DVD in my opinion. I don't regret either purchase to be honest, but they are expensive pieces of hardware at the moment I admit.
Of course once you are used to it, the difference is mostly noticeable when you go *back* to viewing regular DVDs or TV broadcasts. The difference between the Digital TV and HDTV while still noticeable is much less and much less noticeable.
I think its mostly that the cost is too high for most people to want to pay for. Geeks are probably more inclined to shell out for good equipment in the first place and I would expect them to be early adopters as a result.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I still can't figure out why people are so fascinated with video: higher resolution, faster refresh rates, more colors, etc. Yes, visuals are very important. But, in my opinion, video is the least important feature in the chain when it comes to movies. Sports is another thing, usually, but I'd even wager that I could win a debate regarding video versus audio in even live sporting events.
Watch a great thriller: Hitchcock if you will. Turn off the audio and watch the movie. Turn off the video and watch the movie. Compare.
Now, watch it again with BETTER audio (subwoofers, clear highs, decent surround sound). Compare.
Radio still can thrill me with good audio productions. I still prefer most sporting events on the radio over the TV, personally, as one's imagination really builds a lot of emotional connection to the game.
Yes, high res is amazing, and it can be "lifelike" but without a good audio backend, it's trash. Instead of spending tons of cash on the best video chain, spend a bit firming up your audio system, including minimizing reflections in your theatre room, reducing vibrations of the floor or furniture, etc. It's a worthwhile investment, and you'll get great music quality, to boot.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars."
True. Line-doubled DVD content played out via HDMI to a big LCD display isn't bad. There's a noticeable improvement when you go to an all-digital path to the display. As you'd expect, vertical edges get sharper. The transition from an analog video path to a digital one may provide more improvement than the next step of a data rate upgrade of Blu-Ray.
Audio formats better than CDs never caught on. DVD-Audio, at 96 kHz with 24-bit samples, solves the problems of CD-quality audio. With CD audio, soft passages may be only 4 or 5 bit audio, with the high bits all zero. That's quite noticeable. But only classical music has soft passages any more. Few people buy DVD-Audio discs. (Of course, they have DRM, which is another issue.)
Once Blu-Ray players drop to the point that they're no more expensive than DVD players, they will, of course, take over. But there's no big rush.
The day they remove the DRM is the day I buy Blu-ray. It's just not worth my money paying for something that's designed to make it as difficult as possible to view what I buy in the quality I paid for.
For the general population, I believe the reason many embraced DVD was the navigation. Instant chapter jumps, no rewinding. Yes, it had superior quality over VHS, but for anybody but the specially interested I don't think that was the killer feature.
Blu-ray? Its *only* offer over DVD is resolution/quality on HD TV sets. And to get that you have to accept DRM that effectively means you're allowed to watch your movies for as long as "they" decide you can.
Unfortunately, the masses didn't seem to learn much from the music DRM fiasko. But luckily Blu-ray lacks any kind of killer feature so it's not being accepted as quickly as it otherwise might have been.
I'll stick to my HD media jukebox and MKVs for now, thank you very much. I would have bought a Blu-ray player for that money if it weren't for the DRM.
Of course they're going to push it on us. They want us to buy Blue-Ray players, and hopefully replace our DVD movie library with brand new Blu-Ray discs. That would bring in a lot of revenue.
But we consumers are not the mindless drones that marketing execs would like us to be. Usually when we buy something, it provides us with a benefit. In this case, the benefit isn't big enough to qualify.
DVDs have quick seek and are computer readable (with the right software). These two factors make them better than VHS. Blu-ray does not have anything comparable, and picture quality with DVD is more than adequate for more people.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
That is very true. Like many forums, TV is dead after being stuffed with Ad, SPAM, SCAM,... At least I want ad-free home entertainment, just to see the movie
I'm in a similar position - I also should be their target audience, but in my case, though the cost is stupid for me also, the biggest factor is actually the DRM. I can actually get the movies I care about fairly cheaply second hand. But I've only bought two because the sheer agony I have endured in trying to get them to play on my computer system, is simply too much. And it makes me sincerely angry with the technology that people who simply download the films don't have the problems that I've had to go through trying to play my legally bought copies.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I've got a very nice 46" 1080p HDTV, and I do sit fairly close to it (under 10 feet away). Even so, I'm honestly not at all disappointed by the quality of DVD. I can see a difference between the 2 when I'm looking for it, but as soon as I forget about the fact that I am or am not watching an HD source and just go ahead and watch the content, I very quickly forget I'm watching DVD.
To me, the theatre experience is only 20% image quality, 20% sound. Up to 60% is the fact that I can give the movie 100% of my attention. Viewing at home, there's always some distraction (example phone, doorbell, kids, pets) preventing me from getting the full viewing experience. I'm not surprised to hear about blu-ray adoption problems. To me it's quite an investment to slighly improve the 20% part of the entire movie experience.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Most CEOs definitely take last years performance and use it to gauge this years performance. It's a decent gauge but they rarely take into account what possible changes there are in the market. However, if they missed a sale because they didn't try to do it, that's a CEO's fault. If they try to make that sale, and didn't, it's the market's fault because the people would not buy.
But in truth it's the CEO's fault for mistiming the market, and misjudging the consumer. In the 90s, consumerism took off as people bought like crazy. We were riding the wave of high investment in the dot com bubble and the y2k scare. People were taking advantage of the web to create new services, and businesses were retooling their technology to make sure they were Y2K compliant. That meant plenty of jobs and jobs meant people had money to spend.
Fast forward to Bush and jobs went from middle class white color jobs to retail walmart and burger flipping joints for minimum wage, and in the past couple of years we've been losing a lot of jobs. People don't have the money to buy large screen TVs or spend additional money when you can get a regular DVD for 5-10 in the bargain bin. If VHS was still out and movies cost $2.99, you'd see a huge amount of people buying those because that's what they could afford! DVDs are a luxury, and blu-ray is an extreme luxury. We can't afford luxuries like that.
The middle class has a money problem, so companies have a money problem. This hasn't been something that just popped up on us, it's been coming for years. Middle class wages have not kept up with inflation, and they expect us to shell out more money for something which is a mediocre upgrade. Sony picked the absolute worst time to introduce a new format, which is funny, because they haven't been able to do anything right in the innovation sector since the walkman.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I have a large-screen 1080-capable projection TV, but it does not have HDMI inputs. I wish that I had better quality, but with only analog inputs, Blu-Ray movies may limit the quality that I can view so that it is little better than DVD.
If Blu-Ray could actually guarantee me better picture quality, I would buy it. But, instead, their idiotic copy-protection schemes are having the opposite effect. Maybe when my current television dies and I am forced to upgrade to something with HDMI, or maybe when Blu-ray players drop to $50, I might pick one up. Until then, there is no compelling reason to do so.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
You will be as you buy more new titles. The DVD publishers are starting to pull a sneaky stunt to make the HD offerings look better. No longer are DVDs being maxing out the video bandwidth to get the best they can out of the limited storage space. Over the last year I've seen the main title use less and less space, and we're not talking about them filling the disc up with shit ads and other crap. Some discs are barely about DVD5 limits. Remove some of the crap and you get your main title uncompressed comfortably on a DVD5.
I first noticed this on awful picture BBC DVDs. When I looked at what was on the disk, I couldn't believe they were taking the piss. But following on from that I soon noticed they were not alone. Movies were doing the same thing!
Give it another year or two, and DVDs will mysteriously look far worse than people remembered. And it won't just be the masses getting used to HDTV broadcasts.
Now, if you'll excuse me, my wife wants to swallow my load :D
consumers were very happy to embrace the DVD standard when it came about because it brought a huge jump in quality over VHS
Wrong again.
"Consumers" prefer DVD over tape because tape, the media and the player, is unreliable, bulky, slow (remember rewind?) and ultimately more expensive than DVD. If DVD quality were exactly the same as classic VCR media consumers would have still bought into it.
As far as this Blu-Ray vs. DVD survey result goes, I knew this and told you so some time ago. Consumers are not *philes. Where cheap meets "just works" you will find consumers; the rest is just *phile noise.
Anyhow, this whole debate is moot; tapes and spinning disks with die out for distributing commercial content as consumers figure out that "movies on demand" via download is cheaper and "just works" better than any other form of media.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I was recently really into the idea of getting an HDTV, but I've decided I don't really care. For one thing, if I buy an LCD HDTV, my SD video game systems (N64, NGC, PS2), which are important to me, will look pretty crappy on it and have new-found lag, thus making them suck balls. If I buy a Plasma HDTV you have to deal with burn in and annoyances like slowly fading menus and such - that seems even worse to me. So the best option is still a tube TV and, uh, I've got one. LCD TVs suck due to pixillation and lag. Plasma TVs suck due to burn in. Tube TVs are big and heavy, and that sucks a little, but they look great and have no lag. I'll take it.
--- What?