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Blu-ray Adoption Soft, More Still Own HD DVD
MojoKid writes "A new study by Harris Interactive notes that currently,
one in ten Americans (10%) own an HD DVD player, while just 7% own a Blu-ray player. Crazy, right?
More Americans own HD DVD right now than the 'winning' format, Blu-ray. If you think about it, that statistic isn't that shocking. When HD DVD was around, it was far and away the 'budget' format for high-def. The players were cheaper, the films were cheaper. In other words, it was a format more ready to thrive in a down economy. Blu-ray was always viewed as a niche format for those absorbed in A/V, not the common man's format. The survey also found that on average, consumers purchased approximately six standard format DVDs in the last six months, compared with one in HD DVD format."
People can just download stuff in any format. The industry is confused about this issue. My computer can play just about anything, so screw them.
If you had no format knowledge, and someone told you you could have HD DVD or Blu-Ray, which would you pick? Probably the one you thought you knew, High Definition DVD. You might even think it was more compatible with your existing DVD stuff. Blu Ray? What's that?
more people own hd-dvd players than own ps3s? really?
So they're counting the PS3 and the Blu-Ray players as separate items in their study. If you add the two together, Blu-Ray adoption is higher. Of course, the question is if they count Xbox HD-DVD drives, but those numbers are probably low.
As a way to make some extra dough I work at a video rental chain (the largest here in the US) and just from what I have seen no one really wants to rent Blu-Ray. We got 90% of the new releases on Blu-Ray and yet they prefer dvd even at the same price point. Who wants to buy a blu-ray player at over $200 right now when I can keep buying dvds at a cheaper price. Blu-Ray is beautiful yes but for most pictures I don't need or want to pay an extra 10-20 dollars for it.
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how many people with a regular up-scaling DVD player think they have an HD-DVD player?
...does this statistic take into account PlayStations, laptops, and other electronics which include Blu-ray players?
I think what is more telling is the fact that so many people are still buying standard def., original flavor DVD's over Blu-Ray. In some ways, I really think this should come as no surprise.
DVD player in the minivan/SUV: Standard def.
Portable DVD player: Standard def.
The majority of televisions still in the USA: Standard def (digital or otherwise).
Cost of a perfectly capable, plays-all, region free DVD player in the supermarket: $20.
Whichever big-business sector you hate this week (the hardware makers, the movie studios, the publishers, the MPAA, whatever) are pretty much trying to cram a high cost technology down the thoats of people who by majority don't want it, can't use it, or can't afford it.
People are just waiting for the BD-R disc's to come down in price, $15 for 1 disc is too much, blu-ray needs piracy to succeed.
When Blu-ray player or PS3 owners are asked...
I take it they're counting the two separately, which would show Blu-ray ahead. Am I missing something?
Most average consumers either don't see the difference between HD and SD, or just don't care. They want the movie, and if VHS was good enough so is DVD.
HD isn't a bad thing, but the difference between VHS and DVD is much more dramatical than DVD and another HD-capable disk format.
Why publishers don't use the extra capacity to sell more episodes of $favorite_sitcom on fewer disks is beyond me. I could use the shelf space.
(Yes, most people are able to perceive the difference between SD and HD, but I mean seeing the difference in a psychologically meaningful sense.)
.: Max Romantschuk
It's like I'm suddenly in some strange parallel universe where Beta won.
Of course, one does have to consider that these statistics also mean that somewhere between 80-90% of the population simply don't give a shit about Blu-ray versus HD-DVD.
c.
Log in or piss off.
Really? Not here in Portugal. Sure you see a lot of computers (mainly HP) with HD-DVD drives (I have one myself), but although HD format has had a slow adoption, Blu-ray is definitely here - you can see them in any store and video rentals. Only trouble tough are the HIGH prices and crappy movies.
mazevedo
My girlfriend has an HP laptop and bought it at around 800$ a year and a half ago. It has an HD-DVD. She never used it (except for reading standard DVD). Does she still count toward this idiot statistic? Likewise, how many have HD-DVD discs around? Just for myself, I have way more blu-ray than all my friends have HD-DVD (even if you remove my PS3 games). Crazy, uh?
Of Code And Men
HD-DVD wasn't "budget" from the outset or because of any particular economy in the price of players or disks. HD-DVD cost as much as Blu-ray to start off with and then it went cheap fast when it became clear it was losing the battle. Had HD-DVD emerged the victor I'm sure we would've seen plenty of bargain-priced Blu-Ray deals and a correspondingly disproportionate install base.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I know a lot of people who bought HD players and half a dozen movies at bargain price when everyone knew that the format was dying. They already had a home cinema setup and were thrilled to find content that challenged it for a few couple hundred of bucks. But right now it probably lays down in a box, or remain as a living room decoration.
i will stick with the luddites and keep my old 4.7 gig DVDs and wait another year for market forces to decide who is the real winner before i upgrade to the new format, six on one hand have a dozen on the other is the way i see it = sure HD-DVD is cheaper now but that wont make a difference if BlueRay pulls ahead in a few years, i take great pride in being a luddite living on the older tech = dont laugh - i dont have the money sunk in to crap i dont really need so i can keep it buried in canning jars in my back yard - BEWARE OF DOG!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Even though blu-ray won, there were still tons of HD DVD players. They went somewhere, and it wasn't landfills. Stores had fire sales on HD DVD players, many selling them as upconverting DVD players.
I have a DVD player with HDMI output that up-scales my DVDs to 1080p. The only exposure to Blu-Ray that I've had is in the stores, so it may not be the most fair comparison, but it looked marginally better than my up-converted DVDs. It certainly did not look superior enough to warrant spending $200+ on a new player. Of course, the player alone won't get you anywhere; assuming I bought one that plays DVDs, I'd be in no better shape than I am now. The real expense that I don't want to take is re-buying whatever titles happen to be on Blu-Ray without knowing whether I can make an archival copy to protect my investment. DVD has the same legal uncertainty, but for Blu-Ray it's a matter of technological ability even if I shell out money for a BD-R drive and blank discs. DVD does not have that problem so long as the geniuses at Sony et al don't keep screwing with the copy protection and further abuse the DMCA to stamp out fair use rights by making a civil matter criminal.
Obviously, posted AC because asserting one's fair use rights is becoming more and more illegal.
Even before there was a recession I wasn't buying any movies priced over about $8. I don't care if they're DVD or Blu-Ray. These days I wonder why I'm paying even that much.
Since there are no Blu-Ray movies at that price-point, I'm not obviously not buying those, thus I have no need for a Blu-Ray player. Some day I might buy a PS3, but don't hold your breath.
Bundling things like James Bond and Clint Eastwood movies after I've bought most of the movies individually just means I'm not going to buy the bundles -- ever. Why would I? I don't need two copies of High Plains Drifter or Dr. No.
And anyway, physical media is like, so 2006. I watch more on Hulu, video.aol.com, and Netflix than I do from a disc.
Oh, and BTW Netflix, I'd watch more Netflix on-line if you'd support PPC Macs. We haven't all rushed out to replace our otherwise perfectly good PPC Macs. Until then Hulu wins. In fact I might even close my Netflix account.
Due to the egregious DRM that encumbers HD players (esp. Blu-Ray) and the necessity to have these devices connected to the internet in order to keep their DRM updated, I will never purchase one of these pieces of s*!t. I have a firm policy of refusal to support any vendor who utilizes DRM in their products. If they want to treat me as a criminal, I won't support them.
That said, I do purchase DVD's, but the first thing I do is to strip the CSS and region codes from them and back them up as ISO images on my NAS array. I also have a region-free DVD/VHS player. I don't give copies of my purchased DVD's to anybody, but I refuse to abrogate my right to make backup copies that I can use and/or re-burn as necessary, and can take with me on the road when I am traveling without endangering the original copy. I can drop a half-dozen movies on my laptop hard drive and play them when I am away on business travel.
Most people don't remember that Sony paid off Toshiba with a big sum of money to exit the market. And, in return for letting Blu-ray win, Toshiba was granted the right exclusive right to embed a Blu-ray player in their laptops. That is the only reason that Sony won the format wars, their format was actually a lot less successful than Toshiba's HD-DVD.
I bought one, my parents bought one, my brothers all bought one (3 brothers), my newphew and uncles all bought one (4) and my best friend from college bought one. Essentially, everyone I knew was ticked off that they spent several hundred dollars on a player that was now obsolete almost instantly. On the bright side, all the HD discs went on sale fast.
I'm pretty offended that Toshiba gave in, and that Sony forced them to. Neither had the customer's interests in mind when they made that deal. They screwed us out of quite a bit of money. So, will my family or myself buy a bluray? No, because it still stings. They lost a lot of hearts and minds. And, our wallets still feel a bit empty.
The difference between the PS3's Blu-ray capability and the Xbox 360's HD DVD drive is that the PS3 is a game machine that has a built-in Blu-ray capability, like the PS2 had built in DVD capability. The 360 only has DVD built in. If you wanted HD-DVD, you had to buy an HD-DVD drive. So, everyone who bought the 360's HD-DVD drive bought it to play movies. Not every who bought a PS3 bought it to play movies. My few friends that own a PS3 don't really use it for movies (honestly, they don't use the PS3 much, they all also have an Xbox 360 and a Wii and mainly use the 360 for games, streaming movies, connecting to their media on the PC, etc).
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The real telling issue is that less than 20% of US Households have adopted either, and it's been out for years. Frankly, this should be no surprise, the "format war" dragged on for so long that by the time the victor had stepped forth, the market they were fighting for was already passing them by. The migration to HD video on demand, online streaming, and yes, downloading of material makes disk-based distribution an out of date concept who is slowly fading into the past.
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That's because no one cares about HD formats. I actually know what the formats mean, unlike most people, and I am interested in better picture and sound quality but I simply have no desire whatsoever or the budget to replace my huge collection of DVDs and buy a newer, more expensive player to go with my HDTV. DVDs are really cheap now so why bother? Given the fact that most people have no clue at all how to set up surround sound, and it takes a while for most of us techies to get right, then I fail to see how on Earth a better sounding audio format is going to help BluRay over DVDs, Dolby Digital and DTS (which virtually no one uses for the same reasons) either. Most surround sound is downmixed to two channels. As an interesting aside, I wonder how many have just thought that BluRay was compatible with their existing DVD player, put it in, discovered it wouldn't play and then returned it?
Even HD generally is DoA for me. BluRay was completely stillborne. The only thing I bought a HDTV for was to get a bigger screen. I wasn't interested in its resolution. Seriously, save your money on extra money for HD broadcasts and just spend the money you save on a Pioneer that has an excellent SD picture or a new tuner box that has the best deinterlacer money can buy. I got a far better picture than my TV alone simply by using a MythTV box and using the Yadif (2x) deinterlacer. There'll be lots of commercially available stuff you can buy that will do the job and save you money.
Yes, I know HD looks better and its been really impressive on the systems I've seen, but like most I suspect, when push comes to shove I just cannot be bothered to pay for the privilege or jump through all of the pointlessly annoying technical hoops. I did it once. I tried to get a BluRay player connected to a TV through a receiver and HDCP refused to play ball at all. Now I just use HDMI where I know HDCP won't be involved, and that means no BluRay. Hey, at least I get a picture on the screen.
For me, the pricing of Blu-ray has kept me away. Blu-ray discs and players are still priced for early adopters. Most decent movies are priced at $25+ for Blu-ray. I've gotten used to movies being half that price, and I'm just not willing to pay the extra for the HD video (especially for older movies). I also haven't bought any new DVDs in probably two years, because I don't want to buy something twice when Blu-ray actually gets priced reasonably.
So, until the pricing comes in line with what DVDs are priced at, I'm not buying any more movies. I'll just keep using Netflix and VOD. There is just no compelling reason to buy Blu-ray until the prices comes down.
I know of not a few people which bought HD DVD when it died because it was sold at "cost" and they bought all available HD DVD, for a cheap price. Sure now it is "died" as nothing new will be out, but they got it for cheaper than a nice brand new blue ray... I would not be surprised if the difference between 10% HD DVD and 7% Blu ray is not just due to that...
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Neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD make any sense on a standard definition television set. I know this is shocking to younger demographics with disposable income, but the older crowd (by far the statistical majority) hasn't been too quick to adopt HD televisions. I'll buy one EVENTUALLY, but probably not until my current SD set dies. Sorry, it's just not a big deal to me... and while that makes me boring to many geeks and marketing types (increasingly the same group), it doesn't make me a minority.
As for the relative weight of Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, that's probably because of cost. The format war was heading in the same direction as VHS vs. Beta... where Sony's format was again technically superior, but not enough to justify the price difference. This time around though, Sony went kamikaze with the PS3 and movie studio deals to prevent history from repeating itself. I never got the impression that Sony legitimately "won" from the perspective of consumer preference.
Besides, I think this whole "format war" was a wasteful moot point anyway. By the time I get around to buying an HD television, I anticipate that we'll get most of my movies from on-demand streaming anyway.
Regardless of what these analysts think, I know that HD-DVD is dead. How do I know this? Because no PC is sold today with a HD-DVD drive. Because I can't find HD-DVD burners or media easily. It isn't so much that I think that this accessibility is key or that "grandma" needs to find it to be successful but the trend has always been what ever gets widely adopted on PC is accepted as a general format. Frankly this is where HD-DVD really lost the battle where even during the prime time of the format struggle, it was harder to find HD-DVD drives and media than it was to find Blu-ray.
That's some subjective BS right there. HD-DVD came out earlier anyway and I think with better marketing. The support of the film studios and electronics companies played roles also.
pricing returns to its previous level.
Did anyone notice how the prices jumped by about $10 per movie when HD DVD "lost" the war?
Sorry, but that kind of blatant profiteering is a major turn off for me. I get that its an open market and all that. My choice is to hold off buying something that really is a luxury until pricing goes back to where it was. Call it my simple, quiet protest against that business practice if you want.
I have a lot of experience in this field, and here are the reason why physical media is doomed, probably even sooner than many expect.
Here's why:
1. BluRay licensing makes it very difficult (expensive) to enable mass-adoption.
2. Bandwidth is getting cheaper while high-speed internet is becoming more accessible.
3. DRM is slowly dying.
This will lead to Downloadable HD content which you could stream/burn/transcode to any format you want within the next 2-5 years (on a mass-market scale as we're already seeing this in some fringe markets).
And if the establishment wont move in this direction, piracy will only grow as people want things to be easy and will take the path of least resistance (if DRM is more complicated/unreliable than Piracy, we'll see more content pirates).
Zoom Player Lead Dev.
Owning movies really isn't worth it these days. First off, there's rarely a movie I'd want to see more than once. Second off, services like Netflix make it easy to get the movies I do want to see, first time or repeat, with very little delay. And as they're working out the legal kinks with the streaming service, it'd be just like owning the originals at home. Why clutter my life with all those discs? Let's not forget there's also the issue of format wars, buying all your movies again when the latest format drops. Who needs that? I'll stream the movie at HD resolution and when they come out with super-HD a few years from now, I'll stream it like that as well, no worries about buying new hardware.
Granted, there's still going to be the situations where you don't have broadband and want to bring your movies with you. If Netflix has good lawyers, they'll be able to let you operate in cache mode. Select the movies you want, plug in your thumb drive, you download them and are in cache mode and can watch them on the go wherever you want. If they don't have good lawyers and can't make that happen, I can still bittorrent what I want to watch offline.
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I own 3 computers with DVD players and a Wii (which uses DVDs).
Wii doesn't come with DVD-Video player software. Its game discs aren't even DVD-ROM; like GameCube discs, Wii discs have a different file system (not UDF), a physical sector format with slightly different anti-direct-current scrambling, and six pinholes punched in their lead-in. There is homebrew software to play DVD-Video on a Wii, but it probably infringes the MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital patents and the major movie studios' anti-circumvention rights (under the U.S. DMCA and foreign counterparts). More importantly, the Wii disc drive is designed for random access, not streaming a two-hour cut scene.
If you combine the 360 addon owners with the regular pool, 14% of those surveyed own an HD-DVD player.
So, if you combine the PS3 owners with the regular Blu-Ray owners, 16% of those surveyed owned a Blu-Ray player.
Here is the logical response you probably have now: "But, every HD-DVD owner (including addon) bought it to watch Blu-Rays, while many PS3 owners probably bought it just to play games."
That's taken care of by the survey too. Out of all, PS3 owners 25% buy all their movies in Blu-Ray and another. 32% buy "most" of their movies in Blu-Ray. So 57% are regular Blu-Ray buyers now, and many PS3 owners are waiting for prices to come down.
HD-DVD owners? Stores gave the players away. They were cheaper than other upscaling players at some point. The addon for the 360 was $20 at my local stores with 5 free movies. Many HD-DVD owners probably bought closeout gear at low prices.
So while the percentages may technically be right, with the fire sale that followed HD-DVDs failure, it's not terribly suprising. And the 7% is it at least 12% for Blu-Ray buyers, since over half of all PS3 owners buy movies.
I'm one of those freaks that happily still pays for the music and movies that I love, but even I won't pay £25 for Dark Knight on Blu-Ray. The HMV stores that I go into have things like Kung Fu Panda, Iron Man, HellBoy 2 and a bunch of other films for £30 each. That's just fucking insane pricing.
I'd rather see newly released DVDs at £9.99 and Blu-Rays at £14.99 or lower, each. That way the stores could enjoy their little price wars and then I could pick up things like Watchmen and Star Trek for £12 or so each on Blu-Ray. I'd probably walk out the store with three films.
I appreciate that Blu-Ray is new(ish), but they really need to more readily adopt the pile-it-high and see-it-low approach now.
Either that or regularly offer 2 for £25 on Blu Rays, even for new releases.
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I have an up-converting DVD player connected via HDMI to a 720p flat panel, and I also have a
Windows Media Center box driving the same flat-panel via HDMI. Both render a *really* nice picture.
Could I get an even better picture from bluray source material? Sure. But I also need to upgrade my
flat panel to fully benefit from bluray. So now it's $200 for the player and another $600+ for a new
"reasonably" (32" or more) sized 1080p flat panel. That's a steep barrier to entry when 95% of my
TV watching is either downloaded torrents or streamed from Netflix. I'm sure Netflix would send me bluray
movies instead of regular def DVD with no incremental costs. But still, it's not worth it. Not yet.
If I do buy anything *right now* I'll go buy a $200 bluray player with netflix streaming. Incrementally another $100
for a bluray player instead of $100 for a roku? I can justify that.
Maybe the 'Blu-ray' people need a three letter acronym for the format that is easily remembered and spelt ;-).
Just as Compact Disc is CD, Blu-ray Disc is BD.
That was how Sony convinced the producers that they had won, by counting PS3's instead of stand alone players. This is no different than some of the Apple people claiming 10% market share but failing to state that it included phones!
Personal account, only one of the circle of friends who has a PS3 have more than two blu ray movies. Most don't even use it to play regular DVDs, it is the "KIDS MACHINE".
HD-DVD loaded faster, have less expensive players, and less expensive movies. It also had some great shows/movies out early that Blu Ray did not. I have both players now, I would have loved HD-DVD to have won. Why? Because of the G-D ads that too many Blu-Ray movies force you to sit through. See, that AD thing is probably another reason movie producers would favor Sony over HD. They could force you to watch their ads for other products because HD stated that that feature was not allowed - not so in Blu-Ray
Well with http://red2blu.com/ I could get the blu-ray versions fairly cheap, but my HD-DVD player is again, faster and less prone to abuse by the dvd creator.
Sony screwed the consumer over by lies and buying off the movie producers. They are getting exactly what they deserve, flat to falling sales. The players are overpriced and worse the movies border on extortionist in pricing. I do not buy new Blu-Ray movies, I rent them on occasion, but if they are higher than standard DVD I will just wait till the price goes down. This has two effects, by the time the price comes down the movie may no longer be interesting to me meaning I didn't need it anyway, the second being that perhaps one day they will get the hint.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Right now, you can get a cheap Blu-Ray player for not much more than what I paid for my first DVD player. However, I have not even felt a twinge in that general direction; I've been too spoiled by $4 to $6 movies, and until I can routinely get Blu-Ray discs for under $10, forget it. There are really very few movies I would re-buy in Blu-Ray, further reducing my desire to buy one of those things.
I do have a 1080p TV, and a usable 7.1 receiver waiting for the day when it does make sense though...
SirWired
then HD surrendered the fight retailers slashed the price on players to $50 or less and movies to $5 or less to clear inventory
when I was working as an IT consultant for videographers they were asking about the coming HD video format (back in 2002/2003) and I kept telling them not to worry about Blu-Ray or HD-DVD because by the time one format wins, digital content distribution would kill them both by 2010. It looks like my prediction back then was about right. In 2005 I bought a Mac-Mini and hooked up to my 32" HDTV's DVI port and have used it as my DVD player and play TV shows i've downloaded from iTunes.
Last fall I cancelled my cable and started downing the half dozen shows I watch from iTunes. I thought their SD versions were acceptable, but their new HD versions look great.
Is it 1080P? No, but my TV's only 720 anyway. But it is good enough for me. And I bought all my TV shows for what 2 months of cable was costing me.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Owning movies really isn't worth it these days. First off, there's rarely a movie I'd want to see more than once.
It is unlikely that you have children under the age of ten. They like to watch the same animated film over and over.
I'll stream the movie at HD resolution
And pay how much to your ISP for the privilege? In the United States, satellite broadband and mobile broadband plans cost roughly $60 per month and allow transferring roughly the equivalent of a single-layer DVD per month.
and when they come out with super-HD a few years from now, I'll stream it like that as well, no worries about buying new hardware.
You still need to buy the new player even if you rent your videos. For example, Netflix and Redbox never carried VHS, and the rental stores near me have since dropped the format.
I have an AppleTV which means I've had access to HD movies for a year now (well more like 6 months if you're looking at a good selection). I don't rent them... I rent the SD version.
Why? It's a buck cheaper.
Really why? Cause I only have a 27 inch flatscreen that plays 720p at best (and wouldn't benefit from 1080i anyways).
I'm probably the middle of the road in terms of having the capability to benefit from HD movies. My screen is too small, so HD just isn't that compelling. OTOH the screen is the perfect size for good quality SD w/ upscaling.
Even at 35 in. I suspect that HD is just barely going to be a game changer unless you have perfect vision, in which case you probably do see the compression in SD. With upscaling however it's likely less noticeable.
Now if I had a 40 in. screen or larger I would say that HD is a requirement. SD just can't scale up to fill that much space without starting to show compression squares or blurring, upscaling included.
So really the reason I stick with SD movies is that for my setup there is no noticeable benefit. If I get a raise before Christmas I might upgrade my TV to a 40 in. - at which point I will start paying an extra $1 to download HD movies... I still won't be buying a Blueray or HD DVD player.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Blu-ray was always viewed as a niche format for those absorbed in Playstation 3 Game Systems, not the common man's format
Almost everyone I know that jumped on Blu Ray earlier did so because there was already on in their PS3. This, people, is exactly why one company shouldn't make across the board products. You can't make players, computers, game systems, and THEN create an industry standard. A proprietary standard maybe, but an industry standard hell no.
The definition was so good that I could see the seperations around the actors and knew exactly when they were in front of a green screen and no on set. Totally ruined the visuals
Movie theaters nowadays use a 1080p or bigger format with an even higher bitrate than Blu-ray Disc. Had you seen the film in a movie theater, might you have noticed the same compositing failures?
Today, you can get an HD-DVD player and a whole bunch of movies for virtually nothing, although no new movies are going to be coming out for it the existing ones are dirt cheap as are the players.
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People I know went out and bought "HD ready" televisions, whilst having no HD content to put on them. They liked the bigger and flatter screens, not necessarily giving a damn about image quality (you don't miss what you've never had). Later on the HD format discs came out, and were / are seen as too restrictive, and most importantly, too expensive.... they cannot compete with DVD.
However, I have got a HD camcorder without a HD television to play it on (I don't count my HD pc monitor as a HD-tv). Looking at the price of HD camcorders compared to similar standard def. / DV camcorders, people would buy HD cameras. If down-sampled the image looks like broadcast SD, better than even DV video can manage.
So in some areas of technology HD is popular, some not. The camcorder makers want to continue their revenue so video cameras are selling and being innovated with features*. The film companies however want to lock people into a flawed HD technology system, the consumers are telling the film companies to get stuffed, they will stick with DVD.
The film companies STILL don't get it with how to generate sales, so they continue their own created death of a 1000 cuts. Maybe we should make a movie out of it. "How the film industry killed itself and blamed downloaders and bribed [insert country government] to change laws to protect their failing cartel".
* Killing off the MiniDV tape / high bitrate video for highly compressed HDV video to fit a low amount of video on a hard drive.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Why should I invest in Blu-Ray?
1) Once bandwidth and/or video compression issues are resolved, the preferred medium for HD video will be video downloads, probably (but not limited to) iTunes since it's the only cross-platform DRM'd content provider.
2) Can't rip or make backup copies the way it's possible to with DVDs (legality notwithstanding).
3) Ubiquity of DVD readers. I have four devices that can read DVDs, including my MacBook Pro, XBox 360, $50 upscaling DVD player, and my OpenSolaris box (once I install the drivers from Fluendo). Since I don't have a PS3 (don't plan on getting one) or a $350 Blu-Ray player (don't plan on getting one) I need to go out of my way to get one.
4) My existing movie collection is all DVD. I have no desire to start replacing it, as I finally caved in recently and starting replacing 3 of my VHS tapes with DVDs.
5) Upscaling DVD player makes my DVDs look great on my 46 inch HDTV. Granted, it's not as good a Blu-Ray, but I'm not a videophile, so I probably won't see a significant difference.
The movie studios will have to address all of the above if they hope to convert me to Blu-Ray.
This space left intentionally blank.
HD + Xbox HD = 14%
Blu Ray+ PS3 = 16%
I wouldn't quite say "no-one cares". If that were true, you wouldn't see retail stores like Best Buy devoting entire shelving units to Blu-Ray disc releases like they do. *Some* people are buying them.
But by and large, you're correct. These high-def movie formats simply don't make economic sense to most people. When people migrated away from VHS tape to DVD, they felt the value proposition was there. They got a new format that took up less physical space, didn't have problems with the quality degrading over time as it was played repeatedly and "wore out", didn't require lengthy rewinding to the beginning after each viewing, looked noticeably better even on inexpensive 19" TV sets, didn't suffer from random audio or video "drop outs" and tracking issues, and even came with "bonus" material on most discs. And the price? Typically very similar to what the movies used to cost on videotape.
Formats like blu-ray are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Given enough time, prices for both the media and players will surely drop to a point where people figure "why not?" and start moving to it with most or all of their new purchases. But right now, I own a PS3 that can play Blu-Ray discs, and I own a grand total of ONE movie in that format. I can think of a few DVD movies I want to buy, but none are even available in Blu-Ray at this time ... so chances are my NEXT few movie purchases won't be high-def ones either.
I struggle to believe these numbers. Perhaps your average USian has a huge amount more money to burn than your average UKian (the lump of dirt I call home) but even then I struggle to believe that around 15% of people own a HD player of some kind (assuming some own both formats). I'm a moderate home theatre buff (1000+ DVDs, projector, etc) and I don't own a HD player of any kind. I know a fair number of people that are also cinema buffs to varying degrees and they don't own HD players either (one has a PS3 but no Blu-Ray film disks so doesn't count). I'm guessing that uptake of film based HD content is very low and those HD player numbers are almost certainly from games consoles which probably aren't being used for films.
As for purchasing Blu-Ray films in a 1:6 ratio with DVD's, come on, have you ever bought a Blu-Ray movie? Have you even seen anyone buying one? I don't even remember seeing people looking at the Blu-Ray stand in my local DVD purchasing establishments. I do however see people heading to the checkouts with armfuls of cheap DVDs on a regular basis.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Lemme see. I could afford a 600 Full HD flat screen, but really, why do it before my 82cm CRT dies somewhere in 2020 ? Even if I had a flat screen, DVD would be good enough.
DVD brought to us good enough pictures on a price that makes any video marketable at virtually any price. Yeah it was fine to watch LOTR on it, but seeing the crappy 1980s cartoons most Gen-Xers buy in bulk, the picture quality is not the main selling point. It's that it's very cheap to produce.
Blu Ray does not add a lot on top of it. Good classics won't be release for the next 5 years, for the same reason they were not released immediately on DVD: you don't want your A-list movie to be in the budget bin by the time everyone has a player. The manufacturing cost is probably low, but not as low as DVDs. And niche crap that we were happy to watch on a b&w CRT in 1982 are readily available on DVD, so why wait ?
When did anything that occurs in the US become representative of the planet? The US accounts for 4.52% of the worlds population (List of countries by population). The remaining 95.48% says hi.
I haven't even finished replacing all of the VHS tapes I own with DVD. The VHS tapes still work. What makes them think I want to be updating from two different working formats, simultaneously? To a format that is substantially compromised with DRM, and that they'll want me to upgrade from in about five to ten years?
Planned obsolescence is not a sustainable strategy, culturally, economically or environmentally.
I truly think a large part of the issue here is that "Blu-Ray" is a horrible HORRIBLE name. The name HD-DVD is alliterative and logical. HD-DVD "sounds" like the logical upgrade to the DVD, while "Blu-Ray" sounds like a Star Wars weapon.
The two rules for success are:
1) Never tell them everything you know.
I have a PS3 and I bought it explicitly for BluRay. I have more BluRay movies than games. But hey, don't let me interrupt your hatred of Sony with inconvenient details that are incongruous with your devotion to seething rage at Sony.
The general public is happy with DVD quality. The incremental improvement of DVD to HD-DVD / Blu-ray is minor. And is nothing compared to the improvement we saw from VHS to DVD.
And with HD-DVDs failure, retailers dumped their stock cheap. HD-DVD players, HD-DVD discs, all for next to nothing. People picking up that new HDTV, being advised by a sales rep that they'll need an HD source? Probably going to snag that cheap "get rid of all this crap as fast as possible" HD-DVD package. There are many deceptions within these figures, if the figures themselves are not suspect to begin with.
I'm of the camp that doesn't want ANY new DVD player in the house. I was one of those that bought DVDs and now probably have 50 DVDs that I haven't watched in atleast a year. However, I probably watch 1-2 HD On Demand movies a month. I know the audio/video quality isn't as good as a bluray dvd, however, I would take me almost four years> to recoup the cost of the player ALONE (when the movie's are $5 from comcast).
I'd like to know what percentage of HD movies are watched 'on demand' vs. physical media.
the ONLY place HD-DVD was winning was in north america, Europe, Japan, the rest of the world Blu-ray was winning, another thing the HD-DVD players were cheaper but the the combo format that was getting more and more use by HD-DVD was actually $5 more expensive than if you just got the Blu-ray version. the Player were lower in price not because they could make they cheaper, remember the expensive part was the blue laser something both formats used. how long did it take DVD to drop to $99 players? it took HD-DVD less than 2 years to do that lol very realistic...
Blu-ray is more and more becoming the 'common man's format' as the price continues to drop and as the adoption of HDTV increases. if you look at their own chart http://hothardware.com/newsimages/Item10047/blu-ray-adoption.png you take the Blu-ray players and PS3's and compare it to the HD-DVD players and Xbox 360 add-ons Blu-ray is winning, every PS3 out there IS a Blu-ray player and alot of people out there bought the PS3 for just watching Blu-ray movies. for the longest time it was the absolute best Blu-ray player out there, and it was also less expensive too.
It was ultimately the PS3 that really won the format war for Blu-ray, HD-DVD was leading in sales (movie titles sales) until the PS3 was release they might of won a week or 2 after words but they didn't even win 'transformers' week and that was supposed to be the week that would turn things around for HD-DVD, Blu-ray dominated all through 2007 and when 2008 came HD-DVD died since then Blu-ray prices have been coming down as mass production increased.
>At normal viewing distance I honestly can't tell the difference.
I rip the DVDs I buy using SlySofts AnyDVD, so that I can dump all the advertisements and FBI warnings and the like. I've got my encoder settings to 3-pass and and a good quality so that most movies end up about 1.7 - 2GB in size. This does produce some quality artifacts in the end product.
But in the end, in my opinion, it's the STORY that makes the movie, not the film quality, and the convenience of ripped movies far outweighs any quality degradation.
So if you're going to rip and re-encode your movies, blue-ray is a waste of time.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This has to be bullshit. There is no way that more people own an HD DVD player than a Playstation 3.
I like Blu Ray just fine...
I'm not considering a BluRay player, but am still considering buying a HD-DVD player.
Why?
I'm not going to buy high-def movies on optical media. But if I can burn my own high-def movies to optical media, that's not useless to me, and it looks like HD-DVD might be a very inexpensive way to accommodate that, even today.
(But even for that, maybe I'll just stick with DivX on DVD-ROM. But HD-DVD still tempts me more than BluRay does.)
HD-DVD and BlueRay both suck (and so does the PS3 and the HD-DVD extension for Xbox). They are all owned by the rippers + torrents + basic Xbox360.
When there were just a handfull of titles available (this was back when BlueRay was reportedly 'uncrackable') you could already find some great quality HD rips on torrent sites that *just played* in full HD on your Xbox360. Play over LAN (from the PC) or copy to harddisk and connect to USB, no sweat.
If a bunch of geeks can get the movies to your HDTV without hassle for free (obviously for you, but more importantly to them since they don't get payed or pay for any technology) why can't we just buy/rent HD movies for a small price directly on our TV. The reason is just as simple as it is stupid: money, greed, and of course lies, damned lies, and statistics .
crappy movies are still crappy in hi-def. good movies are still good in standard def. after spending thousands on my home theater, it's amazing how little hi-def brings to most MOVIES. 10 minutes in and the WOW factor has usually worn off.
that said, hi-def is a godsend for TV. i rarely bother with the non hi-def channels because the quality is SO much worse, far greater than the difference between BR and DVD.
I got a closeout HD-DVD player off of EBay for $40 delivered and bought it primarily to play standard DVDs on my HDTV. The HD-DVD unit reads the standard DVD at 480p just fine but outputs a 1080p signal to the HDTV via the HDMI inputs - so I'm effectively using it as a cheap scanline upconverter staying digital all the way. The result looks BEAUTIFUL, much better than letting the HDTV having to convert an analog signal from a standard cheap DVD player. Plus there are around 300 movies out there in HD-DVD format that are going for under $5 - MUCH cheaper than your average Blu-Ray disk. I am a very happy HD-DVD owner with no Blu-Ray and with the expense of the latter and free DVDs from the library, I'm going to stay that way for a long time to come.
The numbers given don't carry the same weight when put into the broader context of user reality.
The amount of true HD material is tiny compared to the vast amount of material available. Hardware for HD disks gets used to simply store more regular material. Which HD disk format is used is irrelevant.
Many users convert and compress for storage. Where AVI package dominated before (often a movie stored in 700 MB), MKV format is growing in popularity for HD compression (~ 2 GB for a movie). Even the commercial Xvid variant DivX is including MKV format in their new software. There are over 100 million home and handheld devices sold with DivX capabilty and these can be used to read HD material compressed to either DivX (actually most any AVI) or MKV format. Again, which HD format makes no difference, if one is used at all. As long as material stays smaller than a single standard DVD, adoption of HD formats is stifled and ratios don't reflect much more than current price and previous purchase.
Which particular HD format gets adopted by producers only impacts those whose main activity is obtaining material on original media. More get it elsewhere, and far more material is available than the little bit on HD disks that is actually HD material (ie, they're releasing material on HD formats that aren't capable ot making use of the format).
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I would in fact say it might be useless. Clearly the pollsters didn't distinguish between a DVD player (perhaps upconverting) and an HD-DVD player well enough.
I say this because the poll would have you think that 11% of US households have an HD-DVD player. Since there are about 100M households in the US that would mean that 11M US households have an HD-DVD player. This is impossible since Toshiba said there were only 1M standalone players sold plus some number of 360 add-ons, and I can assure you there weren't nearly 10M 360 add-ons made. So there weren't enough players in the world to make this figure nearly as large as it is, even if every HD-DVD player was sold into the US and not elsewhere.
Add in the fact that this study counts consoles separate from standalone players (allegedly), and the actual penetration of HD-DVD into US households mathematically cannot be more than about 2-3% tops.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Wow, those are some great links to very credible studies you provided to support your claim.
First, there is a problem with them not counting PS3s in with sales. One of the main driving forces of the PS3 is the Blu-Ray drive. I know half a dozen people, including myself, off the top of my head, who have PS3s, and we use them as Blu-Ray players. Not a single person I know has a PS3 JUST to play games, and making that comment is insane. On top of that, there are numorous people who got Blu-Ray and such in the past year. How old is this study? Seriously!
I know two people, myself and my friend, who have HD-DVD players, and I got one cheap after Toshiba announced their death just so I can pick up $5 movies. Its a horrid format. The ethernet did not work on the first two generations of the firmware updates, and it was not until several months after its death that Toshiba released a firmware upgrade fixing that problem, and by that time, most of the content servers seemed to have been shut off on the discs I did have. They scratch if you look at them wierd - in fact, most movies I got from Netflix on HD-DVD had to send back two or three times before I got a disc that was even playable. The 30 gig maximum limit ment that we lost out on HD bonus features and High-Def audio for lack of space. The ONLY thing HD-DVD had going for it was that it could do 1080p at 30 FPS (bluray only does 24), and most of the players out there did not even do 1080p. And then there is the horindious load times! I could power on my PS3, put my movie in, and even with BD-Java, and skiping through previews, I can still have my movie loaded up in less time than it takes my Toshiba A2 to even power on (I have actually done side by side tests on this), then waiting another half minute after you put the disc in for it to even recognize the format.
Sorry, I went chasing rabbits. Point is, the only other person I know who even has an HD-DVD player has one because he was an A/V buff, and bought it the day it came out for an insane price. However, I know at least four people with stand-alone Blu-Ray players, three who have Blu-Ray drives in their computer and hook those up to the TV for watching, and another 7 (just thought of another one) who has a PS3 and use it for Blu-Ray viewing. That is 14 people who have Blu-Ray devices compared to the two who have HD-DVD. And talking to others, that seems to be the norm, not the standard. Blu-Ray sales in two years are surpassing what DVD did in its first couple of years by a longshot. (Too lazy to look up the figures right now, but have seen it posted all over the place over the past year).
Look, HD-DVD is DEAD. Stop beating a dead horse and throwing out all of this FUD. And if you STILL don't believe that Blu-Ray is successful, look at movie sales.
And I don't miss it. I have plenty of DVDs, DVRed material, and streaming content (iTunes, Boxee, Cable Co, and Satellite) to keep me entertained.
As a matter of fact, apart from the few Blu-Ray movies I own, I would probably never miss my player if it was never returned to me.
Alternative content sources, apart from cost, may be Blu-Ray's biggest problem.
-ted
Hey man.. I can burn HD DVD video to a standard double layer DVD and play it back in HD DVD on my Toshiba HD player. I only own the transformers movie in HD DVD and the planet earth series in HD DVD.. buy hey.. I am not gonna buy a blue ray. I learned to live with renting standard wide screen dvds and I've bought an HD camcorder... the family videos are gonna look amazing. So screw you Sony. The Toshiba HD dvd player upscales well.
If your goal is to determine "How big is the market out there which can play my discs?" then PS3 has to count towards that number. Even if a PS3-owner hasn't purchased a Blu-ray movie today, they're a potential buyer. When a particular movie comes out, or they upgrade their sound system, or they talk with a buddy at work, and now they suddenly want to watch Transformers 5 in HD, their barrier to entry is the cost of the disc, not a player.
If your goal instead is to determine the size of the active, disc-purchasing market (let's call it "likely customers" rather than "potential customers") then you're wasting your time measuring player stats. Look at the disc stats. Look at total number of BD vs HD-DVD movies sold, or compare a recent hit title on both formats, or something like that. If this is what you're trying to measure, then player counts are a bad way to measure it. If the guys who love HD-DVD are the type of guys who have money to burn and want to replace their entire movie collection with new discs pronto, while your Blu-ray customers shrug and only buy a new movie or two, then it doesn't matter what the install base number is.
Either way, clearly HD discs of both formats are still a newer, more expensive technology experiencing slow adoption.
Are the HD-DVD fanbois still out there spreading their FUD and BS? It seems so. The clueless idiots who did this study, and by extension, the clueless idiot who posted it really need to learn how to read and how to do a minimum amount of research.
As others have pointed out - there was not enough HD-DVD players sold in the world to make that 11% number correct. It is total BS. It is absurd. In addition, the number of PS3s is higher than the number of Blu-Ray players. That is similar to saying that there are more Ford Automobiles sold in the US than the total number of cars sold. I had expected better by both hot hardware and a slashdotter. Too dumb.
The article is not taking into account those owners of PS3 systems that use the PS3 exclusively for blue ray content. Or alternatively the owners of an XBox 360 with HDDVD.
If you account for this and for the rate of adoption the articles conclusion is incorrect.
=16% BluRay vs 14% HDDVD
Movie theaters nowadays use a 1080p or bigger format
Not just movies today - movies on film are analog
Film is old; DLP has begun to replace it.
I saw a $99 BD player at Wally*World last night.
I also noticed that the prices on BD disks are going down.
Few titles now sell for more that $25, many are available
for around $20, and some for under $10. Also there are
now available some nice multi disk packs with several movies
in the range of $50-$99 (Costco had all 6 StarTrek movies with
Kirk and Spock for $89).
Yes BD software prices still need to come down some more, but they are
now going in the right direction. Cheap players are out there, BD players
are now priced where DVD machines were a few years ago.
The DVD machine I'm waiting for is the Oppo BD83, which will play EVERYTHING
made on a 5.25" disk (IE: BD, BDR, BDW, DVD(-R,-RW,+R,+RW), CD, CDR, CDRW
SACD, DVD-Audio (eventually), MP3, OGG, AVI, MP4, etc......
Also will play files on a USB stick (yes it has a front panel USB A connector).
It also has 7.1 analog outputs so you don't need an external Dolby digital decoder,
digital coax and optical outputs, component video, svideo, video, and of course,
HDMI outputs. This every AND the kitchen sink machine will probably retail for
between $500-600, but I think it's worth the price. (My current Oppo
DVD player does EVERYTHING this one does except for BD, component video and USB
file play).
Up-converting DVD players with HDMI output ($50 to $99 and dropping) fed digitally into a 1080p display (the default today) are a huge improvement over DVD to analog NTSC. The resolution improves, the full color gamut is supported, and the "widescreen" format adjustment takes place automatically, without any button pushing or display in the wrong aspect ratio. That was the big jump in quality.
The next step up, input from a true HD source, produces a much smaller improvement than the conversion to digital. There's a big improvement in audio quality, but unless you have unusually good speakers, all five channels, and a quiet listening environment, you won't notice. The video improvement isn't noticeable from across the room, unless you still-frame and zoom, or you have some screen bigger than 50 inches.
That's why Blu-Ray adoption is slow. Just be patient; once player cost drops below $99, all new players will be Blu-Ray.
I don't see downloaded video being the future. Downloaded content with DRM is good for only a few years before the distributor goes bust or the authorization system is discontinued. That's happened with WalMart music, Microsoft PlaysForSure, Circuit City's DIVX, and Major League Baseball. In fact, the mean life of DRM content seems to be less than five years. Physical media have a long life ahead of them.
...and I'll say it again: HD-DVD was the superior format.
Sig? What's that? Oh, 'signature'...and it's supposed to be witty? Right...
Gamecube discs spin in the opposite way of a normal disc
I loaded Super Smash Bros. Melee, opened the lid, and waited for friction to spin the disc down. It was spinning clockwise (as viewed from the label side). I did the same thing with a CD in a CD player, and it was also spinning clockwise. So I'd like to see your source for this urban myth about GCN discs spinning anticlockwise.
I dont see any methodology mentioned, or who they polled. Or even how many people.
10% seems a bit high since I don't know anyone with a HD-DVD player.
The "more HD DVD players than Blu-ray players in U.S. homes" thing is bunk. I have a feeling people were confusing their upscaling DVD players with actual HD DVD players.
Why do I want a piece of garbage plastic disk when I can store and play HD movies from my computer to the TV? Its stupid.
... shirtlifter !
Yup.
Also, the HD-DVD players did have a head-start. And yeah, they were cheaper, because Toshbia made each and every one of them, and to they subsudized the costs, just as Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft typically do for consoles on release... in both cases, they made it up on disc royalties. Or would have, if they HD-DVD had been the winner.
The real telling factors, even in late 2007, while the HD-DVD players had more installed units than Blu-Ray (PS3s included), the Blu-Ray disc sales were 2:1 over HD-DVD. See, that's the problem with selling cheap... you're selling to cheapsakes. Everyone knew that BD was suprior to HD-DVD (in the true, same video formats, though higher potential bitrates on BD, but the BD disc is more durable and much higher capacity), so the low-end folks went HD-DVD and the high-end folks went Blu-Ray. And guess what... high end buyers spend more... imagine that.
Then you have to couple in the fire sales at the start of 2008, when the format war was all but over. Toshiba unloaded their HD-DVD players cheap, often for less than the price of a top-quality upscaling DVD player. So many folks bought HD-DVD players to use as plain old DVD players near the end, never intending to buy HD-DVD. In fact, that would be rather foolish... even when the HD-DVD discs were pushed out cheap, one has to realize that, in two or three years, when the blue-violet laser dies in your discount HD-DVD player, that's it... no more HD-DVD players, 'sept maybe the used dregs on eBay or the local flea market.
According to the CEA, Blu-Ray players are expected to comprise about 10% of worldwide sales of DVD players in 2009, reaching about $800 million in sales. That will result in a doubling of the installed base from the end of 2008. And it's not just in the USA... projections are on target for 2.5 million players being sold in Europe this year... excluding PS3 sales, which are also growing in Europe. In fact, the PS3's installed base beat that of the X-Box 360 last summer in Europe, and has sold at about double the X-Box 360 rate (total: over 10 million units as of 2/2009, including the UK).
More critical to the success of the format, though, are disc sales. They're expecting to top 100 millions discs sold in 2009. But even more importantly, it's actually possible that overall profits from Blu-Ray will exceed those of DVD this year -- largely because the vast bulk of DVD sales are at the discout level (Wal-Mart accounts for 40% of all DVDs sold in the USA), while Blu-Rays are still largely sold at the $25-$35 price point once occupied by DVDs (Best Buy is currently selling close to 50% of all retail BDs in the USA... they're already making considerably more on BDs than on DVDs).
It's also not quite right to consider HDD delivered media without really considering HDD costs. Sure, if I'm making my own, a 25GB BD-R runs around $3.00 if you buy a small cakebox... maybe a bit more if you want printable. So that's $0.12 per gigabyte. Today on Newegg, I can get a 1.5TB HDD internal for $130, so that's 0.09 per gigabyte, a bit better, though falling in cost much slower. If I don't have a spare drive bay, I see $110 for a 1TB external drive... not too shabby, but that's now $0.11 per gigabyte, practically the same.
But now think about actually paying for HD video. Forget the problem with getting your ISP to think it's ok to download hundreds of gigbytes per month... or the time, or the load on your system. Let's go for it and get a disc set I actually have on Blu-Ray: "Lost: Season 3". That cost me $39.95 last year on BD, from Amazon, with free shipping. That's on six 50GB discs, so it's definitely less than 300GB. That 300GB would cost me an additional $36, today, if I made my own BDs, $33 on the cheap external drive, or $27 on the cheap internal drive.
But here's the big problem: I can get a cheap price at Amazon on BDs because they're in direct competition with other vendors of the same disc. This is kind of happening in music downloads, too, primarily due to the lifting of the DRM
-Dave Haynie
I'm pretty happy upscaling my DVD-Decrypted, VOB-cleaned, DVD-Shrunk, Movie-only (i.e. "clean"--no menus, previews, crap, etc.) disks to 720p. What is the cost/benefit to going to blu-ray? NOT worthwhile, I'm sure. What are the odds of being caught doing this? Pretty slim.
Yes, the PS3 has a nice upscaler, and if we first show our Corpse Bride DVD to someone on our 40" LCD, it looks wonderful. "Plain old DVD, really? Why get Blu-ray?"
Then we pop in the Blu-ray version. If we could A/B it, things would pop out, but we don't have to. Simply point to the textures in the clay. It is SHARP. Didn't see that before. If necessary, switch back to regular DVD and now that they know what to look for, it's clear that texture is missing.
(Not to mention that Blu-ray's hi-def lets you have menus with a regular -- i.e. computer -- density of information, and not have to resort to 6 submenus in order to get all of the chapters in there.)
Last, let's repeat again that downloads do not include extras. And extras are, among our friends, anyhow, an enjoyable part of a movie evening. Without extras, you may as well be watching a really nice VHS tape.
If you RTFA, it turns out that HD-DVD is only still in the lead if you don't consider the PS3 to be a Blu-Ray player. A more accurate headline would have included the word "stand-alone" in it somewhere.
Blu-Ray didn't win because consumers chose it, but instead it won because movie publishers chose it. With HDCP (DRM) built-in, publishers favor it. It's harder for consumers to adopt because older or cheaper home theater equipment doesn't support HDCP. Price of disks is probably the biggest factor for low adoption though. Nobody wants to buy a machine just to be able to play overpriced disks of the same movie just because they are slightly sharper.
We know HD-DVD is dead, that isn't the issue being contested by these numbers.
It may be only simple speculation, but the number of people claiming HD-DVD to BluRay ownership is representative of pissed off consumers that refused to buy into BluRay, despite it winning the format war. Many of us are sitting this round of formats out and waiting for the next one, just to get Sony's goat.
Meanwhile, we'll just watch whatever our overpriced HD cable providers offer us in premium channels.
People are complaining about Blu-Ray + PS3 = 16%... so, HD-DVD + 360 addon = 14%... still a impressive number (only 2% lower) for a looser format. As a lot of people told, Sony win was a Pyrrhic win.
Or, as a greater brazilian writer says, "to the winner, the potatoes!".
The hardware isn't expensive if you already have a HD TV, and here in the UK the TV's seem to be doing well enough even though the only widespread HD content is from a games console. Compared to the TV the BR drives are cheap - decent units can be bought for cheaper than when DVD got popular. But people still aren't buying them because the movies are still very expensive. I can go to my local store and walk out with 6 good DVD's for the price of a single Bluray (plus the choice of titles on the shelves is about 40x wider, and the difference gets much bigger using online stores).
The only thing IMHO holding Bluray back is that the disks themselves are far too expensive relative to what people are used to paying, given the real-world benefits are not perceived as being that great. Sure, BR is technologically vastly better, but people are still quite happy with DVD and for most movies the higher resolution is just not important - and as for audio, most people use the TV speakers anyway. I have a BR player and use a a subscription rental where a BR is the same as a DVD - for blockbusters I go for BR, but for the vast majority I really don't care.
Sometimes I actually go for the DVD version. The "don't pirate me" messages at the start of DVDs are bad enough but with every BR they are infuriating, can't I just tick some "I acknowledge piracy is illegal" box once and have the other disks see that I've already sat through this crap? I just got Band of Brothers on BR and since I watched an episode a night I sat though 90 seconds of crap for 10 nights - 15 minutes in total. There's something wrong when I'm making a habit of loading the BR then switching back to the web browser while it gets to the menu. All I am going to say about the required firmware upgrades is that an unexpected 40 minute routine (OK, counting the PowerDVD patch) is not welcome when I have deliberately left myself just enough time to watch the movie to finish off the night.
that nobody cares.
Before CD's and DVD's, what we had sucked. Beta sucked, VHS sucked, Cassettes sucked, 8 tracks sucked, vinyl sucked and for a short time laser disks and DAT sucked a little less but still sucked.
Tapes sucked. Giant plastic disks sucked.
Then CD came along and was SO much less sucky than tapes and vinyl that it quickly killed those formats. Except for the few die hards who just couldnt let go of their vinyl because they (to this day) think it sounds better. Tapes and vinyl more or less wimpered away, defeated. Then VideoCD came along in a few formats, and sucked.
Finaly, the DVD hit the mark. It sucked less at a ratio even higher than that of CD to tapes/vinyl and just slaughtered poor VHS.
So the problem with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is that they just don't suck much less than DVD. Most people like DVD's, in fact, and have few complaints. Ask anyone and they will say "DVD doesn't suck. My VHS and Cassette tapes sucked, but CD and DVD doesnt suck". Yes, they look better. But not enough better that everybody wants to throw away their investment in a non sucky technology like DVD for something that only sucks a little bit less.
This is especially hard for high definition video disks to compete with because there's also downloading DVD's and streaming video over the internet. Which let me tell you, sucks! The quality sucks compared to DVD even. But people love this. Why? Because even though they suck, they don't suck for real. That is, they are not real, like a DVD, which sits on your shelf permanently, as if to say "I suck and you are stuck with me". People don't like being stuck with and saddled down by something, so if they can get rid of that physical limitation, that trumps almost any other kind of suckyness. Witness online email, and other web applications. Go figure.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
>What makes you think you can't do the exact same thing with Blu-ray?
Nothing. Slysoft provides software for that, too. Unless you crank the quality settings way up high, though (with resulting high file sizes) your output will be sub-blu-ray quality.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Troll much? This was clearly a faulty survey... and really, why get all excited about a survey of some otherwise unexplained but small group of people. Like any survey, the results tell you something about the group being surveyed, but it may not be that interesting on an absolutely scale. And so you can't even begin to extrapolate to the whole USA, or you'll just sound foolish. What the survey definitely seems to tells us... more Harris Interactive poll takers have HD-DVD stand-alone players than Blu-Ray.
But hey, this is public info... why not just do the math? About 500,000 stand-alone Blu-Ray players were sold prior to 2008, world-wide (Blu-Ray Disc Association Press Release, CES 2008). At the start of 2008, the HD-DVD players were ahead, though even by then, the Blu-Ray market had the numbers, if you added in PS3s. And it showed... at the start of 2008, BD software was outselling HD-DVD 2:1. Add in the PS3s, and that's about 10.7 million players in US homes at the end of 2008 (BDA again), including a total of 3.1 million stand-alone players (Adams Media Research).
And keep adding... stand-alone Blu-Ray player sales for 1Q09 topped 400,000 in the USA alone. That's nearly as many as all of the dedicated HD-DVD players ever sold in the US market (widely distributed press release, here's one example: http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090506.html). Sony did 2.5 million PS3s in the same quarter, worldwide... I couldn't find US figures, but they're still doing a nice business, even with stand-alone Blu-Ray players a better deal these days (when the PS3 was the cheapest BD player on the market, it was kind of a no-brainer). So we're closing in if not already passed the 12 million mark on Blu-Ray players in the USA, including PS3s.
At the press conference in 2008, Toshiba's announcement of discontinuing the HD-DVD, they gave numbers:
At the press conference, Atsutoshi Nishida also revealed total HD-DVD hardware sales worldwide, facts previously made opaque in officially announcements. A grand total of 1.3-million HD-DVD players sold worldwide breaks down to 300k Xbox 360 drives, 300k PC drives, 600k dedicated US players, 100k dedicated Euro players, and 30,000 dedicated Japanese players. Against the more than 10-million Blu-ray players in circulation, HD-DVD was indeed fighting an uphill battle in the format war. Nishida also commented that Toshiba has "no plan at all this moment" to begin supporting Blu-ray.
Keep in mind... Toshiba made ALL the HD-DVD players other than the Samsung dual-more players. It seemed like an open spec, but with Toshiba heavily subsusizing their hardware in order to beat Blu-Ray on price, no one else could hope to compete. So no one else did... they all went to the Blu-Ray camp.
And so there are nearly 10x as many Blu-Ray capable players in the USA now as all of the HD-DVD players that will ever be made, world-wide. But even looking at dedicated players, there are over 2.5x more dedicated Blu-Ray players sold in the USA now than Toshiba made HD-DVD players for the whole world. This post was nothing but a troll.. the post itself might even have mentioned that this result was from a poll, not an actual examination of published or tracked sales figures.
-Dave Haynie
irrelevant for people who use simple technologies like Media Extenders. After tinkering with a HTPC for a few years I bought a D-Link DSM-750 which streams most formats from a computer via 802.11n (or wire, or attached usb drive/device) pretty nicely. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but it's the only HD device I'd use. Blue-ray and its ilk is a solution for the distributor, not the consumer.
Quack, quack.
Just as a data point, Best Buy is selling between 40% and 50% of all retail Blu-Ray discs, and they're selling at or close to the full $25-$35 retail. Compare that to Wal-Mart's 40% of the DVD market, at heavy discounts. Best Buy is, already, making far more profit on BD than DVD... not in per unit terms, but total. That's why you see so much space devoted to BD... they're making more cash on BD than they are on DVD. And it's a growing business, while DVD sales are shrinking.
-Dave Haynie
and post hd-dvd/blue-ray format war the consumer has simply started to notice the benefits of high definition isn't tied to a expensive platter produced by a single vendor/consortium. We'd been forced to choose and there was a time when it appeared to make sense, but the magic of blue-ray technology isn't the high quality video or the expensive little boxes, it's a just delivery system.
Quack, quack.
The reason CDs were replaced by more convenient downloads, is that people like to walk around with portable devices listening to music, and downloads are as convenient (or probably even MORE convenient) than CDs when it comes to loading up such devices. People also like to listen to music on their computer and its nice to have your entire music library on your computer so you can shuffle songs together etc.
However, (1) how many people feel an urgent need to walk around watching MOVIES on a handheld device? (2) how many people feel seriously inconvenienced when they have to get their fat ass off the couch and put a DVD in the drive before sitting down for *two hours* to watch their movie?
The calculus for movies is just different from music. There's no reason to download 12 movies to your iPod for your bus trip to or from work. There's no reason to be able to put your entire movie library on "shuffle". Movies also take a lot more bandwidth than music does (as well as being hours long instead of a couple minutes). Consumers will ultimately pay for that bandwidth, where if they buy a DVD during their weekly trip to the mall / Walmart, they don't pay any extra shipping charges for those bits.
I don't think legal movie downloads will be able to dethrone DVD either, because DVDs are cheap and easy to acquire, last a long time, and work really well for their intended purpose. On the other hand, $0 illegal downloads might dethrone the DVD (especially if manufacturers keep adding obnoxious unskippable Warning screens and commercials to them, which serves no purpose except to annoy the very people who actually PAY for their product).
The world is bigger than North America.
Blu Ray sales have eclipsed DVD sales in Japan.
toshiba made 1.3 million hddvd players globally. there are 300 million americans. how does 1 in 10 own an hd dvd player? lest i get concerned my hddvd player is not wearing a condom, i suggest we be concerned this sample is inaccurate.
I bought one shortly after the announcement that they were throwing in the towel and had my inlaws buy one too. They do great as a premium quality upscaler which just so happens to be able to play some really cheap HD movies. As for Blu-Ray, I am going to sit this one out. I hate the idea of a Sony format winning and as someone else mentioned, I have more than one DVD player in the house an in the car, so am in no hurry to pick an incompatible format that's jam-packed with adds, unskipable content and other reminders of how evil the companies distributing video are. I am just about at the point where I hope user dissatisfaction kills the whole stkining mess. Sure, I will miss the latest cool blockbuster movie, but its just not worth all the crap that the copyright industry does to sustain itself.
If only there were some sort of "article" you could read that would confirm or deny your suspicion!
(You're wrong; more people own HD-DVD than a PS3, though they are counting PS3 owners separately from stand-alone Blu-ray owners. I'm not surprised that you thought differently though; there's a tendency among Sony fanboys to greatly overestimate the popularity of Playstation crap.)
Blu-Ray player prices aren't dropping fast enough.
Get Players down to 99 bucks that have BD2, min.
OTOH, I dislike Blu-Ray, and would love to see the very unlikely resurgence of HD-DVD.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
None of the playstation 3 owned I know use it for Blu-Ray.
That worthless piece of data aside, lets look closer.
X-Box is HD-DVD. That did noty add that into the HD-Sales. If you wan to add the playstaion 3 in, then you must ass the X-Box in. That mean HD is still in the lead.
"Its a horrid format. " Based on? You don't sdiscuss the format at all.
"The ethernet did not work on the first two generations of the firmware updates,"
How long diod it take Blu-Ray to even GET ethernet? and then how mauch longer before ti could actually be used in a reasonable manner? And that's with a system being developed, as opposed to phased out.
Don't complain becasue you bought into a format AFTER it had lost.
That don't scratch anymore the Blu-Ray does.
The 30 Gig Max was on it's way out. Considering what was being put on them at the begining, completly irrelevant. Jeez, they couldn't even fill them.
oh I love this sentence:
"The ONLY thing HD-DVD had going for it was that it could do 1080p at 30 FPS (bluray only does 24)"
HAHAHAHAHa.. dumb ass, you want 24 for movies. Yes, HD supported that as well.
Again, don't compare an elchapo HD players to a Playstation 3 player. of COURSE the PS3 is faster.
"Blu-Ray sales in two years are surpassing what DVD did in its first couple of years by a longshot."
A false comparison, the enviroment were far too different to make even a general comparison.
"Look, HD-DVD is DEAD."
well no shit Sherlock, what was your first clue? had you RTFA you would ahve noticed that didn't claim it wasn't.
You are also comparing BLU-Ray NOW to when HD stopped being produced as if Blu-Ray hasn't been being developed.
HD was a far better technical format, and it didn't take anything from consumers, like Blu-Ray Does.
So now we have a player that can have it's firmware changed anytime you put a movie in, where controlling content is a higher priority then playing a movie, and the player licensing is outrageous; which is likely to keep the prices of players high for a while.
Yes, lets look at movie sales between something not being made anymore and something that is, what a wonderful piece of logic you ahve added to the debate of a format~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
why would I spend money on a hostile tech in the first place? I would rather go back to VHS. really.
I know a lot of people don't see the point in bluray - but I have a 50" panel with a standalone panasonic bluray player that will also upscale DVDs. I have to say, BLURAY IS AWESOME. What is not awesome is the price of the movies over DVD so thats why I use Netflix. The difference between an upscaled DVD and a 1080p bluray is very noticeable at 50".
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_06_18.pdf
Seem like a reasonable study, and the results may seem shocking to some people here, they really aren't.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
HD DVD lost in 2008.
Blu-ray will be gone in 2010-12 timeframe.