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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.
https://www.speakservers.com/
how many people with a regular up-scaling DVD player think they have an HD-DVD player?
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?
If you read the article, you'd see that no. The PS3 is counted seperatly, which makes absolutely no sense if you want to compare blu-ray adoption.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
...does this statistic take into account PlayStations, laptops, and other electronics which include Blu-ray players?
Did you even RTFA? http://hothardware.com/newsimages/Item10047/blu-ray-adoption.png
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'm one of those. Part of it is that I just don't see it - HD is nice, but not new-player-and-new-media-purchase nice. The other part of it is something of media purchasing fatigue - I bought it on VHS and rebought it on DVD, and now I have to buy it again on some HD format? No thanks.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
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.
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 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.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
HD-DVD is dead. There's no need to wait to see who will win, as that question was answered a year and a half ago when Toshiba (the banner carrier for HD-DVD) announced that they would discontinue all HD-DVD production. According to the wiki article, the entire HD-DVD promotion group was dissolved March of last year. To my knowledge, no one builds a new HD-DVD player; there are a small number of PC drives that include HD-DVD compatibility, but I assume that's because of the low cost of inclusion once the blue laser diodes for Blu-ray are already in the drive. You can not walk into a retail store and find an HD-DVD player unless they found some hidden stock in the back and are clearance selling it for $20. You can't find HD-DVD discs unless the same thing happens. Any movie that's come out since then will never come out on HD-DVD. HD-DVD is dead and voluntarily buried by its own support and manufacturing group.
In summary, there is no more waiting. The race was over last year. You can debate whether the quality improvement is worth the money, and there's some definite complaints to be made about the cost of the discs. If your only concern, however, is which of the formats will win, then there's no reason to continue waiting. Blu-Ray won last year.
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
> The porn industry wanted the longer play time though,
> so my dad had to get the other player.
I'm sure your father will be thrilled to know that for Father's Day, his porn viewing habits have been broadcasted to the world.
c.
Log in or piss off.
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
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?
"Everyone else said your dad watched porn?"
There... I hope I just saved someone some trouble.
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 ?
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.
Your claim only makes sense in a world where there is only two options: Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Unfortunately, the market has more options than that. The market has spoken: DVD (plain old regular, non-high-definition) is the format war winner.
VHS died a quick and painful death at the hands of the most quickly adopted consumer technology ever, the DVD, simply because the advantages of the technology so favored DVD. That is not the case with DVD vs. Blu-Ray.
In short, Congrats Sony! Welcome to the LaserDisc club!
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.