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Why Has Blu-ray Failed To Catch Hold?
Velcroman1 writes "My VCR is stashed in a closet, right next to a couple of CD-ROM players, a laser disc player, and other forgotten electronics. Is my Blu-ray player about to join them? Blu-ray really hasn't caught on — and probably never will. 'I'm surprised DVDs have continued to hang on,' said King, referring to the fact that player sales of over 20 million units in the US last year were pretty much evenly split between DVD and Blu-ray models. Blu-ray discs and players are clearly superior to DVDs, offering more features and a better picture overall. So why haven't shoppers been impressed?"
I suspect most people aren't that bothered by picture quality.
DVDs are handier than tapes, you don't need to rewind.
DVDs still work just fine.
For 99+% of what I or my wife watches on DVD we couldn't care less about a better resolution or extra features. That really eliminates motivation to get a Blu-ray player.
Because "regular price" for many blu-ray movie is $29.99 compaired to $17.99 for a DVD. The only times I buy blu-ray over DVD are for action movies that I really enjoyed (and that the improved picture quality is actually noticeable) or deep discount sales when I can get them for under $15.
Until my DVDs started to give me disc read errors. I'm tired of wasting money on planned obsolescence, I'm not replacing that collection with BluRays just to have them crap out on me in 5 years. Anyway, a better format will be out by then... I'm skipping this cycle.
You can't take the sky from me...
Way too expensive for a movie. I just buy Blu-ray for action flicks or movies with great cinematography.
Many people don't want to spend thousands to re-buy their entire movie collection at a higher price.
Especially when DVD looks almost as good as BR from across the living room on the 40 inch HDTV.
Sony finally won the standards war but is almost irrelevant because people now watch stuff on-demand via streaming.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
and are being replaced with lower-quality .mp3's? Because most folks care about content more then they care about sound or picture quality.
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
I just got my HDTV this year and I'm surprised as to how many movies in my DVD collection have only been recently released on bluray (or are still waiting).
The fact is hi-def is just coming out of the early adopter phase.
Time will tell, but I bet a lot of those DVDs are being purchased by people on standard def.
Why has BlueRay failed to catch on ? DRM.
It was not made to satisfy needs and desires of the customer, it was made to satisfy the desires of content-owning corporations.
...the economy is in the toilet, and people aren't rushing out to improve their video quality when they don't have the money to do so (or maybe they just don't care to do so).
Because it's a substantial price increase for an incremental upgrade in quality and often a downgrade in convenience.
When I saw the price of the movies and the players I laughed and kept walking. And to this day I still do. I will never buy anything Blue Ray until they get the price right.
My biggest problem with blu-ray early on was that the first generation of players was awful. They were slow as Christmas (WAY slower than the first generation of DVD players) for one thing. Newer players are considerably faster and come with a lot more features. Unfortunately, it doesn't help that blu-ray discs still come with forced trailers (way more common with blu-rays than with DVD's) from most studios (Universal and a few others being notable exceptions).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Maybe it's because blue-ray's are not exactly as clearly better to the average person as compared to a videophile such as yourself?
1. Blu-Ray has higher quality than DVD in technical terms, but not practical terms for most people
2. #1 is all the more true because people are viewing more on laptops and mobile devices
3. #2 is easier with DVDs since they are easy to rip and transcode even for non geeks nowadays
4. iTunes, Torrents, etc.
5. The combination of #1 and the fact that DVDs are cheaper than Blu-Ray and the players are cheaper as well.
There's just no compelling reason to pay more for Blu Ray, and for people who like to put stuff on their iPhone/whatever, it's easier with DVDs as well.
The viewing experience is only marginally different unless you are watching on a big hi-def screen.
The movies cost more
the players cost more
and what is the point of rereleasing old movies on Blu-Ray - like theres gonna be more shades of black and white?
There is such a large collection of VHS movies (good & bad) and I think my local video store has pretty much every VHS movie ever produced so I see no reason why I would put my VCR in the closet. Between that and Netflix I am set, I rarely watch DVDs, let along a 'High Quality' Blue Ray copy of 'Weekend at Bernies.'
VCR -> DVD
No rewind, Digital picture so consistent quality. Menus, Bonus features. Worked immediately on any TV.
Smaller media footprint. (Seriously, anyone with a huge VCR collection had a spare room to put it in. The same DVD's fit in a quarter of the space in their cases, and a 100th in a CD book)
DVD -> Blu-Ray
High Def pictures. 7.1 Sound? Interactive menus?
Whats the draw here? Only a tiny fraction of the world gives a shit about HD video. Most people don't even have the display that can handle HD.
No doubt they are technically superior, but I put in my first Blu-ray movie to watch last week and was horrified at discovering that it had UNSKIPPABLE PREVIEWS. Of course, DVDs can do this as well, but I've fortunately never seen it done with a DVD so it must be rare. I guess the movie studios must believe that those who are upgrading to the latest fancy movie player must also be gullible enough to watch every preview they think you should be seeing.
I have a 47" HD TV. Watching a VHS, it looks like crap, so the VCR is long gone. While watching a blu-ray is superior to DVD, it's such a slim margin that it just doesn't make much difference to me. This, combined with the price difference, means I will continue to purchase DVDs rather than blu-ray discs for the most part. Also, most stuff I watch was never even recorded in HD, so it really makes no difference.
This is the first I've heard of it.
Seems to me that someone at Fox just decided Blu-Ray was failing and wanted to write an article about it.
Basically, quality is not a big enough selling point for most people as long as the old stuff was adequate. DVDs advantages over VHS went well beyond just the quality, with instant seeking, no degradation over time, extra features on the discs, and lower price points. They were compelling. Blu-Ray is just more quality for more money, there aren't really any new features, and it requires you to upgrade your screen to use it. Most people are still on SD screens, because they work and HD is just more expensive. Maybe when their old TVs break they'll upgrade to HD, but there is certainly no hurry.
I read the internet for the articles.
Netflix
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I have a blu-ray player, but I still buy a lot of movies on DVD (because they're cheaper). The main reason is just that a lot of the movies I buy don't really benefit from having better graphics. Sure, if I'm watching the new Tron, I want good graphics, but if I'm watching some random comedy film, do I really need that boost?
Because of that, I rarely stream action movies from Netflix, because I do want the bump in graphics. Mostly on Netflix I watch TV shows, since the quality isn't going to be great anyway and it doesn't matter, and go out and buy my favorite movies.
Blu-ray players connected to the Web can offer games, extra movie features, and additional bonus materials online that DVD players generally can't. And the latest Blu-ray players can handle 3D discs, something no DVD player can do.
I don't want any of that shit, especially if I have to pay extra for it. I just want to watch a movie.
But which distributor of movies desired by the general public provides lawfully made copies of its works in MKV format, apart from WebM trailers?
One, because to be honest up-sampled DVDs look pretty good.
Two, most movies are now shot in a style that looks like someone let a cat piss on the celluloid. Seriously, who the fuck wants to pop in the Battlestar Galactica Blu-Ray and see film grain and shitty lighting in hi-def!?
Three, for the price point, Blu-Ray doesn't deliver enough value except for the rare really well-shot movie.
Four, digital downloads. All things being equal, anything on disc is slightly antiquated. I rarely buy a disc of anything anymore.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Sony has been BlueRay's primary advocate... Sony is Evil, therefore BlueRay must be as Evil.
The picture IS better, but the problem is that pictures on DVD are already really good. I'd bet a lot of people can't immediately see the difference, especially if they don't have a side-by-side comparison to look at. As for the features? Does anyone really watch those anyway? I bought several of the multi-disc box sets of different movies I've liked, but I realize that most of them I only watch the movie itself. The special features stay in the box (Though I love the commentary on my Futurama discs, those I listen to all the time).
I have a Blu-ray player (since we needed to replace our DVD player and it wasn't much more to upgrade to Blu-Ray), so I'll buy Blu-Ray discs if it's not much more, but my Net-Flix queue is still DVD only. One advantage that DVDs still have is that our laptops (and now our minivan) still don't have blu-ray players, so if we want to travel and watch movies, we need the DVD.
The improvement of DVDs over VHS is much higher than Blu-ray over DVD, since the disc and tape are a fundamentally different technology. Blu-ray is just better DVD, for the most part, but not that drastic an improvement. For many, it doesn't offer a compelling reason to upgrade a player and TV for. Plus, it's still a physical medium, which increasing broadband availability and services that use it are chipping away at.
DVDs don't crash because some jag-off decided to run Java code between frames of my movie. DVDs don't make me worry about version numbers, patching my player, or any of that jazz. And that's just technical.
I have a DVD player in every computer, and connected to each TV - meaning portability. All my friends have DVD players. It's easier to find movies on DVD.
DVDs are cheaper.
I have a huge collection of DVD's. I'm not going to repurchase everything.
Next will be going back to solid state non-spinning media. People don't change formats for picture quality (see: Betamax). They change for convenience/durability.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Honestly, the quality is too good - You can see the wizard behind the curtain. Real life example: My geeks friends and I were all standing around watching Iron man 2 on a super huge LCD screen at best buy. It was the scene where Tony escapes his captors in the clunky MKI armor. We all noted that the suit looked like plastic, not metal. That you could see where the joints didn't quite connect. In short, the illusion was shattered. I haven't bought a blue ray video since. (I have a PS3, I own a few blueray films that I got for the extra features - But I prefer to watch plain old DVDs.)
Competition was a good thing after all. Exclusive contracts with studios for unlimited number of years were not.
And, I still have HD-DVDs that work fine for the movies I care about seeing in HD.
Then again, I borrow DVDs from our library now to save money.
When a technology cost more, takes more time to play your movie, requires updates over the internet before playing the latest movie and only gives a better picture if you baught a higher-priced television to play it. Also the normal DVDs still work damned fine enough to not need an upgrade.
Blu-ray really hasn't caught on — and probably never will.
Says some random guy on the internet and... Fox News (sigh).
I have little interest in Blu-Ray. Not because it can hold more or that the picture is better, but because the movie companies are trying to sell me the same thing again at a higher price. Their larger capacity is irrelevant- if a movie only needs a portion of it, I care little for directors and actors talking over the movie, and while extra scenes can be fun, they are not worth the extra dost. Take a look at the media ecosystem; they fianlly get on board with an 'approved' means of delivery then gradually abandon all others. This forces people to buy the same things at increasingly higher prices. Look at VHS, laserdiscs and cassettes. Blu-Ray? Maybe for Avatar, but never for "To Have And Have Not".
Joe consumer walks into Generi-Mart and sees a DVD of a movie for ~$15 and the same movie on Blu-Ray for ~$25...picks DVD. He knows Blu-Ray is supposed to be better but for ten bucks less DVD is good enough. He doesn't even consider DLC or digital copy in the equation. He'll just get his "techie" buddy to RIP it for him.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Netflix HD streaming video and similar features with Cable and Satellite. Most people watch a movie once and aren't concerned with building libraries. The DVD was established well before on-demand and streaming were as viable as they currently are. People concerned with building collections will buy the BluRay player. One other factor was a general wait-and-see attitude while the BluRay vs HD-DVD format war was still ongoing. People waited and better options presented themselves.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein
Maybe because we're still pulling out of a recession. Maybe because Netflix charges extra for blu-ray rentals. Maybe they're happy with Netflix streaming.
Most likely it just takes time. But I have a hard time buying that it's just because the consumer is too stupid to recognize that Blu-ray is just sooo awesome, and that they'd all go running out to chase one down if only they knew how awesome it was. Sheesh.
You need a HDTV for blu-ray to make any sense, if you don't already have one, thats a cost. Even if you do have a HDTV, DVD looks good enough so you have to justify the cost of getting a Blu-ray player. Then there is the fact that since DVD looks good enough you have to justify getting x release on Blu-ray instead of DVD. There is still a recession going on, the cheaper alternative is going to either win or have a very good showing.
I have a HDTV, and I do like the PBS broadcasts in HD, but I don't feel the need to replace the DVD player with Blu-ray.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
That, and not enough people want HD porn.
First of all, the pricing is all wrong... why are these things so expensive? I understand that they were initially gouging the early adopters, but we should be more in-line with DVDs by now.
Second, they are delicate. You get rentals (if you can find them) and they seem more prone to scratches than DVDs.
Third, picture quality is awesome, but you often don't really notice from 25 feet away. Sometimes I have to really pay attention to whether it is Blu-Ray or DVD if the upsampling is decent.
Fourth, selection. Finding pre-2005-ish movies seems to be almost impossible. There have been some things worth buying since then, but not a whole lot. They need at least release the "watch over and over again" classics.
Fifth, player cost. I still haven't seen any for $20 at Walgreens.
Sixth, online. People watch "TV" more and more on their computers. Leisure time isn't what it was in the 90s.
Finally, replacement. VHS wore out, so re-purchasing an old movie on DVD was reasonable. It is much harder to chuck away a perfectly good DVD.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Price. Individual discs are still way more expensive than DVDs.
DRM. I cannot trivially break the DRM on Blu-Ray like I can on DVDs. Yeah, the hackers are ahead for the moment, but Blu-Ray's DRM isn't utterly and completely broken yet.
...I have a home theater but there are several reasons why people aren't interested.
(1)If you don't have a home theater and a giant screen to display movies on, you probably couldn't care less about the difference in quality between DVD and BluRay (plus, I've seen some crap BluRay transfers that were no improvement over DVD.)
(2)Until mini-vans start coming with BluRay players by default, my wife will continue to buy DVDs to zombify the kids on car trips.
(3)My personal hatred of BluRay - Taking several minutes to startup due to the DRM and HDCP handshaking, key updating, communication, et cetera.
It is utterly ridiculous that putting a DVD in my Sony BluRay player versus a BluRay means a playback difference of 3 minutes (and I have a fast BluRay player.) Note that some BluRay Discs do not exhibit this behavior but all are still sloooooow compared to DVD.
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Bluray stops working for grandma. Then the player gets tossed aside. Or it must be sent to the repair shop. Or grand son must install the new DRM keys.
Bluray is trash and that is where the player belongs.
I have a ps3 and a few blurays, but I also have an AppleTV (and Netflix). I can rent movies for $3.99 from my couch or for free through streaming (minus the monthly cost). So for movies I'll watch once, maybe twice, why would I pay $25 for bluray again?
There's a lovely chart out there that combines screen size, distance from screen and some other factors and shows that, at many common screen sizes (I have a 42" LCD) and viewing distances, Blu-ray is indistinguishable from DVD quality. As my wife and I happen to have our home theater in that range, I have seen absolutely no motivation to switch to a new format. (A friend brought over his Blu-ray player at one point, and once it was hooked up, we all agreed the difference was almost negligible.)
So why would King be shocked that a format that means nothing in a majority of households (I assume most of us are getting by with 46" screens or less) isn't taking over?
Blu-rays are like $40 here (for popular new titles), which is insane. It's high for a video game, which you can get re-play value from. I'm not paying that much for a movie I'll watch once, maybe twice. Plus, the video store around here that had a decent stock of blu-rays went out of business. The one that opened in its place has a pitiful stock of blu-ray movies. I have to drive to a store 25 minutes away to get a good selection.
I'd rent them weekly if they'd just carry them, and even pay the $1 extra willingly, but it's not an option.
People generally choose cheap prices over quality. I know many people who listen to music on laptop speakers. HD is nice... but I can enjoy most TV shows/movies at 320x240. If I want an HD experience (which is rare), I go to the movies.
DVD is simply "good enough", and is very cheap. It's not the best, but if being the best mattered, then McDonalds would have failed at selling burgers.
I can think of at least 2 reasons why Blu-ray hasn't succeeded. The first is that research shows that picture quality is less important if you are actually enjoying what you are watching. Interestingly, enjoyment isn't so much linked to the picture quality as the quality of acting/animation, the script, plot, etc... At the end of the day, we don't care that much about whether things are a little less sharp. Heck, that's part of the reason there's such a market for poor quality copies. If it's a good film, you're still going to enjoy the slightly grainy rip you bought from a dodgy guy on the street. If it's a crap film, it doesn't matter how good the picture quality is, it's still a crap film. I can hear people already saying "But you'll enjoy a good film more if the picture is better!" Meh... If I weighted all the factors involved in enjoying a film, picture quality would be weighted very heavily until the quality drops to the point where you can't really see what's going on.
Secondly, Blu-ray appeared at the same time as many of the online streaming services that are now becoming so popular. It's a matter of convenience. I know it's probably good for me to get out, get some sun, while I go to some rental place or shop. However, I have to pay per disc that way, as opposed to the flat rate I can pay Netflix. This also alleviates any thoughts that I may have wasted my money on a film I won't enjoy. Don't like that bad action film you're streaming? Stop it and find another... problem solved. No need to go spend more money and make another trip.
It used to be about how BluRay will fail completely. Now it's "only" selling half of the market.
No, BluRay will likely never have the complete hold of DVD, simply because download is a real option. But it's certainly not going anywhere.
What do you think will be in the next consoles?
parent knows what he is talking about
You need a good tv to watch the bluray on, as well as paying for the bluray player and the movies. Plus you don't really notice the difference until you've watched blurays for a few months and then are horrified by dvd quality. I get blurays through netflix, but even with that, streaming is a lot faster and good enough for most things.
My father would love to have a good blue-ray collection but he has terrible internet service where he is so half the features blue-ray players offer, like streaming Netflix and Pandora aren't viable for him. My mother can't tell the difference between Blue-ray and DVD either so he doesn't bother to spend the 30$ for the discs.
To make matters even more complex, he has around 400 DVD's already. He's not going to re-buy all those on Blue-ray so his DVD player works just fine for him.
I own two Blue-ray players and would love to own more Blue-ray discs but truthfully, when new releases are coming out at 30$ it's easier for me to just download it from The Pirate Bay.
Furthermore, it's been a while since something came out I cared enough about to actual own. Maybe I'm getting old, but movies coming out these days just don't appeal to me. I think a lot of people feel the same right now, especially when money is tight in a down economy.
Plain and simple. Most people aren't looking to play in high definition on Frank's 2000 inch TV.
And for screens 60" and smaller high def, while noticeable just isn't enough of an improvement to merit the switchover.
That and the huge install base of DVD players and drives out there is just an 800 lb gorilla that Blu-Ray has to struggle to overcome.
And the capper.
If there had NOT been a credible format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, we'd probably have seen better adoption by now. The format war completely crippled uptake of the format for YEARS. As such, neither HD platform gained the critical early traction necessary to overtake DVD. Now, this late in the game, since it has to now compete with streaming/downloadable content as well, it's going to continue to stumble.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Odds, are it's a combination of the following..
1) higher price
2) limited playability (must have a blu-ray player which you can't get for 30 bucks)
3) requires a "newer TV" and the reality is many have tvs without HDMI (and the copy projection restriction mechanism that rides along)
4) for many it's not all that much extra. (me personally I have a 42" tv and things do look somewhat better, but the biggest thing I notice is subtitles are MUCH crisper in blu-ray., but I have to watch it on THAT tv only)
5) Refusal to purchase as a matter of principle of being PISSED at the movie studios for crippling DVDs..
- Have you noticed how DVDs now have less and less special features? As an attempt to "encourage" and punish you into buying blu-ray.
6) Can't really play blu-ray on your desktop computers.. and blu-ray is not a standard piece in computers AND software are not available for all platforms even.
7) Netflix and Redbox.
- Yeah I make frequent use of redbox.. I can "Try before I buy" and sift through all of the CRAP that comes out of hollywood for $1 a pop. And unfortunately there's a lot of crap so people just plain aren't going to spend 25-40 bucks to buy a piece of crap. They'll wait until it's in the $5 bin at wal-mart.
I'm not running out to re-purchase my entire collection of DVD's in Blu-Ray format...
And I've always been picky about what I purchase.
But any new movies I buy have been in Blu-Ray format.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
On my TV, (37" 720p/1080i) I don't notice any quality difference between Blu-ray and DVD.
But I do notice that the disks take a lot longer to load, trailers are harder to skip over (one blu-ray had nearly 15 minutes of trailers that I had to skip by fast-forwarding then when it hit the next one, I had to fast-forward again and repeat about 8 times), and I can't easily rip a Blu-ray to my hard drive so I can watch it on the plane.
There are several factors in the blue-ray story. First, and probably the most significant,; people are tired to death of being sold the same thing over again at the same or even higher prices just to have the new format. DVDs are not capable of the highest resolution, but neither are 90% of the devices they are being displayed on, and without the top of the current display technology, the difference is almost negligable, so people see no reason to shell out yet again. Finally, the price premium between the blue-ray and dvd devices is still a significant one, so until the DVD device they have has to be replaced, there is little incentive to go to the blue-ray and pay the higher prices.
Streaming and view-anywhere technologies are going to play a major role in the market and the movie industry will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the current process, where content is movable and the old "buy a copy for each device and format" model is laid to rest at last.
My first job out of college was at a consulting firm that primarily dealt with computer set ups for small/medium video production shops. This was during the transition from OS9 to OSX and the big thing people were discussing was the move to HD.
One of the biggest questions I got back then was "Should I get a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray burner?". Back in circa 2003 my answer was neither. The future was going to be digital content downloaded from the internet and/or the use of something like Compact Flash/SD/USB thumb drives. What I didn't know was whether the delivery of content would be via services like iTunes Store where you downloaded to a local hard drive, some kind of more traditional set top box, internet streaming or some combination of all three.
It looks like it is going to be video streaming. In 2005 I bought a Mac Mini and hooked it up to my 32" LCD TV's DVI port and cancelled my cable TV subscription. The few TV shows I watched was cheaper to by on iTunes than the $60 a month TV was costing me.
In 2009 I started streaming Netflx to my TV via Xbox for $8 a month. The new TV I just bought last christmas now has Netflix and Hulu built in.
In all that time I've never even considered getting a Blu-Ray other than considering getting a PS3. But I barely used my Xbox for gaming. I used it for streaming Netflix.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I have a BluRay player and I like it. I can notice the difference in quality even on my 5 year old 720p DLP TV. However, the load times are insane. From putting in the disc to finally starting the play button takes around 3 minutes. Just loading the disk takes almost 1 minute. Then you have to putz around with the previews and hopefully the disc lets you skip them. Whereas with Netflix on my Wii, I can click on a show or a movie and have it play withing 5 seconds with no BS previews or menu crap. So even at 480p, I prefer it. And once the new Wii comes out with HD support, forget it. I'll be done with disc-based players. Oh, and I don't have to worry about scratching the discs. Or losing them. Or putting them back in the boxes. Streaming is so much better.
DVD players are more universally available. When you need to go from the couch to the minivan, they don't put Bluray players in these things. DVD picture quality is good enough and works well with an upscaling DVD player. I resent having to re-purchase titles again in a new format, and the costs of Bluray are more compared to the same title on DVD.
It's really simple, not everyone has a high def tv. I have a ton of customers that still have a old school tube 4x3 TV and DVD's look fine on there. They really wouldn't be able to make use of blu ray without buying a new tv first so blu ray only suits a niche market at this point.
I bought a new TV and it didn't have SD hookups, given that I've had my DVD player since '99 I figured it was time to upgrade.
I could care less about the BluRay player, the feature that had me interested was the fact that it can stream MKVs over my network. I've taken the Herculean task of ripping my current DVD collection to MKV so that I don't have to play detective and look for missing/misplaced discs anymore.
That said, I have a couple of BluRay discs now, a couple came in those DVD/BluRay combo packs, I actually purchased "Dark City" (finally a good transfer!).
I think I'm getting done purchasing disc media altogether, it's bulky and largely pointless. Especially digging through the collection and asking myself "why did I buy this?".
crazy dynamite monkey
I no longer see the point in owning physical copies of media. Why spend my limited viewing time watching something I've seen before when my Netflix streaming queue has so much new stuff for me to see?
There's also the DRM issue. DVD players pretty much just work. My in-laws purchased a Blu-Ray player, but no longer use it since it refused to play a handful of movies they had rented. They're not going to bother with updating the firmware on their device when they could just watch a DVD instead.
All the major new releases at my walmart are featured in Blu-Ray. The HP movies as well now that the Deathly Hallow's is out. All the Redboxes in my area got Blu-Ray releases alongside the DVD releases now. And the players have gotten cheap finally.
I still only have DVD players but since I only rent now-a-days (or buy the DVDs I want when Redbox sells them for $5 after the rental run is over) so it's rental that will get me to buy a Blu-Ray player. And I'll probably only acquire Blu-Rays if I can help it. I really do like the extra resolution.
I would have gotten a player sooner if HD-DVDs prevailed. I wish they did. It kinda sucks bringing a Blu-Ray to someone's place and find out they only have a DVD player - that's still pretty common. HD-DVDs would have solved that problem by having both formats.... but I guess it was a lost game with the Playstation pushing early sales numbers of this format even if the buyers couldn't care less about Blu-Ray movies at the time.
I guess the malaise is about the whole thing is knowing the next format isn't going to be physical at all and Blu-Ray feels like a stop-gap measure in between then. It won't ever have the impact or ubiquity DVDs did.
50% market share isn't that bad is it? For a long time after DVDs came out VHS was still selling and renting well. Most people I know (including my parents) upgraded to Blu-Ray shortly after getting a >40" LCD.
I think that most people are just waiting for a price point/feature set to justify the switch. I finally purchased a blu-ray player when it dropped under $100 and included apps like Netflix streaming.
Compared to services like iTunes, Hulu, Netflix and, let's face it, torrents, physical media is a pain in the butt. No need to switch discs, access from (most) any device, no unskippable ads, etc.
I think a lot of the tech geeks and early adopters have already moved on; with or without the entertainment industry.
To the numbers of MKV downloads? It may be that fewer people are buying movies at all.
A lot of slash-dot users can't watch 3D and it is the same with HD. Many people's eyes can't see the difference especially between the pixels and just want a non-fat TV. I only have one blu ray and the difference is not enough for me to upgrade. High resolution is good for text (hence why mobile devices now have retina displays) But most people watch tv stuffing their face with food and drink and probably chatting to friends and can't notice minor texture differences between the two.
1) Good enough. DVD is good enough for the majority of people and content. While many feature films can benefit from the density blu-ray offers television series rarely will. Throw in that most people don't have either or both a good enough display and sound system to notice a difference.
2) Costs. Blu-Ray content still carries too much of premium. DVDs are still pricey. They have not reached the impulse level needed for small purchases. If you put the effort into you can buy your blu-ray or dvds are significantly cheaper prices even on release day. It just takes more work than most people wanted.
3) DVRs, Internet, WOW, etc There simply is a large amount of entertainment outside of movie watching available to people now. While streaming is coming up I don't see it making as much of a dent anytime soon even on DVD sales. Tech sites and users of them like this one don't cover a large enough portion of the buying population for an accurate sample of buying behavior.
Things going for Blu-Ray in the future.
Blockbusters and Hollywood Video are essentially dead. Gone, kaput. Being able to rent relieved many people of having to buy the actual disc. This might lead more people to try Netflix but a lot of moving buying and watching was impulse buys which were easy when you could just run down to your neighborhood rental store. The kiosks don't offer near the selection and Netflix still takes a day or two.
Pricing, the player price difference is still closing and the bargain bin blu-rays are falling. The razor model doesn't work well, especially when you don't control both ends of the market. So blu-ray has been hampered by both high player prices, requirement of a TV that supports HDMI (now guaranteed), and high disc prices. Two of those three are nearly completely a non issue now, only disc pricing remains a sticking point for some.
Streaming, yeah, it benefits Blu-Ray at this time. It looks like shit on a lot of large displays. I have had both good and bad experiences with it. When its bad its very bad and always seems to time itself to happen when you want to show it off. Hey guys, Watch this, oh, it never did that before, oh, just wait a minute I will figure it out.
While some may say its time has passed I am not complete sure on that. Streaming has a long way to go, simply follow the availability of high speed internet and then take a very very small portion of those people and that shows you the market possibilities.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
People bought new lcd tv's then hd was announced do you ditch the brand new tv in order to get a hd one? once you have a hd one you then have all your dvd's already do you spend several 100£'s on a new blu-ray player or £30 for an upscaling dvd player? The price for a blu-ray film is nearly double the dvd version for the same film! If the blu-ray and dvd were the same place or dvd was about to be removed from the market then there might be a reason to change over completely. Not all tv series or film are available on blu-ray!
The only reason we have blu-ray now is we have a PS3 and finally got an hd telly, so now we buy new films on blu-ray if we can get them on offer.
Blurays look noticeably better on my projector setup. The sound quality is great. I enjoy some of the added features. But DRM (for which there is no sugar-coated solution yet on GNU/Linux), higher cost, and more offensive crap such as advertisements which can't be skipped at the beginning of the disc have put me off. Not to mention this nonsense of certain bluray discs requiring firmware updates - this hasn't bitten me yet with a PS3, but what Joe Sixpack is going to want to deal with that?
Side-by-Side there's not much difference in picture quality.
Also the Blu-Ray industry is shooting itself in the foot. In order to prevent piracy and push pricey 3D they keep changing the formatting on the disks. If you don't install a firmware update in your player, the new disks don't play. Average people (i.e. non-techies) haven't a clue how to do this.
HP computers that once played Blu-Ray now don't, due to DRM problems.
I had Netflix at one time, mostly to get Blu-Ray disks by mail. Most of the disks arrived with a crack at the outer edge and wouldn't play. I cancelled Netflix.
Blu-Ray is just bad news all around.
What the fuck is the point?
And it "isn't catching on?" Plus the economy in the US still is pretty much in the crapper... what are worldwide figures? What are figures by country? Just because the US doesn't adopt something doesn't mean it's not getting adopted. The US has access to web streaming in HD of many shows and movies that the rest of the world does not - could that have anything to do with it?
I find that Blu-Ray kicks butt. Not for watching movies, but as a backup medium. Disks are relatively inexpensive, so I can do backups pretty easily, and they store a good amount (50GB or so.) So, the terabyte of stuff sitting on my NAS? Split it into 50 GB chunks, make disk based images (finalizing the session so no writes can be done), put the disks on a spindle, and call it completely backed up, where it can't be altered by malware in the future.
Next to having a modern high capacity tape drive, Blu-Ray is the best thing going for backups.
Of course, I use more than just one set of BD-R media, and make sure it is verified. In Windows, Nero's SecureDisk helps here as a tool for easy validation of a volume.
Now if Retrospect could start supporting BD drives not on its "blessed" hardware list, and allow autoconfiguration like they do with CD and DVD hardware, I'd be golden. But Nero works as well, though nowhere near as elegently.
Blu-ray is *not* /clearly/ superior - most people honestly can't tell the difference. Even on my 42in HDTV, I can't tell the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD unless I pause to see the jaggies. There was some study (done in Holland?) where they told people a picture was HD, then randomly showed them SD or HD; they couldn't tell the difference. In technical terms, Blu-Ray isn't that much of a jump from DVD either. Add to this the draconian copy protection, the higher probability that a Blu-Ray will become unplayable due to even minor scratches, the ridiculous pricing schemes, the unskippable ads and FBI warnings, the fact that streaming fixes a lot of these problems, and you have a product ready to go nowhere.
Nathan's blog
Uh, "Operator Not Allowed" ring a bell? Annoying as shit. Worse, Disney have now, oddly, included a Fast Play option. Not odd, because if you have a disney movie, you have kids and they aren't known for their patience.
No, what's odd is that Fast Play plays all the built-in crap they want to advertise to you.
Hardly fast.
Plus, back on subject, BD tries very hard to shaft the user up the jacksie. And, strangely enough, people don't like it.
Why would you buy into a format like Blu-Ray when it's such an obvious technological dead-end? When DVDs came out, they were so much better than VHS, that people pretty much switched over when the price got low enough for them. But with the Blu-Ray, the advantages are much subtler, you really need HDTV (which already excludes a big chunk of the market), and DVD quality is good enough. And with the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war, I think many people who might have adopted Blu-Ray sat on the sidelines waiting for that to be settled. By the time Blu-Ray finally emerged victorious, it seemed pretty clear that it was already obsolete.
Sure, there are a lot of problems with online video services right now, and the quality is not as good as Blu-Ray. But physical media is obviously going to be replaced by online video in the near future, and the quality and selection problems will work themselves out with scale. So unless you're not bothered buying into something only to throw it out in a year or two, I can't imagine adopting Blu-Ray now (and if that applies to you, you've probably already done so).
The article states that Blu-ray player shipments are about to outstrip plain DVD. It's not like Blu-ray has failed. It *has* taken a while to capture the people who are still moving to HD. It *may* have a problem in competition with streaming (if you live in an area where there's sufficient bandwidth). I suppose the biggest issue is: will people continue to want to "own" content in physical form? The case is still out on that one (and even a minority position might be a very large market). Personally I think Blu-ray is still the only way to go if you've got/built a home theater.
Blue ray started way to expensive and it pushed people away from it. For the average person it offers nothing that a DVD doesn't. Better picture that many even with HD TV will never see, Better sound that most of HD TV will never hear. Just no difference for the average viewer and slightly higher media cost.
My first job out of college was at a consulting firm that primarily dealt with computer set ups for small/medium video production shops. This was during the transition from OS9 to OSX and the big thing people were discussing was the move to HD.
One of the biggest questions I got back then was "Should I get a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray burner?". Back in circa 2003 my answer was neither. The future was going to be digital content downloaded from the internet and/or the use of something like Compact Flash/SD/USB thumb drives. What I didn't know was whether the delivery of content would be via services like iTunes Store where you downloaded to a local hard drive, some kind of more traditional set top box, internet streaming or some combination of all three.
It looks like it is going to be video streaming. In 2005 I bought a Mac Mini and hooked it up to my 32" LCD TV's DVI port and cancelled my cable TV subscription. The few TV shows I watched was cheaper to by on iTunes than the $60 a month TV was costing me.
In 2009 I started streaming Netflx to my TV via Xbox for $8 a month. The new TV I just bought last christmas now has Netflix and Hulu built in.
In all that time I've never even considered getting a Blu-Ray other than considering getting a PS3. But I barely used my Xbox for gaming. I used it for streaming Netflix.
This is my reason, I cannot stand optical disks......... they suck.
I generally no longer buy movies. (Disclaimer: I don't have kids so maybe once I do this will change.) I get them through netflix. For a couple extra bucks a month I get blu ray discs from netflix. I built a home theater (110" screen and 1080p projector) so I also don't go to the movie theater anymore.
For me there's a huge difference between DVD and blu-ray on new content. On older stuff it depends how well the transfer was done to blu ray.
I use the PS3 to play the discs (at least they haven't taken that away yet!) and it's been doing a fine job since 2007. I was a bit surprised to read this title because from my perspective blu-ray has been a huge success.
Comes with .. but not worth the extra $$ media cost.
Charter development and story line count more than the nth pixel. Jaws is great in any format. Speed Racer is lame in any format.
When was the last time your DVD player:
- demanded a firmware update to play a disc?
- took 3 minutes to load a disc?
- threatened to chop you down to 320x240 because you weren't using an "approved" output?
- inexplicably crashed for any reason other than a physically damaged disc?
As others have said, DVD's are good enough for most people. I'm somewhat of an AV geek and even I'm satisfied with the quality of a decent dvd. Especially with an upscaling progressive output DVD player. I estimate I'll be getting my first Blu-ray player in a few months--only so I can upscale my DVD's and so that the remote is compatible with my programmable (which for some odd reason, my current one is not--what kind of a self respecting geek has to use two remotes for their AV system?...)
No multi-region.
I would quite like one. I can afford one. I just don't want to have to check every beforehand every single time I go to buy an imported DVD whether it will work.
A lot of the discs are multi-region now. Most studios have realised it's not actually helping them, but I'm still obligated to buy a crippled player.
Well, I can wait. I can get perfectly adequate 720p video files online while I wait.
The movie studios will tell you that Pirates are to blame.
They cost too much. $35-$40 for a new Disney combopack? Ridiculous. Most of the other studios are about as bad on new releases. For that price, I might as well go to the video game aisle and pay $60 for a new game is going to last 8-10 hours.
I do buy almost exclusively blu-ray, but thanks to their prices, they've made me stick to a policy of waiting at least a year before buying most movies.
DVD upscaling on blu-ray players over HDMI works amazingly well,
so I have no incentive to buy blu-ray discs of movies I already own.
I own a blu-ray player bought to replace a broken dvd player and one blu-ray disc.
If they lowered the price to 9.99 USD, I'll bet they would sell ten times as many discs.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Because like Fiber channel over ethernet, they try to charge a lot more for it yet it isn't all that much different. Fiber channel over ethernet should be as cheap as iSCSI, but it's not. It's a marketing gimmick to charge more money.
If they wanted BluRay to become the new standard, they would price it equal to DVDs. If they did that, DVDs would go away. They are just trying to squeeze more money out of their customers.
While I get blu-ray when I can, I've gotten more picky about what I get, partly because since DVRs there's actually so much good tv that I can actually watch, I don't have time for movies. But even on my 8' projection screen, between a good upconverting player and a lot of crappy blu-ray builds, the difference is minor. Getting the early bond movies on blu-ray was a waste of money for example. And a lot of the "extras" on blu-ray are useless fluff I have no interest in, if it doesn't actually get in the way. Then they're usually double the price of a dvd --- I *refuse* to pay $30, and will wait until they're at least down in the $20 range.
I tend to use DVDs the same way I use audio CDs.
I have a large music collection on vinyl, mostly built up before CDs became a big thing. I didn't start buying CDs until I got my first MP3 player (a "Nike psa[play", nifty little weatherproof player with Diamond Rio guts inside). Suddenly, audio CDs were a delivery mechanism that gave me music I wanted in a format I could easily use, that I could load up onto my devices and then store the original media for archival/backup purposes.
These days, that's the same thing I do with bought DVDs. I don't buy a DVD unless it's something I want to watch over and over (eg. "Cosmos", "Connections") or watch occasionally while traveling (eg. my tai chi workout video), and in those cases, I want to rip the video, load it on to my phone, laptop, and/or tablet, and watch it wherever.
(For stuff I only want to watch once? That, I rent, whether via digital delivery to my XBox 360 or AppleTV, or via Netflix mailing plastic media to our house -- which I don't rip, I just watch it and mail it back.)
From everything I've read, as a mechanism for getting video files for my phone and such, BluRay is considerably worse than DVD, partly because of some crazy moving-target DRM stuff and partly because of the Java integration.
Some day maybe I'll get a BluRay drive for a computer for data purposes, or a game console with a BluRay drive, or something like that. But even then, I can't see getting BluRay movies as long as the DVD version is available for at worst the same price (I won't even pay Netflix extra to mail me BluRay rentals) and is still easier for me to actually use. (Now, if BluRay becomes cheaper than DVD, I'll have to do some thinking.)
DVDs caught on because you could go and buy a DVD player and play DVDs. With Blu-Ray you need to go and buy a Blu-Ray player and, in most cases, also buy a hi-def TV costing 3-4 times the price of the player. The price of hi-def TVs has come down a lot but Blu-Ray is years old now so the novelty has worn off.
Also Blu-Ray discs are obnoxiously expensive. You can usually get a new release DVD for £10 or the Blu-Ray for £20-25. People (at least here in the UK) simply don't have that kind of disposable income at this time.
To get the full resolution of Blu-Ray I need a 1080 screen. I don't have one. In fact, I have an old CRT. Nor do I have it hooked up to a fancy 6 or 8 channel stereo system, so I'd also miss out on most of the auditory benefits of Blu-Ray. DVDs offer a better picture than VHS, and you can't rent VHS anymore. So I mostly watch DVDs.
Now let's suppose I were willing to upgrade to a new screen. If I get a 1080 one then I can watch Blu-ray at full-res. But, then, any DVD I watch is going to look worse than it would on a 720 screen, which is its native resolution. Moreover, much of the HD television content is 720, which will also look worse than if I had a native 720 screen. If I get a 720 screen, on the other hand, I can guarantee that all my non-broadcast content will run at its native resolution as well as the majority of broadcast HD television. Blu-Ray will still look and sound better than DVD on a 720 screen, but the delta is a lot less.
I don't care if a movie doubles its resolution. But I do care for FPS. Make movies in 48 or more FPS and then we can talk about quality.
Oh yeah, and most people won't care anyway.
I'm an early adopter, but I'd never adopted BluRay. Why?
a) DRM. I'm not interested in screwing around with DRM to use content that I've purchased.
b) Lack of BluRay support on all my devices - Linux.
c) DVD looks great and I can play them and back them up to a network HDD easily.
d) Stories about BluRay players that stop working after a new disc is played. The keys were revoked.
As consumers, we don't always want "more", sometimes efficiency matters too. A 4GB file that looks as good as a 40GB file is impressive.
3D - don't want it. I get a headache with 3D crap. Not in my house until the 50" TV is $500. This is just TV after all, not anything important.
I don't want more features added to TVs to keep them at $1500, give me a TV at a lower price instead.
BluRay isn't doing well because it's a PITA to use.
Benefits? What benefits?
1. Disks cost almost twice as much.
2. New disks with "improved" content controls regularly break players.
3. Unless you've got a huge home theater the "on-screen" benefits are marginal at best. And home theater screens are NOT cheap.
4. More and more extraneous crud on the disks. e.g. forced trailers
5. DVD rentals are still available, and unless it's a hugely great movie *cough* Pixar *cough*, it's just not worth BUYING the content,
since, with few exceptions, most movies are see-once, if they're worth watching at all.
Hellooo - Marketing Guys..
You read all that? Did it sink in??? (probably not)
OK, now ask us about 3D TV and cinema.
KTHxBye
AT&ROFLMAO
to stream Netflix movies with its built-in Netflix streaming.
The benefits simply do not take a far enough step away from DVDs. Also, there has not been enough time since the last media switch from cassettes to DVDs. Finally, as most all have mentioned, visual quality isn't actually that important. Maybe it's even unsettling, the same way Americans balk at 60fps because it looks like a home video. It's just not what they want to see.
Plus, why do I want to watch something on media that sounds like it was named after aquatic life?
A more expensive disc format requiring more expensive players that usually only has a noticeably difference on >40" screens in a precarious economy overtaking the cheaper option leads to the conclusion that it's not taking hold?
The increased quality of Bluray video does not justify the 4x cost difference to DVD. I can buy DVDs of decent movies at Walmart for $5-10 all day long, and the Blurays of the same movies cost $20-40 on Bluray.
On a 110" 1080p screen OF COURSE you are going to notice a difference. You are an outlier
Good-bye
The choice to move from VHS to DVD was pretty easy. VHS movies were not all that cheap and while DVD was more expensive, sure, you got something that seemed to be more durable and the picture quality was better than most TVs being used to view them.
Blu-ray offers better picture and some extra software and potential integration features, but for just watching movies, you have a very expensive upgrade for most users who greatly expanded their movie collections with DVD.... in short, it offers very little difference for most and it's expensive.
Now... blu-ray is supposed to be even more durable than DVD... so maybe there could come a day when Blu-ray takes hold... but I doubt it. With the increase in streaming media (which is usually of a lesser quality, sometimes just on par with DVD or just a bit better), people are opting for convenience over quality.
Personally, I think Blu-ray is dead... and given how it all came about, I think justice has been served once more...
thought so.
basically the movie world it dead set to repeat everything the audio world tries, 5-10 years later...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
1. DVDs work just fine
2. DVDs are CHEAPER
3. DVDs look great on my "HD ready" TV with only analog component inputs. Why purchase blue ray only to be drm'd back to DVD quality?
4. DVDs are easier to archive and copy.
5. I refuse to spend $100-$200 for a blue ray player.
going from VHS to DVD was an obvious step forward, same with 8-track->cassette->CD, and B&W TV ->color TV-> High Def TV
DVD to Blu-ray, the difference is not that dramatic, especially whine you don't have a large High Def TV... anything under 35" the difference is negligible.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I have a Blu-ray player/writer on my computer and own 0 Blu-ray movies. Why? Because they are unplayable on Linux thanks to the encryption forced down at my throat. I bought this drive to have greater storage space than on DVDs and seems that this drive will remain as such and all video content will come from DVDs.
Betamax was better than tape too, what happened there?
....seriously tho, it sure looks like Toshiba "won" the format war by taking the fat payout from Sony.
Except for me, of course, I was one of the morons that bought a Toshiba HD-A3 dvd player. It's a nice upsampling DVD player, but with HD being dead it's overqualified for what it does... (what did netflix DO with all their HD loaners?)
-Styopa
People don't care about quality, they want convenience. SACD & DVD-A came around about the same time MP3 caught on. Once you could buy an iPod and carry around days worth of music, dealing with more discs just didn't make sense.
Now we have the same choice on the video-front. Blu-ray vs download/streaming. I can start watching something downloaded from iTunes or streaming on Netflix on one device (Living room TV, Office computer, Laptop, Tablet, etc...) then continue it wherever I want, whenever I want. (Netflix will even remember where I paused)
Obviously Blu-Ray is going to look better on the big-screen in the living room, just like SACD/DVD-A is going to sound better on the home-theater. Just doesn't matter when you are laying in bed, riding on the bus, or sitting in a hotel room across the country.
Sidenote: I'm sure it will come at some point, but Netflix/iTunes also hasn't forced me to sit through a commercial, or accused me of copyright infringement yet...
N/T
I bought a 46" LCD & blu ray player at christmas. Finally. I've watched bluray vs. DV versions of pirates of the caribbean --- no noticable difference in quality to me, and it's perfectly acceptable.
The funny part is that we mostly use the BD to watch streaming netflix, which is perfectly adequate quality for us.
i would also dump cable if it was just me, but my wife still watches it --- I can't stand the commercials anymore.
We recently got our first blue-ray player. This is after a string of DVD players which barely lived to the end of their warranties. I think quality is definitely a forgotten art, everything is made so cheaply. The real annoyance is intolerance for scratches. Almost every movie we watch stops and has to be skipped through at least once. One out of every four movies it seems like we end up having to take back. This is usually due to tiny little scratches that I remember being able to play through no problem in older players when DVD was newer. It's not just Blueray or even this player. DVDs do it too and our more recent DVD players did it.
Maybe I'm just being too cheap myself and need to buy a more expensive player? I don't know. Rented VHS sucked too, the tape stretched with use and just wore out in general creating a lousy picture. At least you could almost always still watch it though. You didn't have to stop and restart it but if you did it at least you didn't have to find your spot again. Actually, our new Blueray player does remember the spot but that often times just drops it right back into the scratch that stopped it in the first place.
There's a point at which HD porn becomes entirely too clinical and detailed, too. Sometimes fuzzy lower-def is simply much more flattering, for the same reason that they don't have bright lights in strip clubs.
Some of the shots included in pornos include would be MUCH less flattering in higher definition. Do you really want to see every razor bump, pimple, blemish, grain of makeup, or wrinkle on your favorite performer in larger-than-life detail?
Blu-Ray costs more, can only be used in one device in my home (as opposed to five or six for DVD), and can't be ripped to be used on many other devices in my home. If I want HD, and am going to be locked in anyway, I might as well buy from iTunes: I don't have to worry about ripping it myself, and I can use it on many devices in my home.
I've never bought a Blu-Ray movie except for when it comes in the combo pack, so I get the free download with it.
I already own a TV that doesn't do HD. I already have a DVD player. The economy is crap, and I have no money. I can't afford $1000+ for a new TV, $400+ for a Blu-Ray player (even a PS3), and whatever it would cost for a good surround sound system right now. It's not that I don't *want* Blu-Ray, it's that I have no means to upgrade at this time. Hopefully it lives long enough to allow me to make the switch eventullally, because I have seen whatt it can do, and I am actually impressed; the problem is purely financial.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
People have realized that you get just as much enjoyment from a DVD as you do from a blu-ray disc, and it's cheaper and easier to get. The fact that all of this happened while the economy was already poor means people had a lot less money to go buy new gadgets, so they had TIME to realize there was no point.
Also, some of us still can't see "blu-ray" without wanting to pronounce it "blurry", and that kind of ruins it for us.
I bought a HD TV and a Blu-ray player last year. Since then I've purchased several Blu-ray discs, but I've been very disappointed in them. The most recent Blu-ray disc I purchased is the Extended cut of the movie Stargate. But the quality of the movie was awful (very grainy in most scenes) . I also came across a friend who had the extended cut of the DVD so I borrowed it so I could compare the two on the same screen. I couldn't see any significant difference in video quality, but if there was any difference at all it was that mine was grainier. But I certainly did see that the DVD release had a lot more content that the Blu-ray! The DVD had several "extras" including "making off" features and the films trailers, the Blu-ray did not! Curiously the Blu-ray did have English subtitles that the DVD lacked, but the DVD had Spanish subtitles that the Blu-ray lacked.
In theory, Blu-ray is capable of being much better than DVD. But if the studios are not going to provide a quality product, and just up-convert their DVD content and sell it as HD quality, then the format should die. And unfortunately, I know of no way for a consumer to determine if the Blu-ray is well made from an original HD source or just reprocessed low deff DVD content before they actually buy it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Rice University did a study titled: "The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Rating". They found that it does not matter on the quality of the video, but the content of the video the determines the enjoyment of said movie. Based on that alone, you can see that people are only going to upgrade if DVDs are faded out or they are the same price as DVDs.
(1) Netflix
(2) How many different re-releases of the same movie in a different format does one need?
(3) Redbox
(4) Companies are eventually going to move to a cloud based storage system where you purchase a license but retain none of the content, so why would anyone want to hang on to legacy products?
(5) Only one of the three current generation game consoles comes with a blu ray player.
I'm only partly joking.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
I've never been a fan of repurchasing libraries I already own. I've tried to avoid buying anything on DVD that I ever bought on VHS and Blu-ray seemed to be more about planned obsolescence rather than improved quality. The last straw for me was when DVDs started coming out with ads that essentially said "you should have bought this on Blu-ray!" Now I actively cheer for it to fail.
And don't forget the royalties that Sony gets. If I ever get a Blu-ray, and that is rare for a plethora of other reasons given by other replies, it will be second-hand.
I suppose most new purchases of players will select a Blu-Ray. But going to the store when you have a perfectly good DVD player seems unlikely.
A Snappy answer is that it failed because there are no Apple computers with blue ray built in. Sony tried to keep this proprietary from day one. It got into a pissing contest with Toshiba that delayed it. They didn't cut deals with other makers early. They didn't get them early into Apple or IBM or Toshiba computers (which is where the high end customers lurk). Just into Sony products early.
I think they drank their own Koolaide on the PS3s technical superiority and assumed that bundle pricing would make people buy that to get a blue ray, and a Bravia to get whatever HDTV standard sony wanted, and then buy Sony Pictures movies in blue ray.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
it has horrible DRM and nobody wants other people telling them what to do in their own living room.
"Strategy Analytics researcher Peter King recently said his analysts were surprised that DVD player sales continued to be so strong against Blu-ray players."
yeah. conclusion: your analysts are overpaid idiots.
My latest DVD player has an excellent "up sampling" feature, that makes DVD's look better on my HD TV. And this was an inexpensive Walmart DVD player, so I suspect "up sampling" is probably appearing on the majority of DVD players nowadays. Having DVD players built for making movies look better on HD TV's is another reason NOT to bother with Blu-Ray.
As the above poster mentioned $15 seems to be a pricing threshold for a movie. Personally I think even that is to high, but $15 would be enough to get my interest at the very least.
I have had a great experience with Bluray and really appreciate the increased quality in video and sound as well as reduced number of discs for things like TV series. But in the end, I still buy three or four $3-5 DVDs at some Big Box Store for each Bluray. Buying on Bluray means I'm committing to really wanting to own something for a long time to go back to and watch again and again. A $3 DVD is something that I will watch more than once so it's worth not renting or hoping it comes up streaming. A $3 DVD is a movie my girlfriend and I wanted to see but never got to in theaters and isn't likely to be streaming.
You're talking about the difference between renting and owning a copy. But if you are downloading a copy when you want to see the movie than you are most likely downloading not only a low res DVD copy but also a further compressed for lower bandwidth usage version. So you obviously don't care about quality at all, any crap is good enough for you. The discussion here was about (supposedly) higher quality Blu-Ray discs and DVDs, not about renting low quality video.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
really, you just got my money does blu-ray really have to shove it down your throat with forcing you to watch something too? That and I had a free blu-ray that did not work and would play some director picture-in-picture with no way to turn it off. And finally, turn on the player to watch something and it updates. Blu-ray manufactures and movie companies act like they don't like money.
When DVD hit, people got better image quality out of the televisions they already had. If you don't already have a high def TV, then that Blu-Ray player isn't going to do anything for you.
Compounding that is the ignorance of the public. Many of those who already own high definition televisions frankly don't understand what the benefit of Blu-Ray is. They figure that because they got the high def television, they're already getting better quality images, so why spend the extra money on a Blu-Ray player? I know this sounds stupid, but it took me years to convince my brother of the benefits of a Blu-Ray player. In the end, the only way I could get him to see the difference was to buy him one as a Christmas gift.
We usually rent from RedBox (its hard to beat $1 a day) and although most of the titles are crap, I don't rent for myself, I rent for the kids. Right now they offer Blue Ray and DVD. If they ever quit offering DVD, then I might consider a BR player. But we have a nice surround sound dvd player with a subwoofer (that we got cheap cause BR was all the rage). I'd hate to have to get a cheap BR machine and lose it.
The few TV shows I watched was cheaper to by on iTunes than the $60 a month TV was costing me.
You're obviously not a sports fan. Try to watch EPL, La Liga, NHL, NBA online... it's awful.
As a AV enthusiast I can see the quality benefits but there's a lot of down sides to Blu-ray over DVD too. There's a few reasons Blu-ray has really failed to take off. * a lot of people believe they'll have to replace their entire DVD collection which of course is completely untrue. Shit even saw a few posts here with that myth. It's just that the DVD version won't look or sound as good as if you upgrade it - I know I'm not except for a few exceptions. * most Blu-ray players aren't that good a DVD player quality wise so serious AV guys have a DVD player and a Blu-ray player * the cost per disc is more. Bundling the DVD and digital download with the Blu-ray makes some people think they ae being ripped off. I know I do, I don't want all that extra shit - just lower the damn price * most people can't tell the difference - how many times you seen a LCD monitor in a non native resolution and the user is blissfully unaware how shit it looks? Also Hollywood aren't helping themselves here with some movies being dismal conversions. * players are more expensive * most players are god awful slow just to even eject the tray let alone start the movie * ever tried to resume a Java Blu-ray disc after stopping it or ejecting it like you can with DVD? - unless you bookmark your place back to the beginning you go plus the long load time.This really irrates me * alot of people are intimidated with all the extra technology - all the differnet profiles, internet connectivity, HDMI & firmware updates - DVD really is quite simple to use and no where as near as intimidating * still the use of regions although not as bad as DVD's are
The "HD" DVR our cable company supplies, along with our subscription package provides more entertainment that we can keep up with in the little leisure time we have. We kept making noises about getting Netflix last summer, but never got around to it. Never got around to buying a blu-ray player, haven't bothered to hook up the old DVD player after re-arranging things, and haven't bothered to hook up one of the laptops to do streaming from the web.
Convenience rules.
Granted, there's a bit of "meh, let's watch this" factor, instead of always watching what we really want. But even with Netflix, you'd have to wait for stuff to show up in your mail box, and who knows if it's as high a priority when it arrives as it was when you added it to your queue. If Netflix could pull off Qwest's 1999 boast of "any movie, any time, any where", then I might get out of my la-z-boy.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Because I hate Sony and don't want to have to worry about connecting my movie player to the Internet to make sure discs will play? I don't want another device in my life that I have to troubleshoot randomly late at night.
Plus, I'm just using discs less in general. I'm much more likely to browse around on Netflix streaming for something to watch than I am to go get a DVD. It's more convenient and I've already got more in my queue than I have time to watch.
My TV needs an upgrade waaay before my DVD player does. If I was to invest in Blu-Ray it would not be noticeable on my tiny old CRT TV. I have more important things to spend my money on.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
A blu-ray disc offers nothing more than a nicer picture. Admittedly it's a much nicer picture but you need the right TV for it too which yet another cost on top of the already more expensive discs. But other the nicer picture I can't do anything new with them like (legally and easily) convert it to a digital file.
I own nearly 500 DVDs there is no way in hell I'm going to replace even a 1/5 of those for blu-ray. I suspect most people feel the same way about their existing DVD collection and then if you look how people are quite happy to buy low quality mp3s and listen to them on shitty ipod earphones you can pretty much assume people aren't as fussed about quality as new functionality and freedom which blu-ray does not provide.
What's the point of Blu-Ray unless the story-line is taking advantage of the visual quality available to the viewer?
What's the point of a romantic comedy on BR. Or a murder mystery, general audience comedy, or drama... The only genres I can see taking advantage of BR are Sci-Fi, Action, and pure Animations. Everything else has nothing really to gain by the BR spec for producing A/V, unless your somehow tying in external features to instances within the film itself, thus requiring the viewer to pay closer attention to scene aspects.
As someone who has looked at the BR spec, I'm fully aware of what's possible. Churning out 25+GB of synchronized data, IMO, is not a monumental task for an art-house. What we've seen offered thus far offered on BR for purchase, barely scratches the surface of what is possible with the tech. But that's irrelevant, since hard media is absolete.
So what's the hold up? The simple fact is, BR is not designed to replace the DVD. It is a stop gap of current technology, delaying the foothold till the next wide-scale distribution model for content sorts itself out on the Internet. BR is the ~cheapest way to hold off any 1 particular tech house from coming in and creating something devastatingly easier for wide-scale HQ media distribution.
Where is this going? No where fast. Until I can stream online, 1080P and 7.1 DSS without buffering or image defects at any hour of the day, for a fair price, BR is nothing more than a distraction. Specific media, requiring specific hardware, under specific circumstances. No thank you! I'll go back to creating my own content for now, which is what all this is about. Content.
How many movies today are rehashed originals, or genre variations? I'd say maybe 2% of annual films have an original storyline element. Have we reached a creativity singularity? Not likely. There's plenty of creative content out there, enough to cover the wide arena of tastes that the public has for viewed media. But that isn't what is being offered is it. It's large art-houses, picking mediocre content and storyline, releasing half-ass interaction on a stop-gap media foot-print. That isn't to be said that the occasional release doesn't have something valid to take away from it, but that is rarity in the industry when it should be the norm.
We're seeing more information sharing and creativity exposed to the masses than with any other time in history and what we have offerred before us is the best the people w/ money can do? BR hasn't failed, people. The people who put BR out there have failed to take advantage of it during a time when society is at odds with the transition away from the physical medium.
$30 will feed me for a week. You really want that much for a new BR disk, a 2 hour HQ movie? I'll eat for the week, thanks! Maybe next month.
I was an HDTV early adopter, and I definitely appreciate the higher resolution of BluRay.
But, my blu-ray player sits unplugged in my entertainment center now, because I couldn't put up with all the Blu-Ray hassles. Blu-Ray discs seem to be more aggressive in forcing me to watch commercials (locking out the skip forward button), and they have increased the number of ads that are on the discs.
I pay $20+ to buy a movie, only to put it in the player and be forced to watch commercial after commercial before I can see the movie. No thanks. They even put Blu-Ray commercials in many of the discs. If I didn't already have a BD player, how the hell would I be watching the commercial? I'm sure their logic is "not all the viewers are the owner of the BD player, friends and guests need to see the BD commercial to know they need to run out and buy one too." Which is the root of the problem.. the attitude is "screw the customer, let's take every option we have to force advertisements."
So, now I either rent DVDs (which I can easily rip to avoid the ads), or watch movies via Netflix streaming to iTunes store. None of these have the full HD quality (although iTunes is not bad). But, they get right to the movie with no ads (yet).
http://www.screendigest.com/www/reports/2010629b/10_07_evolution_of_home_entertainment_chart.gif
Blu ray is catching up just fine. This is the same type of pace DVD had to face when it had to tackle VHS as a dominant format. Looking at the chart, It took DVD 4 years to make a substantial entry and BR's numbers are greater in the same time period. When the article claims that more than "half" of the sales went to blue ray and looking at the history of these formats, I am trying to figure our "why" people are trying to paint some sort of dire picture here.
Nowadays, it's pretty commonplace for desktop and laptop computers to be equipped with DVD drives (and DVD burners), meaning people can freely watch DVD movies on practically any modern computer, as well as freely create their own DVD content. It's not nearly as common for Blu-Ray drives (much less Blu-Ray burners) to be included with most computers. It doesn't help that Apple pretty much refuses to include Blu-Ray drives as even an option for their computers. Until this changes, DVD will remain more popular and a more accessible format than Blu-Ray.
a problem is that only movies/show that were made in the last decade are really going to benefit from the improved quality. even films that are supposedly digitally remastered, don't really look great on blu ray. it's still going to look dated. So why should I pay extra for something that really wont look better than it did on dvd or vhs.
the other and more important issue is that most consumer screens are horrendous. just because something says it is HD, doesn't mean it is high quality; with most consumer products(tvs or cameras), it's basically become jargon for widescreen. So yeah, you can plug an hdmi cable into it, but you aren't really getting high quality viewing. I've stop watching TV now because everything just looks better on my Imac's super high quality screen, which is also good for the video editing I do. But screens that nice run about $1000 for 27" and that combined with an expensive blu-ray player, plus the more expensive blu-ray disks themselves, can price you out of the market of most consumers.
There are a couple posts alluding to this fact, but I'll just go on a bit more about it.
The general public doesn't care about quality. They care about convenience, then price, then quality. DVDs were way more convenient than VHS tapes, competed decently in terms of price (players and discs were more inline with expectations vs something like Laserdisc), and quality was a significant improvement, especially with progressive scan.
Bluray can be a significant jump over DVDs as well, but to get there you have to invest in a TV that performs well at a size big enough to appreciate the quality. Unfortunately most people just buy mediocre to bad LCD TVs with horrible color reproduction with contrast and brightness settings completely messed up for proper viewing. Then they put a 42" TV in their living room and sit 10 feet or more away from it. At that distance/size ratio, you might as well be watching a DVD; not that it matters, because without TV calibration, your stuff is going to look awful. It's not hard to calibrate a TV, and even with only a rudimentary set of controls (a color slider, a brightness slider, a contrast slider) you can get decent results. These days it's not even that hard to find an ISF capable TV that allows you to dial in each color and black/white levels perfectly.
But it's all lost on the masses because most people don't bother, and don't even know what they're missing. That, plus the fact that the convenience factor is the same and the price is noticeably a notch higher causes slow uptake in sales. Just look at streaming video and downloaded MP3s - even the masses know the quality isn't exactly great, but the convenience factor has caused streaming to explode in popularity.
I'm a total film fanatic. I'm not a crazy audio/videophile, but I DO like to have my stuff set up so that I can really see/hear details; my TV and sound system are calibrated properly (no, I don't use $400 HDMI cable, nor do I buy into any snake oil components - I just calibrate down to standards). That said, I haven't repurchased any of my existing DVD library, unless there's a significant increase in the value of the product. North By Northwest, for example, is a DVD I repurchased as a Bluray because it had a TON of extras, came with a great production book, and the transfer is absolutely, eye burningly beautiful. It's almost up there with a pristine film print. But for the most part, I don't re-purchase any of my existing library. I do buy NEW stuff as Bluray by default.
If a blu-ray player wasn't built into my ps3, I'd never touch the things. I still usually only buy DVD, all the blu ray discs I have are gifts from family that know I have one.
It's all about costs, DVDs are cheaper, and in an economy where every dollar counts, guess which one I'm going to buy if I feel I have to buy one?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Stupid Question:
1) Most DVD players these days can be made region-free easily.
2) Converting Blue Rays to upload to Pirate Bay is much harder and needs more beef.
3) Blue-Rays are too expensive...Reduced cost DVDs has only made them more popular.
4) Blue-Ray is Sony...They are destined to fail in a format war...forever.
5) Based on 1) above, I can't watch my Blue-Rays I bought in the UK for my PS3 on my US bought PS3...why? Stupid.
6) Blue-Ray content different per region...Unfair...Won't buy because of this.
I hire my blue-rays...I have no need to buy them...hiring becomes more interesting due to high purchase price. However a good movie I want to keep I will buy on DVD for 1/4 the price...Sit far enough from the TV you can't really tell that much of a difference (maybe in sound yes).
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
Call me a Apple Fanboy, but Steve Jobs is right: It's a bag of hurt.
I've been impressed with the image and audio quality, but man: are these things slow. And the crashes, need to updates. etc.
In one year I've already owned 2 blu-ray devices, just to keep track.
Let's get a real standard fast, like DVD was.
p.s. And yes: I do believe Apple should at least support 3rd party blu-ray devices. It's quite annoying they don't, while PCs do!
Blu-ray isn't all that much better than DVDs and I already have a DVD player and content on DVDs. No need to buy either all over again. All this upgrading over and over again of hardware, software, media and content is just a scam to try to get us to pay for the same thing many times. I'm not buying it.
It's simple: Blu-ray adoption is competing with digital downloads. And people sticking to DVDs are the same people who bought VHS tapes well into the 00s and audio cassette tapes well into the 90s -- they'll switch eventually, but don't hold your breath.
I live in a country where the amazing American Netflix download/watch is not a practical option.
I also live so far from any rental place, that rent-rip-return is my best practical approach: wait for a time when I know that I'll be making two trips within the same week, bring home a stupid big pile, r-r-r, and watch them over the next six months.
But I went and got a blu-ray player. I turn it on. Go to the bathroom. Hit the eject button. Fix lunch. Put in the disk. Go out and garden while the bluddy can't-go-past-this-crap runs. Then watch the movie.
I'm better off with "Starz" and a TiVo!
-Eldurbarn
We have used our PS-3 for Blu-ray for a couple of years now and are very satisfied. We rent most of our movies from netflix and for us its worth the small blu ray surcharge
People still use disks? I have not put in a DVD in about a year. Netflix streaming to my xbox has killed any need for a disk for me.
Additionally: why BD? Really. With the higher quality codec, you can get one full size HiDef movie on a single dual-layer DVD. Why did they go to a 50GB disk format?
Because they could get you to buy in to more DRM.
If they'd coded up on DVD they couldn't.
We got a Blue Ray on a black Friday sale for $99.
I didn't get it for picture, enhanced features or really anything to do with the blue ray player part..
I got it because its a nice streaming media player with native HDMI, firmware upgradable and I could easily hook up to my TV.
It replaced the old DVD and streaming PC in the cabinet cutting down on heat, power and the number of remotes laying around.
The fact that it plays Blue-Ray disks is a bonus but DVD's still rule the house.. I can't play Blue Ray on the 5 PC's, kids basement TV or in the car player..
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Because Blu-ray sucks!
Another reason is that DVDs are way easier to copy, rip, and burn. Plus, the blanks are WAY cheaper.
Blurays biggest problem is in its updates. The users who have the savvy to burn .iso updates or to connect their player to their wireless network have the savvy to stream or order from their cable provider. You have restricted your market to people with some technical ability who will buy blurays when a movie is epic enough to warrant it.
DVD still stands strong because the users who continue to use the format don't want to or know how to update. They can make their pop corn, and watch the new movie they just rented, no issues.
I bought my mother a new 1080p television and a DVD player. This way she can watch her movies and I don't get the calls about it 'not working'.
Blu-ray has completely supplanted DVD in my movie buying, wherever I have the option.
The picture quality difference is very apparent, even on my smaller TV. I can't imagine going back to DVD for must haves, and I haven't seen any larger delays or increases of can't-skip stuff on Blu-ray vs DVD. In fact, for the Disney stuff my kid watches, the DVDs are far worse for unskippable previews (something which is immediately apparent because of their combopacks - whenever we accidentally put in the DVD instead of Blu-ray, it takes three times as long to get to the same movie).
Used a discount house to beat the initial price barrier.
However, turning it on and waiting for it to init, much less accept a disc, induced Methuselah syndrome; and OMFG, could this fscking thing be any *pickier* on what it will or will not play?
DVD. Fine. Nary a hiccup.
BRD? Rent? Finger smudge? *BZZT!!* Eject. Clean. Reinsert. Play? Maybe, maybe not, depending on residual oil, cleaner residue, phase of the moon or whim of the Gawhds. Buy boxed set of a season of TV program. One out of six discs would not play, despite having no visible imperfection. Return. Same thing, different disc. Return. Get hassled.
Bottom line, gave up.
Anymore I play downloaded or streaming content through my laptop and keep that boat anchor for it's pretty blue lights at night.
I was having dinner with Parents a couple of weeks ago and a new flat screen tv was being considered. My father had not heard of blueray and was still aiming for a dvd thing, he is computer literate.
Personally as all my computers run linux and being i might have a few issues i have not bothered with blueray either.
On one of those s/f sites they had review of a blockbuster film with the director doing an interactive chat. It was funny to read and honestly if you bought blueray for that feature then clearly the users and extra content had little value.
BluRay has been an awkward lateral technological move. Even when we were placing bets on whether BluRay or HD-DVD would die first, I knew I wouldn't be spending a cent on either, because I am sick of storing plastic discs in my home. They are delicate and increasingly inefficient, not to mention frequently loaded with promotional and anti-"theft" materials that are irritating and hostile to the consumer. I barely even watch DVDs anymore, and my shelves are LOUSY with them.
A more solid step up would be to move to the cloud and stream everything, and the ever-increasing ubiquity of services filling that demand further seems to suggest that this transition has already been well under way. The only reason BlueRay made any impression at all is because of the many ways in which digital media distribution has been and continues to be deliberately stunted.
Anything I present here as a certainty is, of course, skewed by my limited knowledge and experience. That said, I've been beyond ready to just ask the computer to play whatever my heart desires simply by asking - Star Trek stylee - since I was a kid, and I know we are now well past the means to hook that up, so I can only conclude that the remaining obstacles are a bunch of lawyers and old people who think music and movies and stuff still can't happen without them.
The simple reason is that in the great majority of cases, DVD is good enough and Blu-Ray is overkill. I think the only reason Blu-Ray players account for half of sales is that they're backwards-compatible. I strongly suspect a lot of people buying Blu-Ray players are continuing to buy DVDs for it. Not through some ignorant belief that DVDs will suddenly play in high def, but simply because DVDs are (a) a lot cheaper, (b) have a better selection, and (c) provide an acceptable picture up to at least 46".
Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) in home video was a solution looking for a problem. Someone thought that since the buying public embraced the DVD as a clear winner over VHS, that they'd embrace the next leap in resolution and features, with the corresponding leap in price. What they did not account for was that they'd already reached the point of diminishing returns.
Now there's talk of another leap to 4K. It's not going to sell, folks, except to a few videophiles with the equipment to tell the difference, technogeeks who must have one of everything, and a handful of mom&pops who get sold on 4K by predatory salescreatures and then are disappointed that they can't tell the difference (and that media costs just jumped another 4X).
I'm saying all this as an early adopter of Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-Ray who avoided VHS like the plague. And I still only have two Blu-Ray titles, which I bought for A/B comparisons. After noting a tiny increase in detail on a 46" Bravia, I went back to DVDs because they're half the price. (Much less on sale.)
You can see that the studios are starting to realize this, and are trying to entice the public by including both DVD and Blu-Ray media in the same package, so users could be enticed to buy media they can play now and still have an upgrade path when they get around to replacing the player. I dunno how well that's working, but as a marketing ploy it probably works better than asking consumers to leap off the precipice without a clear reason for doing so.
Yes, I know, Blu-Ray on 60" TVs can be startling. But most people don't have that. Of the few that do, many shove their monster TV into a room too small for it, and still have a poor viewing experience for different reasons. (Who voluntarily sits in the front row in the theater?) For the rest of us, 480p is good enough.
Now, this puts the studios in an interesting spot. The big selling point to the media providers was that higher definitions could be locked down to prevent trivial attempts to copy the content. (Of course, pros will continue to break whatever anti-copy measures the manufacturers put in place.) This assumes that Blu-Ray catches on big, (which it didn't) and that the great unwashed masses would love 1080p so much that they wouldn't put up with 480p copies. (Wrong again.) About the only benefit the studios are getting (if you call it that) is that DVDs are so dirt cheap now that it's not worth bothering to steal them.
(Let's not even talk about 1080i. What a piece-o-crap idea that was.)
All that said, I'm about to buy my second Blu-Ray recorder, because the format does have value in another area -- data storage. But I don't expect that market segment to support the format by itself.
I don't see Blu-Ray really taking off until the media (not just the players!) get so dirt cheap that the cost difference with DVD is down in the noise.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
hi def streaming is here
Blueray came too late, the media is too expensive. Now most of us stream video from the net through Apple TV or Boxee like devices. Also most of our delivery boxes like my Apple TV is hacked to run Plex. Videos are either Netflix or from our favorite floating data center. You can rent standard DVD's from RedBox for $1.00.. and they upscale pretty well. My old Toshiba HD player upscales a standard DVD very well.
We stream Netflix for crying out loud. That quality is worse than DVD, sometimes worse than VHS. But we want a lot of content cheap, and that's streaming and that's DVD (which I'm surprised still hangs on).
I'm probably in the minority for people who actually hit the HD button on Youtube videos. Most movies are throw aways, and even if they are good, we know Netflix will always have them in stock or streaming. Why the hell would we purchase them to sit on a shelf? A buddy of mine is an Indie film maker. I buy his DVD's, even though they are on Netflix. But I buy them for a completely different reason. I buy them because I have signed copies by the cast, he's my friend, and I'll actually pull them out to show to friends who come over.
In Hollywood, quality goes up, content goes down. People like quality of picture, but they want cheap content too, even if it's watching Jackass. Cheap to free (as in "I already own the DVD, why do I need HD?") beats HD.
I'll tell you where BluRay does well, rentals. When I am looking for a special release or RedBox or video store, I always pick BluRay first, because it's only $0.50 more usually. Would I spend $30+ for the retail BluRay? Hell no, I'll wait for it to come out on Netflix streaming. If I want super cool quality like when Tron Legacy came out, I'll go to IMAX for the professional experience. And I have a 65" 3D TV at home that is either playing Netflix or Antenna HD.
I8-D
I am totally surprised by this discussion in slashdot. Almost everyone agrees this Blurry DVD is superior to regular DVD. Come on how can something called Blurry DVD be superior to regular DVD? On top of that most of these devices are out sourced to China where they don't even know how to spell Blurry. I have seen so many units marked Blueray.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
FullHD TV's are just now coming into a buy-able range for the average US consumer. You can get BD movies from RedBox. Walk into BestBuy, and the first set of videos you see are BD. Personally, I do a little research to make sure buying the BD version of a previously released DVD was worth it. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. I have noticed that with some TV series, "Lost" for example, you can see artifacts in the black regions even on the BD version. To me, that means that no improvement of video quality was made for the BD version. Maybe I'm incorrect in that assumption.
There are some people who barely have DVDs and they probably have 25" CRTs from the 80's. They will always be behind when it comes to technology (coming from someone who has now forsaken his CD collections for vinyl and other hi-def audio solutions).
No need for a smart phone, but the improved audio of the Blu-Ray discs sounds great on my home theater. Same with the video seen on my HDTV. I'm willing to pay for that. Of course, I try to buy used discs whenever possible so perhaps I'm not helping the Blu-Ray cause :D
When I think of how much my friends spend keeping up with smart phone technology (including data plans) I just stick with my old voice-only flip phone and enjoy my movies. Seems more worth the money to me.
Blar.
Buying a DVD from a best buy, for instance, I can find the smoking deals every week with 5 dollar movies. No chance of finding that for a blu-ray movie. I also prefer my DVD collection since I can watch them on any computer in the house, and my TV's, while blu-ray can only play from my work machine.
After all the recent effort Sony has put into recently to increase the 'user experience' of playstation (shutting down anyone who does legitimate hacking). I don't want to one day be sued for connecting my blue ray player to a non sony-approved television, which is likely not too far fetched by their standards.
Most people don't want to own massive physical collections anymore. That is MOST people. Convenience is key.
Just personally, I've got an HDTV and a Blu-Ray player, and a few blu-ray movies, but MOST of what I buy is still DVD's. The simple fact is that DVD is good enough to watch, and has the same benefits of digital media (no tracking, no rewinding, etc). Overall, the simple fact that DVD's are cheaper (and the fact that they still work fine on Blu-Ray players so its not as if they're being obsoleted) means that most of my purchases will lean that way. I'll only spring for Blu-Ray on very major films that I want to have the better version of (Dark Knight, Avatar, etc).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I personally want to believe it is because the public hates Sony and anything associated with Sony. Okay, admittedly, I have a Samsung Bluray player. It's Not a Sony even if the format is associated with Sony. So forgetting that the public still wants PS3 (come on! Sony == Evil and they abuse you! If you like abuse, I'll promise to spank you if you get rid of your Sony PS3!!), people simply cannot tolerate Sony in their business.
Also, there's the fact that "all things blu-ray are more expensive." There's a touch of bad timing going on here. There was a time when people didn't mind wasting a few extra bucks because something was "better" in some way. These days, we have fewer extra bucks than ever before. And yes, people don't NEED it. Unless you are 5 feet away from your 42" 1080p or you have an 80" display, most people will never notice or feel the difference going full high definition. (Most people does not include me... I require fine detail. I see flaws everywhere and I just can't help it.)
of the crack you're on Blu-ray has caught one and here to stay,well until the next comes along
I think you're confusing "caught on" and sale figures (remember all stats are rigged to say what you want 99.999999% of the time)
Slowness for some people to buy is probably cost.
Blue-ray won format war !
It has internect connectivity and a Netflix client. A Woot refurb for $60, IIRC.
Since player sales are split 50:50 I'd make the argument that it has caught on. It was only two years ago when HD-DVD and BluRay were competing head to head and BluRay had a measly 5% of the market.
When Sony won the format wars people felt safe about making a format decision, and with BD player prices below $100 it has grown tremendously in a relatively short period of time.
...so much as usability. CD's were a major step up in usability over casette; likewise for DVD over VHS. And there is no downside to a CD/DVD compared to what they replaced. What does BD add? You can see the menus without stopping the movie, and there is some more advanced interactive features (which I've never heard of anyone who used...) What do you give up? These discs that look just like DVD's can't play in any of the other DVD players that you have. They are more sensitive to dirt/scratches/etc, they cost up to twice as much, and they are slower to load, etc. I've had a BD player by way of my PS3 for years. The only time I buy a BD is when it comes packaged with a DVD copy. My copy of Cars of BD is no good to me if the kids can't watch it in the car.
I prefer to own, so I do. Maybe "owning" the media will no longer be possible in the future, but I'm sticking with that concept like the public sticks with DVDs.
Blar.
some newer TVs have built-in players. So you just plug in USB flash or SD card and play movies straight from it.
I love the picture quality of BR, and hate the look of Standard Def on my HDTV. To me, the difference between DVD and BR is obvious, and worth (some) extra cost. People that think BR is too expensive imho either haven't seen a good BR film on a decent HDTV or (more likely) don't care as they are content with whatever they have.
'Your brain is God.' -- Dr. Timothy Leary
It's obvious:
* the price premium for Blu-Ray discs (when I buy Blu-Ray I look specifically for DVD/BluRay combo packages)
* DRM: what happens when Samsung, Toshiba, Sony, etc. sunset a particular player, and new keys are required?
* DRM: why the hell can't I easily rip it to my iPhone/iPad/iPod
* Lack of native Mac support. Apple seems to have an anti-BluRay stance due to the fascist DRM
* Lack of Linux support: you might say this affects a minority and for desktop users in the US it's true. But worldwide Linux enjoys rapid growth, plus even in the US lots of set top boxes, in-dash auto entertainment systems, and so on use embedded Linux.
* Lack of blu-ray recorders
* High cost of BD-R discs
DRM should just be dropped; a few mainstream films have shipped on DVD without CSS encoding and yet they sold very well (this was the case for at least one of the Harry Potter flicks - I thought about buying it to support the idea of DRM-free media but I am not into Harry Potter). Blu-Ray DRM is a pain in the rump for the average user. If you look at any torrent site, you see loads of blu-ray rips, and more often than not, high quality camcorder/DVCam "rips" of movies taken in the theater long before the movie makes it to DVD or Blu-Ray. DRM does not slow down the "pirates" in the slightest bit. They just annoy the fuck out of legitimate paying customers. It's a pretty sad situation when counterfeit goods are superior in every possible way than the legitimately-purchased goods.
BluRay drives need to come down in price, and BD-R discs need to come down in price. I'm sure plenty of folks would snap them up for backing up photos, home movies, and their other crap once BD-R media becomes affordable, just like how DVD really didn't overtake crummy old analog 240-line VHS until a) the cost of prerecorded movies became available and b) DVD-R became available.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This being Slashdot, and if in the 400 or so comments on this story there is hardly a nerd to be found to defend it, what hope does the format possibly have?
So you get a new laptop with a DVD burner. How do you use it? Insert DVD, autorun starts, you're watching your movie. The same experience with Blu-Ray? Insert Blu-Ray, get error that the disc format isn't valid. Huh-oh. You've run into yet another trade dispute - Microsoft doesn't bundle BR codecs with their software because Sony wants to be paid and MS says "nuh huh." The rest of the experience will be the computer user (assuming he even understands that this is a codec issue and not a defective BR player) searching left and right for a software that allows BR playback. Hopefully he'll get lucky and find the correct PowerDVD version that allows BR playback and not just give yet another error even though the installer promised BR compatibility...
Streaming services: Immediate, inexpensive, and reasonable quality, depending on your provider and connection speed.
Older TVs: If you have an older TV, you can't take advantage of the higher quality picture.
Computers: Don't come with Blu-Ray players standard yet. I can't play my Blu-Ray movies on one monitor while taking care of something on the other unless I buy another piece of hardware to install.
Quality/Cost: Having a quality picture is great, but do I need that to make Big Bang Theory more enjoyable? No. Inception? Sure. But a large portion of my collection is not action/adventure movies that would benefit from higher quality, and certainly not at the price difference that Blu-Rays usually have.
Inertia: We all have DVD collections. We (almost) all have DVD players. Why go out and get another player when the DVD player is still working? And if I don't buy a Blu-Ray player, I'm not buying Blu-Rays, so I'm still building a library of DVDs...
Misconceptions/Fears: There are always people who don't understand or are afraid of new technology, which makes them resistant to replace something that 1) works, and 2) they (somewhat) understand. One misconception is that Blu-Ray players only play Blu-Ray, and so people would have to replace their DVDs with Blu-Rays.
I didn't replace my DVD player with a Blu-Ray player until it bought the farm. I still only own a couple of Blu-Rays. I use the streaming feature on my Blu-Ray player almost as much as I watch discs on it. If Blu-Ray were cheaper, I'd happily buy those instead of the DVDs I'm occasionally purchasing. But let's face it, with so much content available online, I don't need to buy even DVDs much these days. I see Blu-Ray as the final generation of optical discs. It's a natural extension of DVDs, due to the new standard TV resolution, and it will be around a while, but the price point needs to change for it to take better hold.
I've had a bluray player quite a while (PS3) but don't really own many discs. The biggest hinderance for uptake in my case is the cost of media. I'm not going to pay $25-30 for a movie. If I REALLY liked the movie I might pay $19. I pick up all my discs via sales at Amazon/Target/Frys. Otherwise I get bluray discs from Netflix or stream.
The other thing I personally see slowing adoption is computer playback. No OS plays bluray video by default. I looked into setting up our HTPC to playback bluray discs and it would have been more expensive to buy an OEM drive and playback software than a dedicated player. Both my wife and mother have looked at movies and said something along the lines of "oh... well I cant play it in my laptop so I'll just get the DVD". Sure, they both are rarely going to play the movies on a laptop but they like having that convenience (road trips, traveling, on vacation etc).
That and my wife doesn't notice or care much about the quality difference. A majority of the time she puts out 5.1 system into mono mode when she's watching things.
Discs were a definite improvement over tape for audio and video; that said, DVDs are ubiquitous; the format wars delayed adoption by consumers long enough for (a) the economy to drop and (b) streaming content to get a good foothold; people aren't going to rush out and repurchase their libraries like they did moving off tape, there's not that big a quality difference unless you're on a HUGE screen.
I have a BD player as much for the streaming services it supports (Netflix, Pandora, etc) as its supposedly primary function of playing discs. But a *lot* of my viewing at this point is rips of my existing discs to my media tank just for the utter convenience.
It's obviously getting some penetration, given you now have $10 discounted Blu-Rays at the bigbox stores next to the $5 DVD bins, but on-demand video is no doubt crowding out a lot of people purchasing physical media.
Why has Blu-ray not caught on? Hmmm, well, let's see.
Blu-ray is a great technology, allowing us to see the movies we love the way they were ment to be seen. Great picture and great sound.
But then there's the huge, steaming pile of shit that goes along with it. The draconian DRM, the crapware, the unskippable trailers and promos. People don't like blu-ray because they just want to see their goddamned movie. WIth Netflix or iTunes you just press play. No FBI warnings, no trailers to movies you have no interest in seeing, and your player doesn't break because of DRM musical chairs.
Reminded me of this.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Bluray requires updates. Source of the fail. Instead of fast and easy it went slow and annoying. I bought my mom a 1080p television, with a DVD player. I don't want to get the phone calls about her bluray not working every time she needs an update. She cant burn .iso's and doesn't have wifi. Without a doubt if she could drop a movie and watch it without fail, that's what I would have bought her.
Bluray has restricted their market to connected, somewhat savvy users. The exact same users who can run netflix.
I suspect that a sizable portion of that 50% market share is from people who end up with one from a throw-in on a new TV purchase, part of an all-in-one system that had BR built in, or some other purchase where BR was a bonus feature, but not something that people intentionally went out and shopped for.
And as long as the BR players are backwards compatible and people can just continue to watch their existing DVD collection, there isn't the need/desire to upgrade (for all the reasons already listed in other comment.)
I personally have a BR player in my laptop, but if the same laptop came with just DVD, it wouldn't have drastically changed my decision to buy that model. And in 14 months of owing the laptop, I've never once put a BR disc into it.
I like my Blu-Rays. I don't seem to have the issues that other people are talking about, like crashing and unskippable commercials. The same proportion of DVDs had unskippable commercials too, and films released on both formats will have the same arrangements, so it's not like you're getting anything different there. Some players are better than others at having multiple ways around it, like sometimes there's a second menu button that works or you can manually choose the title and chapter. I don't care about the extras, don't buy collector's editions, don't have or want 3D yet, and don't want Internet features.
I'm generally not replacing my DVDs. I'm buying Blu-Ray for new purchases but if the price premium is too big, I skip buying entirely and look for something else. It doesn't really matter that much that I have or don't have a particular title in my collection. Certain stores offer memberships that save you money on each title, which I use and get my money's worth, so I suppose I don't represent a lot of people. But that applies to DVDs as well... I'd probably buy more Blu-Rays if there were bigger discounts available for them, so I could get them for close to DVD price. $10-20 more than the DVD is too big of a premium for most movies, and $20 is really a lot of money for one movie.
My big gripe is the high priced DVD and Blu-Ray multi-format sets. I'll skip over buying the movie entirely if I am forced to purchase a set with multiple formats. I only want ONE DISC with the movie on it, not a secondary DVD that I'll never use. Seriously, who is the target audience for this? I suppose they could theoretically make an extra few bucks of profit by making these sets the only copies available for sale, but they don't get any of the base profit or that extra profit if they don't sell any.
For people WITH high definition sets... Cable, fiber and satellite provide pretty good on-demand HD programming. I've watched a bunch of movies and TV shows this way and it buffers really fast. It's not comparable to streaming Netflix or anything, it's better enough that you can call it competition for a rental disc. I know several people who don't own many Blu-Rays because they can just subscribe to a premium channel like HBO, Starz, or whatever and watch the on-demand movies.
IMO, the real problem stems from the BluRay experience just sucking.
The UIs are all over the place on disks. I've had movies that literally took five minutes to "boot up". And then, odds are, I probably have to sit through six previews that I can't skip. And partway through, it'll fire my network up without asking doing who the fuck knows what.
If given a choice between a BluRay or watching a streaming version, I'll pick streaming because I can get in and out more quickly.
The studios have latched onto BluRay as a way of locking people in to an experience they want to define, not as a way of delivering a movie to viewers.
The industry tried to push the next gen player too soon.
People had just made the switch from VHS to DVD and had spent a lot to do it.
To expect them to then jump at the chance to shell out more cash for the chance to by the same movies/shows in a different format was a failure from the work go.
The quality bump is not enough to be seen as a requirement to most people. This was nothing more than a nice way to prove the industry just wants to sell us the same product over and over on different formats.
As a gradual transition from DVD to Blu-Ray (IE my dvd player broke so I would replace it with a Blu-Ray)it will work but it's not going to be an instant must have and the sour taste even the dumbest of consumers feels at being made to re-buy for the new format is bad for the shills.
I said when Blu-Ray came out that it was a skip it tech for me.. thought I'd wait till Blu-Rays replacement tech comes before I'd by into something. Instead what happened is I have a media box hooked up to my TV with a hard drive and everything I watch is either a net stream or played off a hard-drive. I can't remember the last I touched a physical disk for anything. Cable was cancelled over 2 years ago and not missed one bit. The way my house hold is moving (and yes wife and kids) the traditional media has lost us completely as consumers.
> between a good upconverting player and a lot of crappy blu-ray builds, the difference is minor.
That's a good point. The issue of "upgrading" to Blu-Ray is further polluted by the fact that there is overlap between the best crafted DVDs and the poorest crafted Blu-Ray titles, with the Blu-Ray titles still being significantly more expensive.
I think $20 per title is too much...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
When Avatar came out I bought a blu-ray player. It was the only reason I bought one. Then I stuck in the avatar disk into the blu-ray player with my tub of popcorn and drink at the ready. The first message I get is "Disc can't be played". WTF! An insert on the disc says that an upgrade to the firmware may be required. WTF! I do not have a convenient way of hooking the blu-ray player to the internet. Oh man what a hassle. Forget the blu-ray player.. DRM has destroyed it. Like CDs becoming obsolete to digital music... dvds and blu-ray will eventually do the same with digital movies.
Really all this is all about is having a medium which fits all our needs - durability, performance, capacity, universalness, etc.. When this happens the trend of constant upgrades will end. Really in the grand scale of things we're in a relatively small "ramp up" phase in our technology. One day it will be sophisticated enough to accomodate all these needs and then this trend will end. No sense speculating on it and drawing all kinds of curves and making this pattern into some sort of holy thing (this is our problem in the first place). The other part is here is that it's obvious that I should not have pay full price for content I previously purchased just to have it copied to a new medium. This is just a flaw of capitalism that is holding us back from change - if it were really up to the people this would have changed long ago, but business resists any change which reduces profits and forces them to adapt to a new model. It's up to us to force business to adapt. People will complain that this destroys jobs but I think that's garbage because there are plenty of jobs to be done that never get done because all the money is going into fake BS like paying these companies immense profits to recopy their old stuff onto new media.
Simple: Blu-rays are too damn expensive. It's outrageous that movies should cost $25-$30 simply because they're on Blu-ray. And then in a lame attempt to justify the price they bundle the Blu-ray disc with a DVD. And all the features they stick on those Blu-Rays is just pointless fluff. It was neat, with earlier releases that you could get subtitles in quite a few languages, including Chinese. But more recently that seems to have been abandoned, only Spanish and French being the only options.
The improved image and sound quality can be impressive but the fact is that DVD on an HDTV is still decent. But a significant majority of movies are not the sort where improved image or sound enhances the experience. And most movies aren't particularly good. Outside of a miniscule handful of movies, none are worth collecting. They're not worth repeated viewings, so why waste money to own them?
Streaming video has played another significant factor in all this. Convenience has trumped image and sound quality. It's a pain in the ass to shop around for Blu-rays, not just because of price, but just trying to even find some place that carries that particular movie. And rentals, even with the convenience of Red Box, run into the same problem of availability. So why not just go online?
Most people don't have the money, time or inclination to invest in trying to get an entertainment system set up to enjoy the full experience a Blu-ray could provide. So now studios are banking on 3D to help sell the format. The problem is that most people don't have 3D capable TVs, and Blu-rays with 3D are even more outrageously overpriced. And 3D is an even more blatantly pointless gimmick.
Streaming will be the death knell for movies on physical media. With Netflix, Amazon On Demand, Hulu Plus, Vudu, CinemaNow, Blockbuster on Demand, and so on, users can watch almost any title in HD with surround sound. Devices to aid in this are cheap and abundant ( Internet-connected TV's, Roku, WD TV, Boxee, etc.) Users who want copies can use a capture card as well to keep a copy on a NAS or external drive. With RAID arrays and cheap storage, it is just harder to justify burning movies to disk and maintaining those collections...much less purchasing new disks.
I refuse to buy anything blu-ray because of the nasty DRM. I've talked people out of blu-ray drives in computers (isn't that a pain in the ass to get blu-ray playback working... might as well forget it and just do rips. (On some OEM PC's it's difficult without using the factory image.) I've vetoed gift purchases within my family too.
If something I want is only available on blu-ray I'll download blu-ray rips from torrents and fuck them. I'm not buying into blu-ray technology.
Fuck Sony and their PS3 systems too. Sony is the very model of everything I hate, rolled into one.
Needing 100 dollar software ontop of a 100 dollar drive to play blu-ray on PC or laptop is definitely a deterrent to use. If the codec was a part of Windows/MacOS I think they would sell more.
When you went from VHS to DVD it was an order of magnitude change. It was exciting, Digital Surround, all these new things were thrown at you. The discs didn't wear out and get tracking issues like the tapes did. All sorts of nice things.
BluRay is 1080p. Unless you have some ridiculously large (bigger than 60") the average person is going to be hard pressed to figure out what is different between BD and DVD.
Mine was easy, I like games. I got a PS3, a bonus was it had a BD player in it. So I started netflixing my BDs.
Do I buy them? Rarely. They need to be a BD+DVD+Digital copy version or I'm not wasting my money, and that has to be under $30. DVD/BD get scratched by small children stuffing them into a computer and/or player. I didn't realize that at first and lost a few kids movies that way. having to re-pay for content I'm told I don't really 'own' anyway just pisses me off. Which is why i stopped buying discs. I went from a >700 disc collection to maybe 30 movies total. I got tired of being told I was a thief when I stuck a disk in and not being able to skip those things. Annoys the shit out of me.
my silent protest was to only rent content, or catch it on pay network channels. 'owning' DVDs no longer has any interest except rare things like classic Sci-Fi Television shows that I can watch over and over.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I remember ripping my CDs to mp3 when it took 12 hours to rip and encode. Just about the time it was getting down to an hour per disc I could purchase mp3/aac online. I've purchased maybe 3 CDs since that time. My 80 GB song library is now about half/half CD rips and online purchase. The CD format is what, 30 years old now? And is the last physical medium for audio. When CD came out it was 10 years before cassette tapes weren't sold alongside them.
Now I rip my DVDs and BluRays to mkv/m2ts. A couple years ago it took 8 hours to rip and encode a bluray. Now I can rip/encode in 1 hour. I can also purchase digital copies of movies and tv shows online. I think the pricing model is still too high for now, and I hate streaming options - I want all my library available without having to pay again. (Amazon mp3 in the cloud sounds better - give me video on there with no storage limit for stuff I purchase from Amazon and we are there!)
Soon, however, we will be thinking back on when BluRay was released as the last physical medium for video.
I own a 35 Euro low quality DVD player. It works with any DVD I insert.
I also own a 200 Euro Sony Blue-Ray player. Bought as part of a home cinema set. This player refuses to play one in every two DVDs I own. Those that do play, turn to blank screen halfway through a movie because the Sony player and the Sony TV can't agree if I am a "thieve" or not.
For me it is clear. DRM and a zealous entertainment industry is what kills new technology.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I own two Blu-Ray players, one in the PS3, and one in an LG box I bought for the kids at Christmas. My old DVD players were all done, so the Blu-Ray player in the PS3 makes sense, and the happy joy of the LG box is that I can stream movies via wifi, (so that does have a Blu-Ray player, but I haven't really used it). I don't own any blu-ray disks, but the second that blu-ray burners get cheap, and the media gets cheap, then I'm going to buy one (for the computer). Call me when that happens. As it is, I have a stack of el-cheapo blank DVD's (about 100 or so). BDXL (the 125 GB disks) would be better for archiving data off the computer, although with my $50 drives I am still looking at 4 disks to archive each drive, and if the Blu-Ray folk want $50 per disk, then I start asking myself why don't I just buy another hard disk and archive to that (its faster, read/write, cheaper per byte, and much more convenient). Network attached storage is cheaper and easier than mere external drives (and can be shared across many computers). So why no Blu-Ray? Co$t! The stupid stupid entertainment industries are as bright as a sack of hammers! Unless you are a videophile, DVD is good enough. As far as computer users go, IBM tried pushing an expensive bus architecture down our throats years ago (microchannel). Yes, it was better than ISA, but wildly more expensive. People went with 'good enough and cheap' ISA. MCA died, ISA got better. The entertainment companies could have learned from IBM, but they didn't. I used the term stupid earlier, didn't I? Cheap Blu-Ray movies for $10 or less would get them moving. People know when they are being charged a premium. The industry won't budge, and neither will sales, nor adoption. Thanks again.
Why pay $25+ for a Blu-Ray of something when I can get it for 15-20 tops on DVD (though we very rarely spend more than $15 for even a DVD). Simply put the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD battle turned folks off, the DRM issues turned folks off, Apple not adopting it turned that crowd off. It all adds up to just making the simple act of watching a darn movie less and less fun than it used to be.
The Blu-Ray should have had only a short period of price mismatch, then after that it would have been equal to DVD's, only then would the format have taken root. DRM should have been greatly curtailed to make using a movie easier (i.e. make it easy for me to get a lower quality digital copy in the same box for use on my portable iWidget).
Oh well.
50% market share isn't that bad is it? For a long time after DVDs came out VHS was still selling and renting well. Most people I know (including my parents) upgraded to Blu-Ray shortly after getting a >40" LCD.
50% of new players is not so impressive. It's not 50% of movies. Probably not even close. I mean, if you are buying a new player, bluray is more expensive but not exhorbitantly so. So if half the buyers choose to go for dvd it really means bluray is not a features that is highly valued by users.
Personally, I intentionally bought a laptop with no spinning stuff of any kind*, and I don't have a screen big enough to really appreciate HD, so I couldn't care less about overpriced, DRM-infested pieces of plastic.
* not quite true unfortunately: it has a fan....
I bought my DVD player for 20 bucks brand new, whats the price of BR?
I don't have a HDTV sitting above the picture perfect mantel in my 500,000 colonial farm house, so the picture quality is more than fine.
Even with an HDTV I can barley notice the difference while WATCHING a movie, yea theres a difference if I am watching the difference, but that is not why I bought a movie player for, now is it?
When DVDs came out to replace VHS cassettes, you could use both of them on the same television. On the other hand, unless you have a good HD TV, you will not notice the improved picture quality that Blu-ray offers. For a lot of people, the added cost of an HD TV makes Blu-Ray unattractive.
In my case, I love my Blu-ray player (PS3). I do not feel the need to go to the movies to see any of the special effects blockbusters anymore, except for purely social reasons. For me, the Samsung LCD TV and a good set of headphones plugged into the PS3 provide a great viewing experience.
1. The quality of DVD is not that much worse than Blu-Ray. For the movies I watch, which (admittedly) tend to be lower budget independent releases, I cannot see how a higher picture quality will enhance my enjoyment of the movie.
2. Basic fact: Movies are moving towards digital distribution. Why bother to buy a blu-ray player and then replace my DVD library with slightly better picture quality discs when I can wait for about 2 more years and have every movie and TV show I want available to me to stream off netflix or Amazon?
The streaming is getting very good. I watched both the Spartacus series streamed from Netflix at 720p, and Lucy Lawless' hooters looked fantastic, along with the rest of the show, of course.
Thank you not only for getting the point out succinctly, but also using the term "couldn't care less" correctly.
My household is pretty tech-savvy in every way but in my actual television. I still have an antenna on my TV because I don't have any desire to pay for cable/satellite. Of course, this means that changing channels requires adjusting the antenna, but for as little broadcast TV as I watch, that is fine by me. The TV isn't even flat-screen, let alone an HD flat-panel. I just want to hear it well enough to follow the plot, and am happy to watch most of my content on DVDs or streaming, because my screen doesn't go to static when the weather system changes.
In the last six months I've seen bluray players drop below GB£100, about US$160, which was the point at which DVDs in the consumer market really took off. Also, bluray disks have fallen in price making them less of premium over DVDs.
That said, as people have pointed out, there's a lot less visual quality to be gained changing from DVD to bluray than there was from VHS tape to DVD. Here in the UK, where DVD resolution is 720x576 the quality is quite good, especially if watching on a 720p display with a good scaler.
If you do buy bluray you may only have one player in the house, so until the players are cheap enough to replace all the dvd players in your house, many people will hold back on buying blurays except for special buys for when, for example, they want the "premium" experience in their main viewing room perhaps with their surround sound kit.
Personally, I buy blurays if I can, and accept the fact that I have only one player at the moment (a PS3) but I am looking to buy another sometime soon.
My Blu-Ray player is in my sons room with the PS3. Our main TV has TiVo & AppleTV attached. I don't bother with disc media anymore.
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
Cost. BD drives and discs are overpriced compared to the alternatives.
DRM. The simple fact is that the DRM interferes with use of the tech. If your drive doesn't talk with the display or the cable isn't blah blah. Plus it's hard to back them up to watch them somewhere other than in the living room. Gets back to cost... It's too damn expensive for a one-trick pony.
Availability. Computer makers keep coming up with excuses for not including BD drives in their computers. Example - I am trying to buy a laptop to replace my aging IBM T-41p, and not one of the business-grade alternatives I've researched offer a BD drive option. Why not? I asked Lenovo and got the snooty answer "we do not offer BD drives on any of our business-class machines". WTF? Lenovo is heavily advertising their "HD" screens, cameras, and high quality sound, but they leave out a BD drive? Sounds like a dirty trick Apple would pull, except that if I wanted to lug around an external optical drive, I'd buy a macbook air.
So... Cost, DRM, and availability. If any one of these three were not a problem for me personally, then I would have switched to BD already. And I am willing to spend a lot on a premium notebook TODAY, but I can't find a business notebook in the 4lb class with a BD drive. So, no BD for me in the home, in my desktop, or in my laptop, because cost DRM and availability are combining to prevent me from switching.
The only reason I own a Blu-ray player at this time is that I upgrade my home theater system about once a decade. Last June my upgrade cycle came due. I bought a 1080p 58" Samsung plasma TV, Blu-ray player and Denon receiver and had a 7.1 surround system professionally installed. I was always anti-Blu-ray, but with such a long upgrade cycle and current prices; I figured the up scaling of DVDs was nice, and if Blu-ray or 3D became more ubiquitous I was prepared. In my last upgrade cycle I had a 53" Sony rear projection TV. I always kicked myself for not getting the HD version for a few hundred more (plasma TVs were like 10-15K then). So this time I spent a little extra to hopefully future-proof myself a little.
I have seen the distance versus screen size chart. I sit about 16' from my screen, yet the chart says I should barely see a difference from 720p. My personal anecdotal experience disagrees, I can see a marked difference. I would never have bought a Blu-ray player if it had not been part of my once a decade or so upgrade process due to the need to buy all new equipment. I just happened to be buying all new equipment at the time.
Though I do have disagree that it has failed to catch on as I see the players and movies everywhere. I remember when DVD was just a few shelves on a couple walls in Blockbuster. Then it got placed next to the movies with the VHS version. Then you could not find the VHS version anymore. I don't see how this process has been a lot different other than streaming is very popular and good enough for most programs. So it does have competition, but adoption rate seems pretty normal. If only that had not dallied so long in the format war with HD-DVD.
I wish there was a fscking blue pill
I will offer my 2c to the fun:
I already have a DVD player, and many (not hundreds) of titles on DVD. So, now I get to re-buy everything I own to get a better experience... I can pass. Blu-Ray players are cheaper now, and I still don't feel compelled. Many of my titles (some quite obscure) aren't issued on Blu-Ray. My current DVD player does a very good job of 'upgrading' the image of my DVDs to 720p quality. DVD ubiquity was mentioned as another reason... I must strongly agree with this. I can easily take my DVD player just about anywhere and have the connection/s needed. Blu-Ray discs apparently need to call home periodically, just to play. Why am I purchasing something that I am only allowed to play if it calls home and gets permission?
I think that people is not attracted to this technology because the priorities on the people's pocket have changed. Entertainment is not in the top 3 places any more. Thank to the last 20 years of politics, most of the "consumers" realised that they jumped a couple of steps down in the Maslow pyramid. ... The status of the actual economy only allows corporate directors, Govt providers and politicians to keep riding the wave of consumption.... is not for the people who work 40hs/week any more... $4 the gallon of gas?...yeah...that's ridiculous...if corporations keep pressing with those prices while the politicians are watching HD, updating the car every year, taking 2 months vacations with the family invited by Govt providers...America will be the next Africa very soon.... time to look for ammo..gotta go.
If the industry REALLY want to get more people into it, they will have to invest in the short term in methods to get people's attention....programs like "trade your old TV for 50% off on a 37" 720p " or "bring your DVDs and get 50% off in blu ray"
Until recently I didnt have a HIDEF TV,. I did however, have a Blu-Ray player.. I won it at the office christmas party a few years back.. I hooked it up, but never played a BR disc on it.. I did use it once for a regular DVD... When I fisrt got it, i considered selling it, but knew that eventually I would get a decent plasma or LCD hidef set, so I hung on to it. Then came the day when I finally got myself a decent 50" Plasma (720P)... and thought, now is the time to go Blu-Ray... Something wierd happened tho, I realized I didn't rent physical movies anymore, and my wife and I stopped buying movies... We we're watching all rentals on netflix, and ofcourse, i was downloading content... I had shifted away from all physical media... For the price of a Blu-Ray box set, i was able to assemble a hidef HTPC, and the rest is history... I know this isn't the norm in every house yet. I think this article, is trying to equate old VHS/Betamax movies with new all-digital movies... and thats just not right.. To me, I would guess that in 10 years we wont be putting scratch-prone spinning bits of plasic in players anymore.. When with the click of a button we can watch almost anything on-demand...
People are OK with crap picture quality. I have many friends who stream TV on their computers in very crappy quality and look at me funny when I point that out. Many other friends have older TVs and when I mention upgrading to a TV that can handle HD, they look at me funny too. For some people, its not worth the expense, even if they have the money.
Most people are not interested in nor can they see the difference, especially on a smaller TV. Also you have to consider that a DVD player works with any TV, new and old. To enjoy the benefits of BD, you really need a larger high resolution TV, and many people simply don't have one or if they do, don't care or feel that BD is worth twice the price.
Good points, and I agree with most of them, but the one thing I feel holding Blu-Ray most of all is corporate politics. These corporations have grown up and expanded so much that they want to compete at every level. None of them wants to use products from the other. Microsoft competes with the PS3, so they won't use anything that might put money or leverage into Sony's hand. I'm sure Nintendo and Apple have the same thoughts. Add to the fact that it's much cheaper for all these companies to just support some software that allows a movie to be delivered over the internet than support the hardware.
1: PRICE. When the price of a new release on BD is the same as for DVD I'll byte.
2: Compatibility: When I can put a BD drive in my Linux box and play a BD disk I'll byte.
3: Players: There is a good assortment of BD players out there now and if OPPO digital comes out with a lower cost universal machine that will play everything my OPPO DVD machine does + BD I'll byte. My OPPO DVD machine up converts very well to HD, no complaints watching on my 50" LCD TV.
4: Public Library: Right now I can borrow new releases from my Public library on DVD. I might have to wait a few months if I don't put it on hold just before the release since the library system only gets just so many copies. The library doesn't (yet) get any BD disks (because of reason #1) so I can only borrow DVD's.
I would have thought that if DVD machines were no longer being made and you could only buy a BD player (which plays DVD disks just fine) and the prices on BD disks fell to DVD levels eventually the production of new DVD titles would end and the public would be gently nudged to BD. While BD may not offer a great increase in PQ over DVD (after upconversion it ends up being a 720 vs 1080 issue, not much difference), for some movies the difference is worth it.
The one that I would like to see more of; but is basically certain to not happen outside of pirate circles, is greater adoption of the dubiously standard; but quite convenient, intermediate format of MP4 video recorded on DVDs. All the cheapness of DVD production; but better quality than MPEG-2 for the same size. Some DVD players support it, and computers have no trouble; but it is totally informal.
This is something I'd like to see also. All of our movies have been ripped to mp4 format and put on a hard drive on the media server, but there is no room in the car for such an item. It would be nice to fit a few movies per DVD for the kids to watch on long car trips.
Which leads to the other two pluses for DVDs: (i) ripping a DVD is mindlessly easy nowadays, while ripping a BluRay still takes some effort, and (ii) region-free DVD players are the norm in most of the world, while I have not encountered a region-free BluRay player. We have a few DVDs which are region 0 (i.e. no region), a larger number which are region 1, but most are region 2. This is OK with a region-free DVD player, but wanting to view disks from different regions would mean buying multiple BluRay players.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
1. Movie selection is poor/incomplete compared to DVD
2. Movies are pricier than DVD
4. Player/writer are more expensive, thus less ubiquitous
For all that you get marginally better quality.
I have a computer that I use for BluRay playback. They play fine on the primary monitor, but on my secondary monitor? Nope!
Thanks to HDCP, I have to crack movies that I legally own (with AnyDVD HD) in order to watch them. Most of the time it's easier for me to pirate a movie than mess with BluRay.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
3 reasons:
1. DRM
2. DVD "good enough"
3. Stop-gap measure. Digital downloads are the future. Nobody wants to carry around discs. People want a file they can play on their iDevice, and stream to their media connected TVs
-Most people aren't technical enough to setup their tvs properly (http://hd.engadget.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/)
-Most content is resolution independent (do you watch Seinfeld for the image quality?)
-The perceived benefits are much smaller (vhs to dvd was huge, dvd to blu-ray is not as big a jump). The difference is very noticeable in animated films with sharp lines (e.g. Pixar and Disney films).
-My local Walmart still plays dvds on all their hdtvs (ick)
Both blu-ray players I bought cost less than the DVD players I bought. DVD players: 599/699, blu-ray 399/429. The 429 was a very early model sony. So stop whining about the price of blu-ray. Heck, remember how much CD players were when they first came out. I have a first gen 900 buck model that still works after almost 3 decades. I also have a high end 1250 buck model that was out in the mid 80's. Shoot stereo cassette decks cost more in the 80's than a blu-ray especially when you factor in inflation.
Why would people continue to buy any form of removable media (DVD, Blu-Ray, etc) when most devices these days play a wide variety of video file encryption formats? Given that there is a huge push from manufacturers such as Sony, Panasonic, Western Digital, etc. that offer Media Servers over uPnP connections. Where all media is stored in a "library" format and movie watchers simply browse through their own catalog of movies. (and NetFlix++)
Blu-Ray disks seem to load a lot of executable code on start. They take an amazingly long time to start. I don't know about you, but I spend this time fuming. Not a good start. Then when finally loaded... the fancy menus that execute then to suck a lot. They execute unbelievably sluggishly, the cursor is often nearly impossible to discern, and usually, some random selection of standard controller keys are implemented or not implemented - whether or not "top menu" works is a crap shoot. Then the next thing that happens is truly horrible... anywhere from three to eight movie previews that I don't care about and can't skip except one at a time by tabbing. Finally, a menu, this is usually about 2 minutes into the experience. By this time I am usually pretty mad. Then when I hit play instead of getting a movie I get a minute or so of being told I'm a criminal in large text and strident colors, and I can't tab past this time, nor can I fast forward.
I think that Sony hates their audience, that is the trouble with Blu-Ray.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I was just fine with my DVD recorder (yes, recorder). But then my lovely 17" Samsung CRT TV died and I needed a new one. Only option was to get a larger "flat screen" LCD HD TV. That and the lack of connections on the back forced me into a new player, so I opted for an upconverting blue-ray with web aps. I mainly wanted the upconverting and the web apps for Netflix Instant Watch.
Otherwise, I would not have bothered with a blu-ray. DVD works just fine, even on upconverting.
Shortly after DVDs came out, they were in the range of $15-$20 per disc. They decreased steadily until right around the time Blu-Ray won the format war. Now DVDs can cost $30 and Blu-Rays up to $40, new. The market is showing that cheap media was a great seller, but more expensive media is a turn-off to consumers.
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
As long as a premium new release Blue Ray movie is $29.95 when I might find the DVD for $15, blue ray will not take hold the way some folks had projected. It really costs no more to produce the BlueRay version. When the technology was brand new there was a business case for a premium price, but that shold be close to level by now. Just another case of greedy studios shooting themselves in the foot.
Keep passing the open windows...
For me, it hasn't caught on because I don't feel the cost is worth the benefit. The quality improvement from DVD to BluRay just isn't enough to justify investing in a large enough TV and a new player and then paying exorbitant prices for each disc. Maybe if the discs were cheaper than DVDs, I'd consider upgrading the equipment.
We've already seen what happened to cds.
I suspect most first adopter types see the future as Netflix. I could pay $10 a month to add one blu ray to a collection - and that on a deal - or I could pay $10 dollars a month to have a library of tens of thousands of movies and tv shows that grows by hundreds or thousands each month.
I make a mistake and buy a Bluray every once and a while. Bought a couple last weekend in fact. And once again I was reminded of how frustrating it is to sit through "cool" menus, studio identifications, previews, FBI warnings, and then more studio identifications. By the time the actual movie starts, I'm usually doing something else. I can probably download a 720p copy of the movie in that time. It take me less than ten button clicks (and seconds) to start one of my library rips.
Oh and then there are the exclusive blurays that you can't even buy, like Avatar in 3D (unless you have a Panasonic TV). And the half-assed transfers that you just know will be superceeded by something better if you wait. And then there are the $40 blurays, which I'm just not gonna bother with. Gimme a break!
Sony thought they could raise the bar for disposable income and failed. I've got a plasma
set, a game console or two, and an upsampling DVD player and don't feel like I'm
missing a thing. If I was, I sure as heck don't love any move enough to spend 25-35
bucks to bring it home. The value just isn't there. Coupled with the trend of recycled
ideas from Hollywood and the increasing penetration of reality tv, the set of stuff
I'm willing to own on disc keeps getting smaller.
If they stop the pricing nonsense and make them as cheap as DVDs then they
could see some real market penetration.
www.alphalinux.org
people refuses to pay for the SAME CONTENT again. The entire thing about this "new" format isn't about delivering "better" content, it's about making people paying for the same content AGAIN.
DVD quality is quite good enough for me, and I can easily copy and media shift DVDs. If I want to watch my DVD on my phone, I can. If I want to watch something from outside my region, I can. (I already paid $80 for the damn DVD direct from the publisher, why not watch it?)
The usual reasons: not enough bang for the buck, the perception of a forced upgrade, DVDs work just fine, thank you. Plus the draconian DRM that goes with all HD stuff.
It all adds up to a non-starter for me.
...laura
I am thoroughly convinced we are 3-5 years away from true digital distribution. Services are getting close but no one has everything available online, yet. Why buy blue ray or any other BS format just to replace it in a few years. I will soon be able to pay a monthly fee and have access to all of the content ever in a click. In the mean time I just pirate.
it was picked over hd-dvd because the studios thought it would help them control piracy better. hd-dvd was cheaper from the start and would have been just as cheap as dvds by now. plus, hd-dvd would have infiltrated homes by default...joe sixpack: "my dvd player broke. this says hd-dvd. it must play dvds. i'll take it."
Another reason for falling blue ray sales is that discerning viewers can see that lcd tvs (even with blue ray) is not an all around upgrade over a CRT with DVD. LCD tvs are incapable of producing smooth cinematic movement because the liquid crystals and plasma cells physically can't change fast enough. So panning shots in a city will show light poles jumping across your screens. This isn't a problem on a tube TV with DVD. Also CRTs produce many times the light output of the best LCD on the market. And worst of all, LCDs fail to produce texture in shadowy or dark areas. Seeing the texture of a black tweed jacket was no problem on a CRT but on an lcd it's a washout of black. The market has traded a technology that was superior to LCD and plasma in almost every way except pixel density. A lot of people when they watch a blue ray on any given lcd or plasma think, "but wait. As the camera moves, people are skipping across the screen and I loose the subtle textures of dark scenes". And so they just don't see the value of paying so much more for a TV and player that is cinematicly inferior and will not last half as long as their trusty CRT. Excluding definition, shot for shot CRTs deliver a superior viewing experience over lcd/plasma/blue ray. And a lot of people realize that. They need to fix this with the two technologies before hordes rush out to by new tech. Marketing bull will only go so far in convincing the masses to buy.
Me, I haven't bought anything SONY-branded or SONY-controlled in years. I have bought computers, televisions, DVD recorders/players, portable music players, even blank media, all without the SONY logo. Their rootkit arrogance has probably cost them $4000 of my money...so far. And, dear SONY, I ain't nearly done yet.
What most industry pundits never seem to get is that people got a finite amount of money to spend. And we got a LOT more to spend it on. Just how much does your phone cost again? Your iPad?
And what pundits also forget is time. DVD did NOT catch on. It wasn't until you could buy a player for under a hundred that they started to sell and then only when the actual DVD's came of their premium price. VHS hung on for a long time afterwards as well.
Blu-ray is still relatively new and still expensive. It isn't just the movies and the player but what good is HD on a non-HD tv? A REAL HD TV with enough quality to make it apparent? And then, does it matter on most movies?
I am not one of those people who claims he can't see the difference because I can, very clearly. On HD movies. But most stuff I actually watch is old crap. Red dwarf on Blu-Ray? Why?
Will Blu-Ray win eventually? Maybe, if downloading doesn't take over. More and more quality TV's will be sold and become available second hand, players will become cheaper and the movies will go in the discount bin. That is what happened to DVD and for that matter VHS. People always forget that new formats take a LONG time to take over. The past always happened faster. The 100 year war? Lasted a weekend.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Even with the launch of streaming services Blu Ray is life support for rental outlets. I find that after my purchase of a Blu-ray player i rent the Blu-ray dvd in preference of quality,then i watch for those titles on sale for low low prices once the demand falls. I have Netflix but find most of the titles duplicate what i get from cable movie channels. Online blockbuster titles are 3 times the cost of renting blu rays. also i dont want the whole 3D thing to take off and will not purchase such appliances or dvds.
Blu-Ray is pretty much useless for me, and not just because of the high disk cost or DRM-created issues.
First, all the televisions in my house are standard definition, the largest being 32 inches diagonal, the remainder 12 inches. Without large high-def screens, there's just no point as up-converted DVD's look fine. I suspect a lot of people are in the same boat.
Second, my son and I watch all our TV/movies on our computer screens, in a tiny window while we're doing something else. Now, what is the advantage of Blu-Ray once again?
Blu-Ray was invented by electronic companies to get us to re-purchase all of our movies, nothing more. If that works, they'll re-release them again in 3D. If it doesn't work, they'll blame piracy for the failure.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I didn't even read the summary, let alone the article, but I'm pretty certain that the title of this post answers the question from the article title.
Formula 1 on HD, on the other hand, has completely transformed the viewing experience this year.
Check out the torrents. The sensation of speed actually exists, which was completely lacking in SD.
For CGI, HD might not be so good, but for RealLife, HD is the way to go.
I've been a pirate since before the days of internet back in copying vhs tapes (ugh) :)
anyhow I may buy the odd dollar dvd from the bargain bin, but as for new blurays I have never bought a bluray.
I download the bluray rips of movies 1080p off torrents, not the 720p unless that is all that is offered, but I normally get the 1080p rip.
I use Western digital WD TV Live with a usb wifi adapter plugged in which is plugged into my television. It will play nearly any format/codec and will play 1080p rips with no downsampling at all. So I can enjoy full 1080p on my hd tv.
The western digital wd tv you can plug a usb hard drive into it, or you can setup a share on your network and stream the movies across the lan. and it's super cheap compared to all other similar gadgets and supports all the codecs us pirates love.
Western Digital finally did it right by selling to pirates a product that works perfect for all codecs with absolutely no drm involved. And they've sold a ton and gained a lot of support in doing so.
I cut cable years ago and even before blurays and before the wdtv I used a laptop with cable into tv, I have all my television shows I keep up with using demonoid's RSS feed to automatically download as they are available which is usually 20 minutes to 1 hour after they are broadcast.
I watched the Superbowl in 720p HD Thanks to Justin.tv and Justin.tv people always restream the live payperview events
there is absolutely no reason to support mass media as it exists today, If television ever stopped spamming you every 5 mins then I may one day return to cable tv.
But as it is now, Where I live we have 1 movie theater within a 50 mile radius, and for price of seeing a movie in a theater I could own the dvd. Ticket price for a movie where I am at is 13.50, you add on popcorn and a drink thats 20 bucks or more per person. There is no way in hell you will ever force me to go to a theater.
I can get screeners or bluray rips and watch then in high def on my hdtv with my family and in this economy save over 100 bucks when watching 1 movie as compared to local ticket prices for same movie.
and as for television pirating, I will not pay for cable tv to get spammed non stop by ads, 40 minutes of advertising to watch 30 minutes of a show. thank god for demonoid and other torrent engins and http://icefilms.info/
thats also why bluray's wont catch on
The question is fundamentally flawed, so there can't really be a valid answer.
Blu-Ray is catching on just fine. I have 2 Blu-Ray players myself, not counting the Blu-Ray burner in my laptop. The quality is noticeably superior to DVD (unless you lack the quality of equipment or visual acuity to discern it). You also have to remember that many Blu-Rays these days also come with DVD copies (and digital copies), so the numbers may be skewed as a result of that.
Even if Blu-Ray doesn't succeed as a movie medium, it will succeed as a data medium due to the simple fact that file sizes are growing and DVD's are too small to provide reasonable backup/archive storage for today's larger drives, much like 3.5" floppies did back in the days of the Floppy Shuffle. A dual-layer BD holds ~6x as much as a dual-layer DVD, so for longer-term archival, BD is a necessary evolution of size.
Michael Jennings | HPC Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab | Author, Eterm (eterm.org)
Blue Ray Disc sell for $20 and upward
while the same movie on DVD goes for $11 and up, and there are tons of DVD going for $3 and up
brand new at Walmart and etc.
who wants to spend $25 on a movie in t his economy?
Or a computer, a bluray drive, and AnyDVDHD. Or a computer with 3 Bluray drives, one Region A, one Region B, and one Region C. So, if you really care, it's merely slightly inconvenient, not particularly undoable.
Not everyone has a flat panel/HD capable TV, so it makes sense that for those who don't have a flat panel, a normal DVD player is already better than the average TV. As more and more people replace their old CRT based TV with a flat panel, there will be a corresponding replacement of DVD players as well. If HDMI cables were also provided, the reduction in cables to connect things together would also encourage many people to make the switch.
Costs on flat panel displays have been dropping, so there will be a time in the next few years where people will FINALLY stop buying those old TVs, and Blu-Ray will at that point make a LOT more sense. $50 Blue-Ray players would also help with the adoption of the technology.
I felt later I bought a DVD player too soon. I bought when they hit $300 for a good one; they plummeted after that and I realized I'd had time to watch about 10 movies before they hit $100. In short, I paid $20 each, besides the rental, to watch those 10 movies that year rather than the next year.
Most people are conservative about these things. Wait until the price drops. It has to STOP dropping before you buy.
And then there's the recession. Only one /. poster above "1" score has mentioned the word, as an add-on point. Then I googled the two words "recession" and "blu-ray" and there was a page of articles about how analysts in 2008 and 2009 felt the recession had sabotaged BR's uptake. The recession is only marginally better so far this year.
It's not the few extra percent out of work, it's the 20% or more that are *worried* about their jobs and not likely to make purchases that aren't needed. Which is not just the BR player, it's the HDTV..which also have only stopped dropping recently, after a bewildering period of 720p vs 1080i and have finally stabilized on everybody being able to afford 1080p. Which is the only grade that you can only see with BR.
If the recession and the tech changes have been holding back demand, then it could suddenly jump up as people gain confidence. That's happening slowly, so I'm thinking at least 2012, possibly even 2013, before you'll know if this is a result of economics and reluctance to get caught behind on the technology, or a genuine lack of interest in BR's features.
The real problem is that movie studios and equipment manufacturers overestimated the value of Blu-ray quality to the average consumer. Yes it's better, but (aside from enormous TVs that are still a small fraction of the market) it's not dramatically better. It doesn't matter if the price of Blu-ray players has dropped when you can still buy a DVD player for half that price. Similarly, the disks tend to be overpriced relative to their perceived benefit to consumers. The only company that seems to understand about what Blu-ray is worth to consumers is Netflix, who charges just $2 extra per month to mail Blu-rays instead of DVDs.
I still have a VCR, DVD players to play both old DVDs and CDs, 20" CRT TV from 1996, HTPC with two old HDTV tuner cards from 2005, etc. I don't need to upgrade if they still work fine. Frak DRM too.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Positively provincial!
What an absurd little idea, what will they think of next!
If the industry can't figure out that the model has changed without them, then they don't deserve to participate. Physical media is the past, all electronic is what the future is. They can try and wrangle about with a DRM laden cloud if they want, but even that is likely to fail, as it has been tried in the past. People want content, on demand. You either provide it or you do not.
With usb flashdrives running up to 64 gigs and beyond, why bother with discs?
This post is a lie! Do get a medal for saying that?
The purpose of existence is to make money.
"Blu-ray discs and players are clearly superior to DVDs, offering more features and a better picture overall" -- Not really. Old movies that have been re-released in BD format have same visual resolution as on DVD. The same applies to new movies that were not shot using highdef cameras. On my 46 inch highdef tv I see no difference between, say The Bourne Identity DVD and BD.
Seriously, it's been a decade since I've been to a video store, and I live half a block from where one is/was.
Everything's on disk or flash.
Everything.
And with torrent so I can watch the original French-subtitled Japanese TV series, why would I even BUY a Blu-Ray disk? They won't let me use it in the players for the US - so I won't buy their crippled US product.
Consequences - it's what's for dinner.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Because physical media are a thing from the past. Future is streaming.
I won't buy a Bluray player. And i plan to sell 90% of my DVD collection. After watching most of them only one time, I put them on the shelf to collect dust, and that's plain stupid. I'm learning from my mistakes and won't buy discs again. Ever.
Sitting 12 feet away from an 96-inch image is about right for watching movies.
Since the prices have fallen to about $1 to $1.50 for a 25 gig Blu-Ray disk, I'm thinking they would be great for backing up data.
Blu-Ray players... Ill hold off on that. I dont trust the Motion picture industry and their new toys. I would have to research it to see what kind of shackles they include with it
As I am reading these comments, I realize that most of you are in the category of either "I don't see a difference" or "it's not that noticeable" which tells me you've never really seen the 2 formats side-by-side. I'm no expert, but the difference is very apparent to me and well worth the cost. BTW, if you're paying $29.95 per blu-ray, your not really price shopping as you would most other products. I rarely pay $19.95 and that's if it's a new release.
Blu-ray is the only feature Sony hasn't taken out of my Playstation 3.
Blue Ray is not just competing against DVDs. It's competing against networks and hard drives.
You start with an $80 up front cost for a Blu-Ray writer, but then have to buy the discs, which have come down to $1 per disc, so $.040 per gigabyte.
Meanwhile. you can get a 1.5 TB external hard drive for $70, which winds up being $.051 per gigabyte.
So if you look at these costs, you'll have to use 290 Blu Ray discs before Blu Ray is cheaper storage than external hard drives. Yes, if you are just putting movies on those Blu Ray discs, you will be able to able to play those in a FEW more devices, but many DVD/Blu Ray/Consoles/etc. can read from an external hard drive. But access to a few extra devices comes at the cost of not being able to reuse that storage, where you certainly can with an external hard drive.
Also, if you are needing high amounts of storage, you are almost certainly doing video, and will wind up using a lot more than 25 GB. An external is far more compact (and easier to deal with) than 60 Blu Ray discs.
Sure, there are cases when you want to transfer smaller amounts of data, but that's what flash drives are for.
In no particular order.
1. Price for disc.
2. Upsampling for DVD
3. Firmware updates
4. Load times
5. Stream services
6. USB ports
7. too many people just don't SEE the Difference
8. 99% of people just won't HEAR the Difference
Many here are likely to point to services like Netflix but the plain fact of the matter is that most people simple do not have an issue with the quality of DVD and BluRay just isn't a big enough jump for them. The even bigger hurdle is that, once again, the industry gets it wrong by charging an outrageous premium for anything on BluRay. No thanks. I'm simply not at all interested in turning over my collection of hundreds of DVD's for that kind of money.
I'm willing to just wait them out until the discs are actually sensibly priced.
Yeah, and that is the problem. Choose:
1) Pretty OK picture and convenient.
2) AWESOME picture and inconvenient.
Most people choose 1)
I have chosen to buy a BluRay Player only because my DVD player broke (after ~10 years, so that was pretty OK) and the Player was not much more expensive than a DVD player.
The media I buy is pretty much 90% DVD and only 10% BluRay. Because most of the (older) stuff I'm interested in only comes out on DVD, if at all. If it is available on BluRay, though, I get it on BluRay. But I only started buying BluRays after I knew I was able to rip them and and have a "Movie Only" copy without all the stuff they put on that only gets in the way.
We have a 40" LCD tv (not that big, I realize) that we watch from a ways away, and while the quality is noticeably better, the quality of the same movie in DVD looks almost as good, and looks totally fine. However, I noticed that my old upscaling DVD player (a pretty nice/expensive model) didn't do as well as my blu ray play upscales dvds.
I buy everything new in DVD + BluRay packs where possible and buy DVD for anything that doesn't have both. Then they'll work in the car, my mom's house, etc. BluRay is great, but my player LG BD370 has had I think one update released since the player was created and it made things worse not better. I don't know- its not for everyone.
I have 2 main reasons not to switch to blue ray:
1) I don't want to spend MY money buying a new Hi-Def TV Set that will only last for 3 years.
2) I don't want to buy all my VHS/DVD collection again in a new format. And they are damn expensive!
I thought long and hard about this prior to me responding. I read almost every response and I think the biggest reasons are several fold. I am a typical person when it comes to my movies. I like my movies, I like good movies, I watch them frequently, I have a good stereo system and a HD tv (more later). However I think the reason it has not "taken off" is because the studios miscalculated their audiences for what they are offering.
.. well it does not look much better than an upscaled DVD to go BR. Why pay a cost premium.
.. but I also have some DVDs as well purchased in the last 2 years. When I can find a movie for $4 in a best buy bin, I will buy that for some stupid movie I might watch once or twice. A movie I want on Blu-Ray is Sherlock Holmes. I would purchase that in a heartbeat, but I have yet to see it for less than $15 in the 2 years since its release. Again - Oh well - does not beat my $10 rule.
First off, when I got my first DVD player, I was blown away. I had a VHS player, and a good VHS and DVD player at the time (late 1990's) were the same price. Yes the DVDs were more expensive, but the prices eventually came down. However the biggest thing was you bought DVD since you could get nothing else. If you wanted to rent a movie, it was several dollars a night, and buying a movie for $10 bucks was almost cheaper in case you wanted to watch it again later. What does this have to do with Blu-Rays? Well now there are other cheaper options to get your content.
Next, Netflix. You can use this for your on demand stuff for decent quality. Why pay good $ for a season of a TV show just to see if you like it? Same thing for the latest Romantic Comedy. This goes right in line with what you purchase. I used to think that any movie purchased was a movie I did not have to see in the theaters due to the cost of tickets. While this still holds true, I don't go and see movies as much anymore as most of them are shit.
The next is Price. I have a golden rule of $10 bucks is the most I will ever pay for a DVD or blu-ray. I hold true to that. I hardly ever deviate as I know in 3 months after a DVD/BR release, the price will come down. So what I don't get to see Iron Man 2 until 8 months after it came out. The movie is still the same. If the picture is the same, why pay more for the DVD and BR (see below for my setup).
Extra features. Who cares. I like them in some movies, but hardly worth the watch. I never watch them a second time. If they are there, I never pay extra for them. I can care less about commentary or freaking Portuguese subtitles. I am American, in Region 1, English with English subtitles.
Not able to skip content. I usually turn on the BR player, pop in the disk, and walk upstairs, and take a leak, get a diet cherry 7-up and pop some pop corn, and come back and I am at the main menu.
Limited use of BR vs DVD ubiquity. You cannot give your brother a copy of a BR movie to borrow since he does not have a BR player. There is ubiquity in DVD.
My TV/Video setup. I have a 51" 2004 rear projection 1080i TV. I have a 2001 Onkyo-503 (DTS, 5.1, etc.) receiver. I had a DVD/VHS system give up the ghost (well it was drowned in a basement flood), so I replaced it with a BR player. It works great for DVD, but not for BR due to lack of HDMI inputs. So what do you ask
Firmware updates. I have had to do 3 on my BR player. I don't find it difficult, but annoying. Cannot do it online - have to use a USB disk formatted to put it in and tell it to update.
Computers lack of cheap support. This one is self explanatory. I cannot take my BR from downstairs and play it on my computer. Oh well - guess they don't want me to watch it more often.
Don't get me wrong - I have some Blu-Rays
I can't tell the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray. Also, they cost more for both discs and players. And if I buy Blu-Ray then I'm limited to my one player downstairs. If I go DVD I can pick any of 5 other players in my house (2 computers, one downstairs, one in the bedroom, one in the guest room). I should pay more for less convenience and no noticeable difference in quality?
I know technology changes all the time, old stuff becomes obsolete, I work in IT in a minor way so I'm not a complete tech idiot. With that said however, Blu Ray is simply too expensive. You figure that if you really want to use it to it's potential, you need an HDTV. Yes they are much more common these days and cheaper than they have been in the past but considering how you'd really need two major pieces of equipment (an HDTV and a Blu Ray player) to really truly use Blu Ray, that's a hefty investment upfront. The real kicker after the fact is Blu Ray movies and tv shows cost a good bit more than DVD. Again prices have lowered some over the years but when a Blu Ray new release movie is $30 and the DVD of the same movie is $14-16? Yea it becomes expensive to buy them.
Aw Frell this
For those of us who grew up watching movies shot on 35mm film, the images are simply cartoon like.
Movies are supposed to transport us, suspend belief, take us out of our daily hum drum lives and allow us to immerse ourselves into the work. In other words they are a manufactured dream.
Our dreams are fuzzy and kind of out of focus for the most part, fragments of our subconscious being interjected into our sleeping reality. The starkness of such hi resolution images is startling and nothing dream like.
Do I really want to see all the pours on "name your favorite actor" face? Do I want to see all the imperfections in set / model design? Nope. I have gone into extreme hi end places where everything is perfect, all the adjustments have been done and I see the jaggies, I see the compression break when mpeg has done its level best to remove the background that never changes except for hi rate pans and fast movement and seen things get blocky for blip or three and since our eyes to detect random images fairly well, they really stand out and snap me back to reality. Not good when one is suspending disbelief.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I don't want disks. I have a wire in my house that gives me thirty million bits a second, why would I want my bits on anything else?
Because the greedy movie industry decided to price the Blu-Ray at a price point way above what most people want to pay. I can get a DVD for $20 or less, but the blu-ray's are sometimes as high as $35 for new releases.
So, charge too much, and you slow the adoption down. Also, their moronic "release windows" haven't helped, as a lot of movies took too long to get to blu-ray, but were available in DVD quickly.
No blu-ray playback on linux.
The Studios aren't pushing for it hard enough. If they wanted us to buy Blu Rays they could force our hands at least a bit...
A lot of people forget the phenomenon back from the age of VHS cassettes called "The Rental Window"...where a Movie would initially be released at a price around $100 then 4 to 8 months later be lowered usually to between $10 and $20. It's this window that made rental stores successful initially, and a great contributor to why they've been in great decline over the past decade.
Studios did this, they thought, to maximized profit. It wasn't until DVD were released for purchase the same day as a VHS rental that they saw that it actually garnered them more cash. DVD sales went through the roof. Think about it...you could buy that movie you saw in theaters and loved today or you could rent it now and wait 6 months to buy it on a completely inferior format. The choice was simple. I'm not typically an early adopter, but for DVD I was for that exact reason. People undersell (or don't realize) the importance of the Rental Window's place in quick domination of DVD over VHS.
If studios WANTED to push along the adoption of Blu Ray what they'd do is institute a similar window for it. Release the movie on Blu Ray for purchase and rental (but not streaming or pay per view) and then 4 to 8 months later release it to streaming/pay per view/DVD. Why don't they? It's not going to maximize profits...or at least not now. Since they can charge more for Blu Ray it could eventually make them more money to do this, but the current model of "make it available on every format possible all at once" will make them the most cash RIGHT NOW...and the Movie Studios have never been shown to have a very "long view". So they leave the choice in the hand of the consumer as to how they wish to consume their media (which hasn't come out in favor of Blu Ray by a long shot).
Sure there are a lot of other factors that have made Blu Ray sales "muted" compared to DVD: slow load times, the economy, featureitis, being much more delicate than DVDs, cost, selection, netflix, people not caring about picture quality as much as the studio hoped, etc...but the studios don't want it bad enough themselves.
Why would I buy a player for a format I don't own and why buy a format for a player I don't own. I'm happy with my DVDs.
We had 4.7GB DVD-Rs when HDDs were around 20 GB. a 4:1 ratio.
Today, we have 500GB HDDs while bluray media is 25GB. a 20:1 ratio, soon to be 40:1 or more.
The speed needed to burn enough data has stagnated while data volumes have ballooned immensely.
By 2020, SSDs will come in multiple TBs. As a rule of thumb, today's internet will fit in a laptop's storage in 2042. The same is true today with 1982's internet.
Just recently, Blockbuster Video decided to allow people to use their online video subscription (IE their version of netflix) and B&M stores, and also to close all B&M stores. If people can watch Netflix via XBox, PS3, Wii, and various other devices, but their video rental options are limited to whatever is in the Wal-Mart kiosk (does that even have bluray), mom-and-pop video stores that have thousands of DVDs and one or two shelves devoted to bluray videos, or whatever they get in the mail next week, then is there really anything to get excited about there?
Of course, I haven't been in the "gotta see the new movie with the guy and the explosions...it's so awesome!!!11!!!1" crowd for a few years now. Maybe I'm wrong.
I don't own a Blue ray player nor do I own a hi def TV. I don't plan on purchasing a hi def TV for another 5-10 years unless cheap tube TV's run out.
I have a VCR and a DVD player ... and a tube tv. I don't need blue ray and I likely never will need it.
"But more important, they say, is that consumers have just failed to understand the benefits of Blu-ray."
That's right, the people not buying this junk are the reason the junk does not sell.
How about consumers just don't care about 1080p HD Movies when they have redbox/netflix/and streaming options that all support good enough DVDs.
Kids movie? Works in the back of the minivan and in the house, PERFECT.
Date Night? Let's go rent a DVD or stream some romantic comedy with Netflix over a bottle of wine.
I think all those who go on and on and on about video quality and all that are missing the crucial point: bluray failed to make a significant impact because it isn't convenient to burn data on it.
When DVD came out, it was the best way to store large amounts of data. In fact, plain ol' DVDs are still the cheapest way to do so (if not the most efficient for truly huge amounts), although hard drives are finally encroaching on their territory as well.
Back when DVDs were a new thing, with USB thumdrives and broadband still expensive, people who wanted to bring a few pirated movies, albums or games from their home to their friends' place would burn'em on a DVD or three and carry them over. There were, and still are, huge amounts of pirated entertainment meticulously preserved on piles of DVDs. Offices backed data up on DVDs. Even larger places with redundant drives and tapes and all that often made a DVD backup, because it was incredibly cheap and one more backup is always better than one less.
In fact, it'd really surprise me if more than half of the world's burned DVDs were strictly for movie usage, to be watched on the living room television.
And now we have Bluray, which just isn't competitive. The burners are still expensive, each bluray costs as much as ten (or more) DVDs while holding about half as much data, and if you don't shop online IRL stores often don't even sell them.
And we don't have rewritable ones, or dual-layer ones that you can actually buy.
And then there are thumbdrives; we've come to the point where a thumbdrive that holds more data than a bluray now has an acceptable price even if you aren't rich, and you don't need to bother with the whole burning process, and compared to a delicate, scratch-prone plastic disc thumbdrives are practically indesctructable.
And then, of course, there are hard drives. 3.5" disks have passed BluRays in price-per-gigabyte, and while 2.5" ones haven't yet they're far more practical.
In short: nobody is interested in burning data on blurays, which robs the format of its greatest potential market. Add to this that, even in its second market - movies - most people don't much care about its advantages, and even those who do care have to bend over for the MPAA, and you see why the format is in trouble. I wonder how worse it'd be if the PS3 didn't use them...
Bluray stops working for grandma. Then the player gets tossed aside. Or it must be sent to the repair shop. Or grand son must install the new DRM keys. Bluray is trash and that is where the player belongs.
Huh? Install new DRM keys? To be fair, when a DVD player stops working - it too must be repaired or trashed.
Well, for one, what's the product differential? DVDs are movies on disks, Blu-Rays are movies on disks. Movies? Maybe Blu-Ray is better suited to archival apps?
Second, you play DVDs in a DVD player. I have one of those. But you play Blu-Rays on a PS3. Say what? Blu-Ray is just a game format? Ok, I get it, but why should I buy another player to watch Blu-Ray? Just so I can buy the White Album again?
Third, my daughter won't touch Blu-Ray, and she's in high school -- cool by definition.
Personally, I think Blu-Ray has missed its niche. Leave it to gaming, but design for the massive production values the medium is perfect for. I would love to see Square-Enix actually building fantasies on an unfettered planetary scale -- with, say, seamless pathways to approach the same character's emotions from nine directions, like flying/walking/swimming/riding/motoring over the same landscape that NEVER gets linear. Could we have that, please? A game in which "Nothing is Written?" A game without unevolved context-free monstrosity that owes more to drugs and STD's than anything remotely (r)evolutionary?
Put that on Blu-Ray and smoke it!
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Time..people just don't have the time. Computers have gotten faster over the years, but burning or ripping blue-rays on just any old computer is a pain. As for buying movies, as mentioned multiple times if its not bootleg, people could careless about the quality. Things have to to get cheaper and faster, if Blue-ray wants to sell.
Blu-rays are less useful to me. I only have one blu-ray player, while I've lost count of my devices that can read DVDs. But most importantly-
I can't (yet) format shift my Blu-rays. I have devices I like to watch my movies on... like, say. my PSP. I can't do that with a Blu-Ray yet, because I don't have the technology to boil all that HD goodness down to the small screen.
As such, yes, Blu-rays are cool and all, but at least when it comes to movies, less useful to me. Games? I like my PS3 games on Blu-Ray.
>>and what is the point of rereleasing old movies on Blu-Ray - like theres gonna be more shades of black and white?
The classic movies that Warner Brothers has taken the time, energy, and investment to restore are absolutely breathtaking. I understand that the market segment for these films is small and only the best films are going to get the treatment, but as an example, seeing Casablana in hi-def is a true thrill for the richness of the image and the fine details I'd never noticed before. HD really does have the potential to make old movies amazing.
(And remember, film resolution -- even the old stuff -- is still well beyond hi-def. 6k (6000px) resolution is the norm for most of the new restoration masters, and 8k is possible. Some of the Vistavision prints can reveal details at even higher pixel scan rates.)
Sure, DVDs are cheaper and good enough, but there is one reason I don't really buy Blu-Ray discs: The Apple ecosystem.
I've got a whole bunch of mac stuff - none of it has a blu-ray drive built in. Ripping DVD movies to my iTunes server for playback on my iPods and Apple TVs is easy. When you have kids, it's a nice thing to not have to chase down discs when the kids want to watch something.
What would blu-ray get me? I'd have to buy more expensive discs, an external drive - and for what? I'd still compress the movies so they would fit on my server.
The really crazy thing is I own two Samsung blu-ray players - and I only use them for Netflix and Pandora.
-ted
During the great depression candy bar sales exploded, want to guess why?
Because they costed 10 cents and you could afford to treat yourself, or your kid(s).
This is a time of depression, and people don't have money to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
Redbox is the new candy bar. And if you don't want to go to the grocery you can always rent off netflix for $3.99.
And if i use some foresight i can rent DVDs from netflix for some $10 a month.
With a 2-4 day mailing time that means if i stay on top of it i get to pay roughly $1.42-$0.71 a movie in DVD OR Blu-ray format!!!!!!
Why would i pay $20 a DVD or $30 a Bluray when I can pay as little as 71 cents an experience?!?
Buying either DVDs or Blu-rays is a joke unless I'm going to watch that movie a million times.
HD-DVD is not dead! My local Costco is STILL selling HD-DVD players.
And they haven't been all along, oh no. But a stack of Toshiba HD-A3 players suddenly appeared on the shelves in March, stacked on top of some Vizio Blu-Ray players. It's been so long since I've seen an HD-DVD player for sale, I had to stop and think for a moment about what HD-DVD actually was. Wooh is that some kind of media player or streaming format or what? I had to google it on my phone.
Wait. THAT HD-DVD? It was a major WTF moment for me.
Did not buy one, mainly because Costco didn't seem to have a price displayed and I didn't give a crap enough to go ask -honestly even if they were free, it's questionable because I don't already own any HD-DVD discs.
Sig for hire.
800+ comments on an article asking why Blu-ray hadn't caught up, and none modded as Funny 4+ ? Damn, talk about all Sony-haters talking business!
I once wrote as an introduction to one of my books: "In the past we used to create high quality content in low resolution. Today we create low quality content in high resolution". I work with CGI, but regarding a movie, I prefer to watch a low-res high quality content movie than the contrary.
i bought mom a blu ray player for christmas so she can use it for netflix. not a single blu ray disc has been played.
I admit it. I was a DVD addict. I made a zillion trips to blockbusters previously viewed section turn purchase movies. I have close to 300. Since then blueray has come out. My solution was different. I compressed and stored all my movies in wmv (i know, but windows media center loves it) and sent all the discs over to my ex's house. Now I have 4 dvd players in the house but not one DVD movie.
That being said both my PC's have blueray burners in them and I do have blank media but I'm not gonna rush out and buy new discs. I stream my movie collection to the TV, If I don't have it I can stream it off Netflix. Discs are dead for movies much like VHS tapes and Myspace. Its time to force the idiots in the MPAA away from this stuff. Let them eat the losses of pressed bluerays that never sell.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
Fear me. I have a HD-DVD burner in one of my computers. HD DVD will live on. Not!
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
DVDs cost between $1 and $15.
Most Blu-Rays cost around $24 to $30.
The picture quality isn't worth the doubling in price. Especially when for $9 a month, I can stream Netflix to my TV in better than DVD resolution.
I was hoping the price of BluRay would drop as fast as the price on DVDs has, but it hasn't happened.
Reeses
The reason I don't buy Blu-Ray is that DVDs tend to be cheaper than the amount Sony charges just to put the logo on the box.
I bought HD-DVD because Sony wasn't making it hideously expensive.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
My local CostCo still sells VCRs, and the last VHS factory was shut down half a decade ago.
CostCo just sells dead things.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Leave it to a slashdotter to try to explain the failure of a popular video distribution medium in terms of hard-drive space.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
How about because I don't want to be paying $35 for shit like The Last Airbender ?
I just got rid of cable. That means all the HD channels are gone. But... I don't care. It was a waste of money.
MP3 players have demonstrated to people that you can stick all your media on one device and pick something at random easily.
Blu-ray (and DVD) are comparable to CD, tapes and vinyl. Why find a box, take out a disc and then walk over to a player when you can just select a file from a menu and watch.
Discs get damaged and the media companies aren't interested in giving you a replacement for free or a nominal charge. With most online services you can re-download your media even if it gets lost.
The article says "Researchers suggest the reason Blu-ray has struggled ..., is that consumers have just failed to understand the benefits of Blu-ray." What a load of tripe. Sure, blame the consumer for not understanding the shite that the studios and hardware manufacturers contrived as a horrible user experience. How about taking some ownership here??? More like "we devised a crap product, bloated it up with features that noone really wanted, encumbered it with brutally slow startup and horrible performance and laidened it with compatibility issues that just ruin the movie watching experience; and we don't know why it hasn't caught on like wild fire".
Unbelievable... well, not really, I've come to expect that. 3D is next - "Consumers just don't understand how great this technology is..." - learn from past failures - WE DON'T WANT THIS CRAP, WE WANT CONVENIENT, EASY TO USE TECH!
I don't buy DVDs or bluerays any more. Even when I own the DVD, I'll watch it using netflix streaming instead. It's easier than searching for the DVD, waiting through the menus and previews, etc.
When I start a blu-ray in my PS3 it can take a LONG TIME before the bloody thing finally gets to a menu. And then I need to FIGURE OUT the unique way to maneuver through the menu to set whatever options I want (my wife likes to have subtitles on) before starting the movie. All this so I can get an image that is not noticeably better than DVD for most films.
I may go through the trouble if the film has high detail special effects, but honestly I find DVDs much easier. They load a heck of a lot faster, and the menus are far easier to navigate.
At Redbox, blu-ray versions of movies are $1.50 instead of $1, and more often than not I find myself electing to not bother paying the extra fifty cents just so I can wait longer for the disk to load and then have to figure out some new complicated menu scheme.
If you only rent you and don't have a fancy projection TV there is little need...
Collecting and maybe ripping your own is where a person would prefer a hi def format. When I download new TV episodes or movies I still chooses standard definition of 300MB and 700MB for movies. If I want to collect a movie I get Blu-ray and rip it to a video NAS box just for that purpose. But I'm a nerd and like instant access. For the average person I doubt they collect, they just rerent form Netflix. The average consumer nowadays already has a clue that the movie industry won't let them own, there will always be the next greatest format with even more features so why not just rent... In other words there is no incentive to collect and to upgrade.
consists of Star Trek, Serenity (which I also have on DVD and HD DVD), and Doctor Who Series 6. The reason it's so small is because I'll only buy a Blu Ray if: a. it's on offer, 2. it's a film that has enough awesome special effects to justify being in HD, and d. I don't already own it.
Some people have mentioned it, but the discussion seems to have concentrated on blank or writable media. The article focuses on consumers who generally don't care about that, however the article utterly fails to mention the price difference between movies on bluray and dvd! The difference in production costs is negligible, yet the list price for a new release bluray movie is $40! The list price for DVDs of the same movie is only $30. The special features for both versions of the King's Speech appear to be identical and the sale prices are $20 and $15 respectively. Why buy a new player and pay an extra 30% per movie when the quality difference is minimal?
Read this post and see why the article mentioned above is wrong. http://thedigitalbits.com/#mytwocents
Gee wiz, someone came out with a format which
- Doesn't look much better (if at all)
- Is a PITA to get working right due to DRM
- Requires "upgrade" cost
- Costs more per disk
- Doesn't work on ubiquitous players everyone else has
- Has poor included software support
- Has a miserable user experience
- and is used to distribute moves in a format which seems purposefully designed to be as obnoxious as possible for users
Two points: I just looked at Netflix and they don't even have a defined method of searching for Blu-Ray discs. We still have DVDs in our queue in addition to streaming. We just ripped out our 5.1 speakers that were cluttering up the room in favor of two very nice *stereo* speakers. We don't really like all the SFX and crap coming over our shoulders. We prefer good plot and intelligible dialog without gratuitous audio crap. Maybe Hollywood and the AV manufacturers have lost their way...
I had a DVD player last century (can't remember if it was 1998 or 1999). Most people didn't. It took years for DVD to penetrate. There was an interesting stat on one of the DVD fan sites, showing the number of DVD players sold in the US. It was said (on that page) that DVD would be regarded as a success (and would not decline and vanish) when they had sold as many players as 10% of the population of the US (a parochial attitude, but...). It took several years to reach that mark.
Bluray has, I believe, already reached that mark. It may have taken a little longer, and it may not be growing as fast, but it's certainly not about to vanish. It probably had a bit of a disadvantage, compared to DVD, because Bluray works best on an HDTV, whereas DVD could be attached to (almost) any TV - for a lot of those who have yet to adopt Bluray it means upgrading the TV as well as buying a player.
I think this article is written to provoke a response. I think the author can be satisfied with the response provoked :)
1) Why should I re-buy what I already have?
2) I don't actually own the "entertainment content" so much as I have a licence.
But really:
3) Sony has a history of a "screw the customer" position. All I used to buy was Sony until the DMCA was passed and Sony was one of the big backers of the DMCA. Why should I reward Sony by buying anything they touch?
the conversion from vhs to dvd was due to the slew of new features and the higher qualty without the need to change your entire setup. blue ray only offers slightly better picture if any on older hardware. you need to replace your tv most people are still using converted sd tv systems or pre hdmi hdtvs. the ecnomy is in a death sprial so if its not broke people are not replacing it. lets not forget the drm as well nobody likes. so relly the only blueray sales are ps3 systems and many people dont buy any blueray movies. oh and dont forget they cost more then a dvd both the movies and players. dvd on the other hand became very cheap very fast and was quickly the cost of a standerd vhs cheaper in some cases.
This is on target here.
I do still use a few CDs, when I want to slightly "overstylize" a set of backups etc, and $2 CD's I get in bulk. That gets into the whole Music thing.
Then if you're gonna get flea market videos for a dull evening, they're likely to be DVDs.
But my big surprise I had lately is that NONE of it matters. I suddenly discovered I don't care for movies much except some top-10 per year, so that's not worth a Blu player and I don't game so I can't slide into it.
I hang out on boards, including this, and I do a ton of reading (tho Borders just croaked!), and I am working on my career and simpler family activities.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Blu-ray has not failed to catch hold. I'm downloading more blu-rays than ever before.
The article cites streaming content as the reason BluRay hasn't grown as quickly as expected. It should be pointed out that there is a huge advantage to many streaming systems that Hollywood and operators of these systems should not neglect: The dearth of commercials. In fact, a dearth of "forced content" including trailers and copyright notices you can't navigate away from. Often BluRay, DVD, and TV content force you to choose between watching nothing or watching these with your content. In modern broadcast and cable TV "forced" content come at dramatic expense -- 30% of your time!
Streaming on-demand for-pay content with no commercials is such a blessing at this moment in history.
It's also why I'm watching "free" Hulu less these days and Netflix more. I *paid* for all of these things Hollywood! Sometimes in multiple ways: I pay Netflix, I pay for XBox Live to access Netflix (I'm dumb ;)), and I pay Comcast to carry the bytes of both! Why oh why must I *pay* to endure Hollywood's damned flood of inane commercials?!
So perhaps part of the equation is the paying viewing public saying "enough!".
Nonetheless, I am not optimistic. I expect ads will eventually invade this space like they have every other space of our crazed noisy lives. Remember when one of the advantages of having cable was fewer or no commercials? Ads are pernicious -- they offset the costs of content (e.g. newspapers) for the producers/distributors making their business more competitve even at the expense of paying consumers. To stay competitve, businesses must adopt the same strategy or raise consumer prices. Given consumers' unwillingness to pay more for the same product this means ad subsidies virtually force competitors to adopt the same strategy!
Mark my words: eventually consumers will be unable to choose *anything* that is ad-free.
So I'd like to take this opportunity to say a hearty FUCK YOU to any advertisers or employees of advertisers. Rest assured I won't be reading your replies.
MOST people don't have to worry about region support because MOST people aren't going to buy that much stuff outside of their region.
Blu-Ray is the "best; but regular DVDs are, for most purposes, "good enough". My 50" plasma HDTV looks just fine with a regular DVD, and when I compare the screens on the TV showroom at Fry's, I really can't see much difference.
Perhaps after I upgrade to a 150" TV, I'll be able to see the difference, in which case I'll buy a blu-ray player then. Assuming, of course, that 1.) Blu-ray hasn't been superseded by something even better, and 2.) Blu-Ray players aren't included as Cracker-Jack prizes.
There are many reasons for the lack of Blu-ray adoption.
I could probably come up with more, but I don't have all night to do so, and /. only allows you so much time to compose a message without requiring you to refresh to a new form. (At least I didn't lose my first draft.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Blu-Ray had two markets. Movies and data-archive.
For those of us who still believe in the importance of using WORM drives for archival, arguably the best we can do is a 50GB Blu-Ray.
But, the data media for a Blu-Ray archive is 10-30x what it should cost. So the few of us that do archives pay dearly.
If the data archive media was in line with blank DVD media, I suspect there would have been a significantly higher take up of Blu-Ray in general.
Once one has 200G that needs backup, DVD-R and even DVD-9 are non-starters, I'm waiting for 50G recordable to get reasonable in price.
I think BluRay will wind up as the default choice replacing DVD burners when the price gets comparable, Which it should sooner or later. What I think is going on is simply that people don't see the benefit to match extreme premium prices. However, the price is dropping (I've seen burners for around $100). Another year of dropping prices and increased numbers of HDTVs and the premium will disappear ... along with DVD burners as a category.
I didn't mention playing Blu-Ray movies because I haven't gotten around to trying that yet.
so much good tv? *cough*
tv today is the flavored water compared to tv of the past. it's almost ALL 'reality tv' based, just with different 'flavors' of show types. instead of a documentary on some aspect of nature, it'll be an hour of people talking about their feelings about it instead of facts being presented in an interesting way. instead of a cop drama where the excitement comes from the suspense/action involved with who-did-it, it's all about the personal lives of the cops...boring. ..and the shows that were supposed to be about relationships? oh they just added girly-vampires to those.. there. that makes it all different, right?
sadly, even movies suffer from this now, but they're the only medium (besides books but I"m talking video here) that has sufficient detail to keep my interest. i wish they'd do them justice on bluray. it's also sad that virtually every dvd/bluray purchase requires a ton of research thanks to all the pointless 'editions' they release, each having flaws the other does not.
All of the copy protection nonsense the industry was doing with blu-ray really sours the customer experience. When a movie comes in from netflix I want it to just play. I don't want to perform a firmware or software update, I don't want to have to rip it to break the encryption (which most consumers aren't tech savvy enough to do anyway). Meanwhile I have a cheap multiregion DVD player and on my computer I have about 10 different programs that play DVDs pretty reliably.
A well mastered DVD looks pretty spectacular on my 27" 720P device, and while some BluRays do look even better, you need a larger 1080 device to really see a benefit from the higher resolutions.
I have 6 computers, and a dvd player that can play DVDs, but only 1 computer than can play BluRay, so there is a big convenience factor,
When I first bought my BluRay player I signed up for Netflix BluRay. Over time I realized that most of my titles were DVD only, and I was watching a lot on streaming, so I cancelled the BluRay option.
minds, get scrambled like eggs, abused and erased. Hard Hearted Alice is who you want to see.
...conclusion: TFA writer is a tool. Blu-rays DO NOT look better to normal eyes in most cases. There was no need to replace your DVD player, Reminder, DVD's look better on a 1080 screen anyways, because dvds are 4better quality then SD-TV's, when encoded well. Blu-ray players was a condescending attempt by industry to make you rebuy all your movies, and equipment and also add more shitty DRM.
DVDs are smaller than tape, prerecorded DVDs have no inherent wear mechanism, and the machines can live a lot longer than VCRs (VCR heads have about an 8000 hour life.) Although DVDs can be scratched into uselessness, VCR tapes are more likely to be irrecoverably damaged. Blu-Ray has no usability advantage over DVD, and was actually designed to be physically compatible. More capacity is not enough to drive the change, and not everyone has a high definition TV yet.
When it becomes economically feasible to put movies on SSD, people will be happy to pay a premium to be able to put a dozen truly rugged movies in their pocket.
Physical media is something you can have around forever. You're not subject to a supplier's whim to discontinue (too many to mention) or "improve" (George Lucas) their product. Pride of ownership is not negligible.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Sure, there's a lot of crap out there, but there's a *lot* of tv. It doesn't take but a very small percentage to be good to eat up all your free time. DVRs made me realize that Sturgeon's Law is a very good thing.
If everyone hasn't gone Blu-ray yet, it's probably because there's a big up-front investment in a new player, new cables (say cable or composite vs. component or hdmi) and repurchasing all those DVDs in Blu-ray format. When pricing Blu-ray discs vs. DVD, you can generally find better deals in the DVD section. There are also a lot of titles that haven't been produced in the Blu-ray format, especially numerous TV shows which were never produced in hi-def. So, the DVD format is fairly entrenched. All of which is why it'll take a while for Blu-ray sales to outpace DVD sales. But I believe they will, eventually. I see the number of Blu-ray titles growing. The Blu-ray sections of the store are getting bigger all of the time. I know I'm buying more Blu-ray discs when I have the choice.
People find BluRay to be more of a problem than DVD.
DVD is pretty damn simple. While it has its obvious flaws such as allowing DVD authors to force people to watch a dozen commercials for other movies before watching a film, it's a nice simple format.
BluRay on the other hand requires the user to regularly update their player firmware which in the case of my cheapy $200 Samsung player can take 25 minutes in order "To improve my viewing experience" by adding support for a new AACS key or support for a new BD+ scheme.
Read performance of BluRay decreases drastically with each BD+ update causing a tremendously long period of waiting before you can play the film.
Shitty BluRays sometimes crash the Java virtual machine requiring the player to be rebooted.
In short, although I have a BluRay player and BluRay discs, I play DVDs in the BluRay player and just copy the BluRay films to a file and play that instead.
http://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg
If you're making the DVDs yourself, you'll be interested in the AVCHD format.
And the horse they rode on in.
1. I don't have a HD TV
2. My PC is not powerful enough to play HD video, but it is perfect for all my work needs
3. My PC has a 19" monitor, which is enough resolution for HD video, but SD still looks good on my screen
4. Streaming SD video from sites like youtube, 4od, iiplayer etc, looks good on a 19" monitor
5. I don't like clutter, extra peripherals
6. Physical media such as CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays seem excessive, when you can have more or less anything streamed these days, or bought online in digital form instead of physical form
Beta was superior to VCRs but it didn't catch on either. And Beta wasn't encumbered with frustrating and illconceived DRM "features". I'm in no hurry to run out and spend hard earned money on something that will not work with the rest of my stuff just so some fat cat can get richer.
... because you can get all the pr0n you could ever want from the internet, and you probably wouldn't want to see all the skin blemishes and zits in HD.
Give me a break, DVD is also a DRM-encumbered format. We weren't supposed to be able to copy those either ;) People tend to forget that because it was cracked aged ago.
That isn't really the point. When the exchange rate is good it is often cheaper to buy a boxed set of DVDs from the US, rather than from Amazon or Play in the UK. Sometimes the US discs are better quality too, being the original 60Hz NTSC version rather than a 50Hz PAL conversion.
Region coding was invented specifically to prevent us doing that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I can understand the sentiment, and somewhat agree with it, but for the vast majority of film, I'm more than likely only ever going to watch it once. That, and a lot of crap is rerun all the time on cable (which I would get rid of, but the wife likes it for background noise). Buying a movie without seeing it is stupid; going to see a movie you might not like in the theater is stupid; renting (especially streaming) is really the only reasonable option. Picture and sound quality are not more important than writing or direction, but some movies that do benefit from it ("2001" comes to mind) and are good are sometimes worth owning. Most of the rest is garbage that is barely worth a rental, much less a purchase.
Nathan's blog
HD-DVD didn't ship until 2006... so of course, the answer was "DVD" in 2003.
-Dave Haynie
So, I assume that everyone here claiming there's no difference between 1080p and 720p is happily reading Slashdot on a monitor of 1280x720 pixels or less resolution. After all, it doesn't matter. And you DVD fans... still using your PC in original VGA mode, right?
Ok, those who are left... you have proven you can see differences in resolution, or just like wasting money on those expensive HD monitors. If you can't see any difference on Blu-ray, either (a) you're just saying that to justify your low-resolution DVDs, or (b) you're sitting too far from your TV. And that's not just a resolution issue, it's a viewing quality issue. If you follow either the THX or the SMPTE recommendations for seat to screen, which are based on angle of view, you'll get perfectly complete HD at 1080p, and it will look better... just like your PC does.
It might get a little trickier with 4K screens....
-Dave Haynie
Society has changed from wanting the lastest and greatest to stuff that is just adequate and good enough.
People would rather watch TV on a 4" handheld device instead of a 52" home theater system with surround sound.
People would rather stream standard def content or download poor quality torrents instead of high resolution content.
People would rather have a computer and OS that lasts for 8 years then get something faster and better.
People want a laptop instead of a desktop computer.
People want a small underpowered netbook instead of a powerful laptop.
People want an even more underpowered tablet instead of a netbook.
People would rather play Farmville or wave a baton at their TV then play Crysis.
The only thing that is failing is society. The L337's have lost, the Luddites have won!
When we looked at blu-ray, the total cost for changing to blu-ray technology was a complete non-starter for us.
We are a family of six. We have three upconversion DVD players with three HD TVs, HD cable, and two portable DVD players for long cross-country trips.
Replacing just one DVD player and the two portable players with blu-ray versions would have cost over $1,500 and that was just to replace part of what we have for video alone. Audio was not even included. Blu-ray discs were at least twice as expensive as DVD discs. That price difference is still about 50%.
Blu-ray technology is simply a large expense for only minor improvements in video and audio. So our answer to blu-ray was and remains "No sale."
- Cardhu
expense ya twits and not that great overall improvement in quality