Blue Ray doomed? Is this guy an idiot?

[[AK]Clay]

Interesting assessment. I was planning on buying one of those home theater in a box sets, based on Blue Ray. Now I'm not so sure - maybe a home theater sound system with a separate Blue Ray component drive makes more sense long term...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365

Blu-ray is dead - heckuva job, Sony!
by Robin Harris

Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product.

With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it.

16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose?

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
Delusional Sony exec Rick Clancy needs to put the crack pipe down and really look at the market dynamics.

In a nutshell: consumers drive the market and they don’t care about Blu-ray’s theoretical advantages. Especially during a world-wide recession.

Remember Betamax? SACD? Minidisk? Laser Disk? DVD-Audio? There are more losers than winners in consumer storage formats.

It’s all about volume. 8 months after Toshiba threw in the towel, Blu-ray still doesn’t have it.

The Blu-ray Disc Association doesn’t get it
$150 Blu-ray disc players are a good start, but it won’t take Blu-ray over the finish line. The BDA is stuck in the past with a flawed five-year-old strategy.

The original game plan
Two things killed the original strategy. First the fight with HD DVD stalled the industry for two years. Initial enthusiasm for high definition video on disk was squandered.

Second, the advent of low cost up-sampling DVD players dramatically cut the video quality advantage of Blu-ray DVDs. Suddenly, for $100, your average consumer can put good video on their HDTV using standard DVDs. When Blu-ray got started no one dreamed this would happen.

Piggies at the trough
The Blu-ray Disc Association hoped for a massive cash bonanza as millions of consumers discovered that standard DVDs looked awful on HDTV. To cash in they loaded Blu-ray licenses with costly fees. Blu-ray doesn’t just suck for consumers: small producers can’t afford it either.

According to Digital Content Producer Blu-ray doesn’t cut it for business:

-Recordable discs don’t play reliably across the range of Blu-ray players - so you can’t do low-volume runs yourself.
-Service bureau reproduction runs $20 per single layer disc in quantities of 300 or less.
-Hollywood style printed/replicated Blu-ray discs are considerably cheaper once you reach the thousand unit quantity: just $3.50 per disc.
-High-quality authoring programs like Sony Blu-print or Sonic Solutions Scenarist cost $40,000.
-The Advanced Access Content System - the already hacked DRM - has a one-time fee of $3000 plus a per project cost of almost $1600 plus $.04 per disk. And who defines “project?”
-Then the Blu-ray disc Association charges another $3000 annually to use their very exclusive - on 4% of all video disks! - logo.
-That’s why you don’t see quirky indie flicks on Blu-ray. Small producers can’t afford it - even though they shoot in HDV and HD.

The Storage Bits take
Don’t expect Steve Jobs to budge from his “bag of hurt” understatement. Or Final Cut Studio support for Blu-ray. I suspect that Jobs is using his Hollywood clout from his board seat on Disney and his control of iTunes to try to talk sense to the BDA.

But the BDA won’t budge. They, like so much of Hollywood, are stuck in the past.

A forward looking strategy would include:

-Recognition that consumers don’t need Blu-ray. It is a nice-to-have and must be priced accordingly.
-Accept the money spent on Blu-ray is gone and will never earn back the investment. Then you can begin thinking clearly about how to maximize Blu-ray penetration.
-The average consumer will probably pay $50 more for a Blu-ray player that is competitive with the average up-sampling DVD player. Most of the current Blu-ray players are junk: slow, feature-poor and way over-priced.
-Disk price margins can’t be higher than DVDs and probably should be less. The question the studios need to ask is: “do we want to be selling disks in 5 years?” No? Then keep it up. Turn distribution over to your very good friends at Comcast, Apple and Time Warner. You’ll be like Procter & Gamble paying Safeway to stock your products.
-Fire all the market research firms telling you how great it is going to be. They are playing you. Your #1 goal: market share. High volume is your only chance to earn your way out of this mess and keep some control of your distribution.
Time is short. Timid incrementalism will kill you.

Like Agent Smith delivering the bad news to a complacent cop: “No, Lieutenant, your men are already dead.”

[[AK]Squidly]

Hardware and software is too expensive, and many of us are too heavily invested in DVD to switch.

[[AK]FiGHT*CLuB]

I havnt bought a dvd in a few years. Blu Rays are all I buy. 1000 times better.

[[AK]Mydrial]

I may get one when they get a bit more reasonably priced, feature enhanced and dont take 4 minutes to start playing amovie or load menus....every time you change discs its like rebooting a computer.

[[AK]FiGHT*CLuB]

dont take 4 minutes to start playing amovie or load menus....every time you change discs its like rebooting a computer.

hmm never had that problem, Anyways my PS3 was the best exscuse I ever told my wife for getting a blu ray player lol..

[Slaughter]

Don’t expect Steve Jobs to budge from his “bag of hurt” understatement. Or Final Cut Studio support for Blu-ray. I suspect that Jobs is using his Hollywood clout from his board seat on Disney and his control of iTunes to try to talk sense to the BDA.

More like controlling board seat on Disney... He owns about 7 times more than Roy E. Disney does and 3.5 or so more times than Eisner does.

The Best thing Disney ever did was sell themselves to Pixar.

[[AK]Hylander]

I agree with him on several fronts.

I can get an up-convert DVD player for $40 - a good one. The "mass-market" aren't inclined to spend $150 - $250 for Blue-Ray DVD player. Sure, audio and video aficionados will buy them, but they aren't the "mass-market".

Secondly, I do truly believe the US is finally going to see more broadband pushing applications over the next 2 to 5 years and Netflix, DirecTV, etc with HD downloads will make DVDs the equivalent of what is happening to CDs today. They will eventually become marginalized - not the dominant standard. I got DVDs for Christmas, normal, wide-screen DVDs. But I definitely see myself investing in digital delivery methods before a Blue-Ray player unless the prices come down drastically.

[[AK]Squidly]

They look great (in stores) but I have hundreds of DVDs, and I'm not enthused about buying new hardware and upgrading my collection.

Further the software and hardware are more expensive, and DVD quality
using the upscan devices is more than satisfactory to my eyes.

So why would I bother?

[[AK]Bribo]

Don't forget the fact that Blu-Ray releases are usually $10-$12 more expensive than DVD as well. Until they bring the price of players and movie disks down to where DVDs are today Blu-Ray is a FAIL.

[[AK]Hylander]

They look great (in stores) but I have hundreds of DVDs, and I'm not enthused about buying new hardware and upgrading my collection.

Further the software and hardware are more expensive, and DVD quality
using the upscan devices is more than satisfactory to my eyes.

So why would I bother?

Squid - I thought Blu-Ray players not only played 'regular' DVDs just fine, but don't they up-convert as well? At least some of them?

I agree with you, I wouldn't go out and buy new Blu-Ray DVDs when up converting is better than "good enough", but If the players were cheap enough - I would probably buy one as long as they up convert, etc. But I don't see myself paying a $100 - $200 premium to do so at the current time.
I still see digital distribution as the future. We'd already have it if it weren't for the FCC screwing up the broadband industry with it's past policies.

[[AK]Squidly]

Yeah I know about the cross compatibility, but I can get a new release DVD for 14 or 15 dollars...or a blu-ray for 26.99 or something. Just doesn't seem that big of a difference to be 2x more expensive.

[[AK]The Beast]

Here's the counterpoint--this PC World columnist believes Blu-Ray will kill DVD faster than DVD killed VHS.

[[AK]Abaddon]

I've upgraded to Blu Ray -- the moves look a lot better and the HD sound is awesome.

Of course, I only had about 70 DVDs ... I tend to only accumulate my favorite movies. I've been selling the ones that are replaceable on Blu Ray and transitioning. The difference is noticeable, and they look a lot better than the HD video from my DishHD as well (and it looks worlds better than the old SD Dish). Really good standard DVDs scale very well on a Blu Ray Machine ... my LOTR box and Indiana Jones box sets scale nicely. But there's no confusing them with the clarity of a good Blu Ray release in 1080P.

Blu Ray disks can be had on sale for as low as $10, or, more often -- $17.99 to $19.99 for new releases. The price difference is more extreme for slightly "older" titles that are no longer on special -- those tend to be 24.99 to $29.99.

I do not have a computer hooked to my home theater -- just a Panasonc DMP-BD35 Blu Ray, a Harmon Kardon AVR-254 tuner, and a Panasonic 50-inch Plasma (TH50-80PZOU).

[[AK]Rocks]

Replacing all your dvd with blu-ray helps get the ecomony going. Make it happen..

[[AK]Bojan]

Ill convert over around the same stage I converted from VHS, more or less when the number of available titles increases and the $$$ go down down down.