People just not that into Blu-ray Winning the next-gen DVD format war turns out to be a bit like getting crowned "most popular stench." Blu-Ray may have overwhelmed the competition, but that doesn't mean folks plan to invite it into their home. Although nearly half of Americans now own a high definition television, the overwhelming majority show little …
disks are more expensive - as usual.
a lot of older stuff like tv shows that people want to own wasnt shot in hd - why upgrade from dvd?
for normal tv sizes at normal viewing distances advantages are marginal, esp for 1080
personally: every player i've touched is a crock. 30 seconds or so to start, no indication of whats going on.
personally: most films are crap now, only intersting ones are indys or weird foreign films.. no real reason for blu-ray.
Blu-Ray discs are priced at a premium which doesn't help. We have SkyHD which is more convenient to use than messing around with discs. I don't like the way discs take ages to start playing, from inserting to playing takes too long and as with all commercial discs the stupid logos and promos at the beginning that can't be skipped are infuriating. Total time from inserting to watching what you paid to see can easily be over a minute.
"Consumers today can easily watch high definition TV channels or use the internet or video-on demand to access high definition movies"
Does it ever enter the minds of these people that people actually don't give a shit about hi-def? Most people have bought a TV because it's new, shiny and big; and then watch standard-def TV on them.
Likewise, I bet there's more people watching shitty hand-held camera pirated copies of films than hi-res Blu-Ray copies.
Between the abysmally slow startup times, the DRM/,you-need-the-latest-firmware upgrade merry go-round, the lack of control (all I want is for the stupid machine to play the $#*&#&! movie), no wonder there's not much enthusiasm. For those of us early adopters there simply wasn't much to recommend.
Get a good upscaling DVD player and you have 90% of what BD offers for 30% of the price, and none of the grief. I just don't see how they could have made the BD experience much worse. Oh wait - BD Live - they're still trying.
So I have a Blu-Ray player in my Media PC but im not exactly running out to buy Blu-Ray discs en-masse due to the fact that they are charging a premium for the content. I am perfectly happy with the quality of my DVD collection on my 40" Full HD TV especially with the low price you can buy DVDs for these days.
I often wait for sales at the local K-Mart or Big W stores to pick up movies for AU$5 to AU$15 where as the Blu-Ray discs are around the AU$40 to AU$80 mark. If they slashed the price for HD content they would find the uptake of players increase.
Does this come down to the fact that yes, when you look closely you can see that Blu-ray is clearer, but in actual fact an upscaled DVD is more than enough for your average person?
For sure, a good surround sound system and a nice TV are worth getting. but the difference between a DVD or Blu-ray just ain't there.
Personally I'd still rather go to the movies and watch DVDs on poor nights. When I walk into the movie theatre the clarity of the picture isn't at the front of my mind.
Paris. Ahh Paris. Would her videos be any better on Blu-ray?
<quote>
According to Harris senior consultant Milton Ellis, folks would rather forsake the disc format altogether in favor of alternative media.
"Consumers today can easily watch high definition TV channels or use the internet or video-on demand to access high definition movies," Ellis said. "In the near future, access to high definition movies may be a download or streaming delivery of one's favorite movies to a home media server that eliminates the need for a Blu-ray player or Blu-Ray disc."
</quote>
Alternatively, given America is in a recession and has been for more than a year with job losses running circa 600,000 per month and house repossessions rising all the time, perhaps people have rated food on the table etc a touch higher than more definition and bolder colours on a bloody movie.
Just perhaps.
Not that I'd quite Bill Gates often, but I recall that he said that, irrespective of who won the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray war, it would be the last physical format ever. I think all the people backing both formats assumed that, even if this were true, the winner would still have several glorious decades of revenue akin to the VHS to DVD transition. What if the last physical format ever ends on a whimper?
You can't buy a TV these days without it being a flat screen and all flat screen TVs are HDTVs. So the surge of sales of HDTV is really just people replacing older TVs with newer models (flat, better looking, lower power and receives digital off air without a converter -- the US went all digital last week, remember).
BluRay's different, its an optional extra -- an expensive optional extra with few advantages to the consumer for the steep cost of entry, higher media costs and lack of flexibility. Only Disney seems to have cottoned on to the idea that you should ship a standard DVD with a BluRay -- currently if you buy a BluRay its useless anywhere other than the BluRay player.
I quite liked the idea of HD-DVD because it promised backwards compatibility. I don't think either are particularly necessary -- we should be able to get an HD movie onto a DVD with MPEG-4 type compression (and yes, BluRay's compressed....you can see the artifacts on some movies).
via a PS3, but I've only watched 1 Blu-ray movie on it. To be honest having a single optical disk for each and every movie is a big pain (also I only watch the movie and ignore all the extras they put on the disc). And with kids at home, optical media is just not robust enough and ends up scratched and unusable in very short order.
With 1TB+ hard disks now pretty cheap, it's easy to store your entire library on the hard disk and bypass the need to deal with optical media at all.
Of course people don't plan to change their disc collection. People were forced / coerced into moving their movie collections to DVD and now that's only just about finished.
What they should see is the fact that the jump from VHS to DVD was HUGE. The benefits were tangible and made buying DVDs actually worth watching. No degradation of quality over time, instant rewind or play from a point and a smaller format. Life watching movies became so much more convenient. The only benefit I can see for Blu-ray is a miniscule jump in quality, a brand new TV set and hella expensive cables to play them through and some of the boxes so desperately worried I'm a pirate only playing through approved TVs and cable sets because I AM A PIRATE and I WILL EXPLOIT the analogue hole.
Maybe it really has hit a point where people will not take being marketed a small improvement for a massive price hike. It's like when DVDs first came out, VHS were at £10 price point and had been for ages. The manufacturing price of DVDs is infinitely lower, and the profit margins for the distributors / publishers grows massively - but I'm still a pirate damaging their sales. Until DVDs come down to a £10 price point and blu-ray costs the same as DVDs now, then I sure as hell will not go anywhere near that Sony endorsed piece of crap.
Lewis Page can take a break we won't need him to figure that one out.
Price, demand, entertainment, storage.
When content I want only comes in bluray I will shop bluray.
When more and more files to burn have to span dvd discs I will consider the switchover.
When more of our existing DVDs become unreadable: bluray time.
When I see bluray burners at around 100$ and media around a dollar a pop, hip hip bluray! (had to slip that one in).
However I wonder whether blueray and hddvd might be merely transitory standards especially given that the amount of extra storage they offer is relatively minimal IMHO, and that has struck me from day one. It feels to me like there is a chance that something else will come along and FUBAR those technologies right in the nuts.
I think SD memory is doing great at the moment, albeit a couple years late; 32 GB postage stamp sized rewritable, multipurpose storage at less than 20$ US for those who buy their gear elsewhere than at Futureshop. I carry around two 4GB SD cards along with an SD card reader and in between my home DVD player, my 4 computers, my camera and PDA I don't need any other short term, even mid term storage as it is; and I use SD extensively at our help desk too.
IT analysts argue that downloads are the future. I think my 15 year old keeps redownloading the same damn music video 50 gazillion times on youtube and that's because I'm not charging her for the bandwidth (yet). The bigger the download and the more items downloaded, the more incentive one has to keep and store their content.
The NET is still plagued by a reliability problem. Flaky IP Telephony comes to mind, chuggy hulu clips and that email I just sent you a minute ago.... Did you get it yet? It usually only takes about a minute or two. How about now? Can you hear me now? How about now?
We would like to download everything right now but we are not there yet and we are still going to need cheap storage - lots of it and way more than bluray currently offers - for the next foreseeable future.
In the meantime Bluray is looking more and more like the Vista of media formats.
Flood
I posted here months back that consumers were disinterested in Blu Ray.
Content rules and no amount of heavily applied make-up can overcome the dull turgid content HD formats are mostly associated with. Production costs become skewed away from the creative skills to the technical skills. These costs are then foisted on to the punters and so everyone is a loser.
Dump HD. Bring back creativity.
Make the HiDef DVDs the same price as the already overpriced StandardDef DVDs and you might have a market.
Although, can you actually tell the difference when you're watching it on a screen that isn't as clear as a CRT even?
Watching the telescreen isn't about wanting it to be as good as looking out the window, the content is supposed to be immersive by way of story and acting I thought.
The way films are these days I'm surprised anyone bothers with DVD collections.
Disney, Sony and others have crapped all over the DVD formats for years with DRM and now they can't shift the things.
I own a PS3 but there is no way I'm shelling out for HiDef DVDs. I'm perfectly happy downloading films to see if they are any good (I usually go for the 6-800MB version) then if I like them, go to the pictures. If they aren't worth the £9,000 that a cinema ticket costs these days I'll consider a rental but mostly I just wait for them to turn up on the TV and get played ad nauseum.
I believe that HD killed BluRay and this is partly why:
"You can't buy a TV these days without it being a flat screen and all flat screen TVs are HDTVs. So the surge of sales of HDTV is really just people replacing older TVs with newer models"
If you walk into any electronics retailers, pretty much everything is flatscreen and almost all is HD. Joe Public consumers have been baffled with bullshit about the difference between HD, flatscreen, digital transmission and many (most?) have been hustled into buying HD flatscreens when actually most of them would have had a better or just as good a picture on big old CRTs like they had before (and are probably replacing for fashion reasons).
But when they get home and still get pretty much the same picture as they did before from their SD cable or Rabbit Ears, then it was all a bit underwhelming for them - it wasn't the mindblowing experience they'd been expecting for the extra $1000 (or whatever). And I think (believe) that people are more cynical about the difference between DVD and BluRay, thinking "you know what? DVDs look fine to me and last time I believed the hype and bought into something I didn't understand, I ended up with an overpriced TV and the same picture as ever, and BluRays at the video shop are more expensive, so bugger it, I'll stick with DVDs..."
People have seen how both DVD and HD DVD prices have fallen in recent years, and are waiting for BluRay to follow suit, especially considering there's a recession going on, and spending on luxury goods is always the first to be cut. Many people probably don't see any need (or are financially unwilling) to replace their DVD version of many films.
Many BR discs are lacking on additional content compared to the DVDs even when released at the same time, and as seen from the DVD years, they will most likely get a later re-release with the extra additional content, so some people will be waiting for the re-release of their favourite films before they go for them on BR.
Then there's the issue of around half of earlier BR releases being in the inferior MPEG2 codec, and being squeezed onto single layer BD25 discs, neither of which make the picture look much better than an upscaled DVD. Inferior transfers are also a problem, some releases have clearly been taken from a master that was originally made several years ago for a DVD release, and doesn't look as good as it really should do. These will presumably be fixed by re-releases with a big 'Remastered' logo on them, but again its holding off anyone (who reads a review on the picture quality at any rate) from buying those films.
Also, several big name film series have yet to come to BR, such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the original Indiana Jones films, and Alien, all of which will improve takeup as their fans want to see them in improved clarity.
Blu Ray, so what....
Sure the picture quality might be technically very good but the majority of the content sucks ass and has done for *years*.
I don't feel any 'need' to upgrade and if they stop producing standard definition media I'll just stop buying altogether because I really don't feel like paying the HD premium just to watch the same old pap trotted out over and over.
Put me down as being in the 93% please.
* Minuscule benefits - DVD quality really is fine for most people
* Excessive price - 25 quid per movie! What fantasy world do these people live in?
* DRM - For the breathtakingly high price you have to deal with painful DRM incompatabilities and brokenness, why not just get the damn movie off Piratebay if you're going to be treated like a copyright infringer anyway?
* Optical disks are fragile, slow to access and relatively bulky to store compared to hard drives and flash drives. Why can't I have digital copies of all my movies on my cheap, fast 300/500/1000/whatever GB hard drive(s)?
* DRM also makes it really painful to make legitimate backup copies of the optical disks that will inevitably break
* Physical disks are inconvenient to buy for each individual movie - why can't I just download them over the net? For all it's illegality The Piratebay et al. has shown us that it would be technically trivial for the movie companies to setup an excellent, no-bullshit video-on-demand service. They won't though purely for political reasons - they really do think they can bribe governments to make corrupt laws to coerce us all into continuing to buy media on overpriced physical formats.
Recently got a drive for the computer for storage. Not watched any movies (nor do I intend to) but 25 gb a disc was hard to resist when I spend my days video editing and needing to take copies of huge files that often won't fit on a dual layer DVD.
Even a month ago discs were still 5 or 6 quid each but they've already dropped to about £3.50 and the speed that data is read from the disc is far faster than DVD.
"Consumers today can easily watch high definition TV channels or use the internet or video-on demand to access high definition movies"
Is this actually factually technically correct? What guaranteed bandwidth do you need for an HD stream? Not one that's been DivX compressed to hell and back, one that might actually be able to cope with action and colours and stuff.
There are *lots* of people in the UK who can't get more than 4Mbit, and quite a few who'll never see more than 2Mbit. I don't see them streaming HD movies.
I own a blu-ray player.
It takes the bloody thing ages to load a film
It's region-crippled, which isn't nice when my kids grandparents bring them films from abroad
-> it can't compete with my old Pioneer DVD player.
I own no blu-ray disks.
I rented the latest bond in blu-ray, and although the image quality is veeeeeeery impressive on my HD telly, I won't pay the premium to buy or rent blu-ray disks.
People bought hi-definition TVs not because they're high-definition but because they're flat, take up less space, and an obvious status symbol than the huge box CRT machines. Also you spend way more time watching TV than you do watching films on DVD.
The majority of people are just not that motivated by the "improved viewing quality" crap that gets forced into their faces by every Currys store.
The improvement of DVD over VHS was huge... being able to buy a film that doesn't degrade over time (time-out?... damn DRM!). Blu-ray over DVD is just about higher resolution.
At least if it was as cheap or cheaper then people would buy it, until that I'll stick with DVD thanks since it just works!
BTW I can't remember the last time I bought a new DVD. I'm no pirate. It's just they're sooo cheap on ebay and amazon marketplace!
It isn't rocket science. People aren't buying players because :
a) We're in a recession
b) Blu-ray discs are massively overpriced
c) There are not enough quality films available in blu-ray.
The majority of blu-ray releases are either crap films (which nobody will pay that sort of money for) or poor quality transfers.
A lot are films which do not benefit from the increase in quality. There is no point transferring comedies to blu-ray. They don't get any funnier.
Even when the film has stunning visuals, if the transfer is poor or the print you're scanning is poor, then you get a poor result.
I like the format and it can be done properly. When you look at transfers like Blade Runner, Zulu or 2001: A Space Odyssey, you see how stunning it can look.
Where are the Star Wars films? Alien? Lord Of The Rings? Where are the films which would look superb in high definition, such as Lawrence of Arabia or Finding Nemo?
The films I'd like to see in the format are not available, or are only available in US/Canada region versions. If the studios start releasing the films we want, scanned to the quality we want, region free or available in all regions, they might just get us to part with a few more quatloos.
BD movies insist I watch all the crap the studios/publishers/whatever shove on the front of every movie - so I have no control
The movies are reworked rubbish - and I've fallen for that trick once all ready with VHS to DVD, so it's rip-off central
And they're expensive - stupidly so.
This is only in the US, which is what almost half the size of the EU and even then not a very high number of people polled. It was an on-line poll which are notoriously poor at representing real opinion.
So, perhaps the conclusion is right, but it would be more useful to look at Blu-ray sales figures.
I was curious about the format, and I needed a games console for my son (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it - I hardly ever play games myself). Buying a PS/3 was only a little bit more expensive than a player so it was an obvious choice - I don't think that's an accident as it could provide Sony with two different revenue streams at once.
However, I hardly ever buy Bdisks unless they're discounted - the prices are IMHO stupid, and DVD is OK for me. And if not, buying and drinking more beer beforehand costs about the same but is more fun :-)
How many of those 47% of HDTV owners actually watch HDTV content?
Indeed, how many are watching SD but think they're watching HD because the TV is an HDTV?
Let's face it, little of the content today is of a dramatic quality where resolution matters. It's either so crap that HD just makes it HD crap, or (rarely) it's so good that the resolution is irrelevant. That's always ben the case, i.e. "Casablanca" is still a great film, even though it's in black&white. The 'colorized' version added nothing. Combine that with the truly rubbish quality of most LCD TVs compared to a good CRT and the whole HD business can be seen to be just a gimmick to persuade people to spend money.
VHS tape only had ~200line resolution, but people still found it acceptable for watching most things, and even commented on how "good" the picture on their new VCR was. DVDs and CDs took over as much from the convenience aspect as from any perceived quality improvement, and it's no surprise that a minor incremental improvement over DVD generates as little interest as SACD did over CD.
I don't know where you guys are shopping but I've not paid anything close to that for any of my BDs yet, I think the most expensive one was £12.
And yes, you can definitely tell the difference if you've got a 1080p screen with a decent screen size (40"+), You can really tell the difference, especially on productions which were shot with HD in mind, The Planet Earth series is probably the best ambassador for this and I picked it up for £20 (that's £4 per disc).
Basically if you can't tell the difference between an SD DVD and a BD copy of a production shot in high def, you should visit your optician.
I love my Blurays.
.... who seems to like watching Blu-Ray films??
Me and the missus got a HD telly and watch loads of Blu-Ray rentals via our PS3. Personally, we're prepared to wait the oh-so-bl00dy-unacceptable minute or so the thing needs to start up (normally we use this time to open a can of beer or something) and, by using the actual media control, as opposed to the Dualshock controller, it's pretty much identical to watching a film via video or DVD.... oh yes, except the quality really is so much better.
<Shrugs shoulders and goes off to watch Kung-Fu Panda again...>
I can't be bothered with Blu Ray, up-scaled DVDs look great on my 46" HD LCD TV, Media Centre works (albeit slowly) and my 3.5TB RAID 5 NAS has more than enough space for my movie collection when trimmed of all the trailers and other junk they think we will pay extra for? Who actually watches the extras on DVD?
Forgetting anything else for a second I love the fact that we've reached a day where people moan that 30 seconds to wait for a disk to spin up is way to long and is a deal breaker. Man, haven't we turned into an impatient world.
Surprised those same folk don't switch off the tv every time an advert comes on as its WAAYYY to long to wait for the program to start again!!
Maybe these are young whipper snappers who can't remember the days it took 10 minutes to load up a ZX Spectrum game, only for it to crash and you have to start the whole thing again...... those were the days.
I am already binning all my DVDs, CDs, VCRs, etc - 1 £80 media player, 1 £90 1TB disk, no getting out of the chair to change the disks, no storage issues, no scratched disks, and absolutely no adverts or bullshit warnings about the proceeds from pirated tapes being used to fund terrorism.
They can stick their crappy films, (there is very little of merit these days), and their drip fed formats right up their fat American behinds.
As has already been said there is no compelling reason to move from DVD, and no compelling reason to move to Blu Ray (or any other format at the moment).
I own a Blu Ray player, and still only own a handful of titles on Blu Ray. OF those 1/2 are the freebies I got with the player. I have a large DVD collection, and it's good enough.
The upscaling on the Blu Ray player is why I bought it, and that wipes out nearly all practical differences between the formats.
Add to that the cost of Blu Ray titles, the poor choice of titles, speed of loading etc, then it's a bit of a pig in a poke.
Slash media costs and you might get some movement on uptake, until then, it's a minority format.
Bluray and the Bluray crowd have been responsible for the failure of Bluray.
Bluray had far more DRM and was far more restrictive due to region encoding than HD-DVD that it was clear when studios backed it they only did so because it gave them greater strength over price fixing.
But they supported it anyway, HD-DVD lost and here we are, Bluray players initially went up after HD-DVD died and the average film price increase. Players have dropped slightly but discs haven't.
Bluray won the battles but lost the war because it was a war of a decent consumer friendly format vs. a locked down movie industry friendly format.
But of course Bluray isn't the real loser here even though it's clearly failing. The real loser is the consumer stuck with an extortionately priced, problematic DRM laden, region locked setup as the only available option for physical high def.
So I can either...
1. Pay SKY 30 odd pounds a month for HD, plus an extra fee for movies. Or...
2. I can pay VIrgin the same amount for less HD channels... or,
3. I can buy a BR player and fork out £15+ for a crappy movie, or
4. I can pick up current DVDs in Tescos for £3 and watch them whenever I choose...
It's a no brainer.
The true problem is not price but the titles available. I own a PS3 and would happily upgrade to blue ray for most of my DVD collection. The main issue is that there is not alot of GOOD movies available in blu-ray. You mostly get really turdy movies such as ultraviolet.
The best title so far has been Dark Knight, was filmed in IMAX and looks class in high def. I think its well worth upgrading. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't seen any good movies in high def.
Blue-ray players, expensive. Blue-ray discs, freakin' expensive. Blue-ray selection, meh. Blue-ray DRM riddles, high, confusing, constantly changing.
Videophiles with money love the quality and give toss about the rest, as usual. Normal consumers keep buying DVDs because they don't give a damn about Blue-ray. Cheapskates whose fathers educated them that C-Copy VHS are fine keep stealing low quality DVD-rips from the intertron, as usual.
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There's still a massive amount of misunderstanding about HD amongst the non-techie (majority) public. It's amazing the amount of people who think they are now watching glorious HD simply because they bought an HD TV, despite having no HD sources to input.
Which leads me to wonder, of the people polled how many said they own an HD DVD player whereas they just own an upscaling one? Also how many people answered no to getting a Blu-Ray player but may look to buy a PS3?
Price wise discs aren't the problem, it's the players. Discs *are* more expensive, but we're only talking around £5 more than a DVD when you buy from any online retailer (e.g. Play.com). I'd say that's worth it for the quality jump over DVD. Although on the flip side I must say that upscaled DVDs (e.g. via a PS3) are astoundingly better than via a regular DVD player, and it's hard to argue that the quality leap between well-upscaled DVD and Blu Ray is that different
Final note on players - I've not noticed load time issues being any different to DVD. Maybe the first commenter has had a bad run of it.
I don't have an HDTV, time to upgrade soon (when a Full HD set has the same brightness using the same amount of power - likely to be a LED lit LCD).
BluRay ? I'll get a PS3 (cheap BluRay player with a good internet browser). However, will I buy BluRay discs ? Not likely unless they are only say 20% more than DVDs. Alas, that is not the case; let's take a couple of examples from play.com:
Casino Royale (released a couple of years ago):
Single Disc DVD: £2.99
Single Disc BluRay: £12.99
That's 334% more for the Blu Ray
OK, a more recent example (less discounted) - Valkyrie:
Single Disc DVD: £12.99
Single Disc BluRay: £17.99
That's a mere 38% more.
In summary, if you must get a dics as soon as it's released, Blu Ray isn't that much more expensive (still more than my target of 20%). If you're sensible and wait a while, alas Blu Ray is a rip off. Most readers of this site are sensible.
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