back to article Blu-ray ramp beats DVD up-take in Europe

More Western Europeans own Blu-ray Disc players in the format's third year of availability than owned DVD players at the same stage in that technology's development. So said market watcher and Blu-ray advocate Jim Bottoms of research company Futuresource today. "2008 represents year three for BD and we anticipate more than …

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  1. Martin Owens

    Out by a year

    The graph looks out by a year, no way did BluRay pick up so quickly. These numbers have surely been altered to show the view of the consortium.

  2. Eddie
    Thumb Up

    Will we all be downloading?

    Yes - well, provided the British Telecos actually provide us with a 20th Century infrastructure fairly soon.

    Either that or copying the movie onto our mobile phone in the hire shop, then plug said phone into our "media hub" when we get home.

    Either way, I don't think the future is that auspicious for the shiny discs.

    On the bright side, we'll have lots of bird scarers going spare for all those crops we'll need to plant to make the biofuel to give us the power we need to watch the things...

  3. Andy

    How many people actually care about BD?

    Perhaps those narrowing lines suggest that other than technophiles, who will always be early adopters, the general public really couldn't give a crap about BD? I wouldn't be surprised if the format never gets close to DVD penetration (hur hur).

    Not to mention that presumably about 90% of those players are PS3s. I wonder how many are actually in active use as movie players?

    Sorry, I'm a sceptic. It's just it always seems that companies/"advocates"/whatever only put out propaganda saying "we're awesome" when their product is failing. I'm pretty much downloading my movies already (through iTunes, obviously...) so I don't think I'm ever going to be in the market for BD.

  4. Mark
    Stop

    Blu Ray is rubbish

    HD-DVD FTW!

  5. Nigel Whitfield

    Why are they being bought?

    It's all very well saying people are buying BluRay faster than DVD, but surely just as important is why are they buying.

    There was precisely one reason for buying a DVD player - to watch DVDs.

    But these figures include PS3s, and that means that for many of the buyers, there could be a different primary motive - games. And a proportion of those won't be using it for films at all.

    Unless all you're interested in is how keen people are to buy shiny boxes with lasers inside, I'm note sure that simple figures like this really tell anyone anything. Except perhaps that if a piece of kit can do two things, it might be bought by more people than a piece of kit that only does one.

  6. Andy Worth

    Will we all be downloading movies by then?

    Not in the UK, unless they sort out the shitty infrastructure so that people can get a decent download speed during peak time. It'll also take a fair bit to persuade people away from the desire to actually "own" something (as in the physical media). Likewise, while you can give a DVD or Blu-Ray as a gift, if you give someone a download gift, they still have to make the effort to download it themselves.

    It has its upsides as well of course, but I think the desire for shiny things will keep physical media as the main format for up to a decade or perhaps longer.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    What about disk sales?

    I would like to see corresponding figures on comparative disk sales. From what I recall, the disk sales figures clearly show that the vast majority of PS3 owners are not buying Blu-Ray disks, which makes the shown graph completely disingenuous.

  8. Mark
    Gates Horns

    re: "Will we all be downloading movies by then?"

    SD, perhaps, HD, not a hope in hell. The infrastructure is not there, and nobody is at the moment preparing for it either.

    In addition, the mindset of paying money for movies you don't actually own in a "touch it" sense will deter many people, as most people like a seeable/boastable/browseable DVD collection.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns

    re: What about disk sales?

    Funny, anyone else notice this..

    When talking about PS3 as a Blu-ray player, AC tells us that everyone uses PS3 for games, nobody uses them for moves, the next week the (presumably) same AC then tells us in a 360 thread that everyone is buying PS3 as it's the cheapest BD player.

    What is it to be this week AC?

  10. Eric Van Haesendonck
    Thumb Down

    Is this all PS3 sale...

    I would like to point out that following sites like VGchartz, around 10 millions PS3 consoles should have been sold.

    And it seems that around 10 million Blu-Ray players were sold. This means that most (if not all) of the Blu-Ray players in the survey should be PS3.

    One has then to take into account that not all PS3 are actually used to play Blu-Ray movies. I think a study was made to see which proportion of PS3 owners actually used the console a BD movie player, but it wasn't that high (about half I think).

    This makes it pretty much impossible to draw parallels with the DVD uptake as that technology was incorporated in consoles when the format was more mature.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmmmm

    These figures are misleading (I think).

    The vast majority of Blu-ray players out there are PS3s which may or may not be being used to play the overpriced disks.

    But at the comparable point in the uptake of DVD, the PS2 had not yet been launched. For many people the PS2 was their first taste of DVD and the format exploded in popularity from then on.

    So I suspect in the near future we'll see the rate of Blu-ray adoption drop below the rate DVD was adopted.

  12. Andrew
    Black Helicopters

    The reality being...

    Can we see the graph minus PS3s please?

    Black helicopters because it's an obvious conspiracy.

  13. Andy Pellew
    Boffin

    Market Size ...

    Of course numbers are meaningless, it's market penetration that counts. Assuming the market now is larger than the market then if each sold 50,000 then Blu-Ray would still be behind ...

    Interesting but irrelevant statistics ... much better one would be to look at the number of retail locations for each. Wonder if anyone will do that?

  14. Daniel B.
    Dead Vulture

    DVD first year?

    "Interestingly, BD fared less well than DVD during the formats' respective first year on sale - 2006 and 1999, respectively."

    Hm... wait ... 1999 *DVD's first year*??? Geeze, wonder how my dad got hold of his DVD collection back in 1998!

  15. Rolf Harris
    Boffin

    Will we all be downloading?

    No, we won't.

    ...and not because of any lack in the telecommunications infrastructure of any particular country (though of course the UK springs to mind, along with the USA and Canada, traditionally three of the places the pioneers of making money out of us look to for their data) but more because of the business models that are employed.

    Here is the decision before J. Public (or J. Doe, if you're over the pond) in 2011: Shall I buy either...

    1. A digital download of my movie. I don't actually get anything. I can only use it on some devices as it is DRM protected. It takes ages to download (perceptually, or actually, and if not, I am paying through the nose for my broadband connection or per Gig (of which I will use a lot of my cap to get an HD-movie))

    or

    2. A Blu-Ray of my movie. By now, BluRay Ripping is as easy as DVD was in 2008, so applications are available to turn my BluRay in to something that will play on my 5G-iPhone or my PS4P. If I don't know how to do it, I know a geek who does. I can loan it to friends. I can give it as a gift to more people. I can ask for it as a gift. Every high street stocks it, and if not, Amazon can have it to me next day. If my PC crashes, I don't loose it and have to re-download it (or worse, loose it completely if the online-reseller has folded in the mean time).

    I think that we are tied to the shiny disc for a while to come yet, especially when the pricing of BluRay discs become more realistic, as at the moment, they are priced to the early adopter market of course.

    Just my $£0.01's worth.

    Cheers.

  16. Highlander

    @Eddi, Andy & Mark

    A) Downloads? No, not unless all the western world can suddenly rip out their crappy broadband infrastructure and replace it with something more suited to 30+ Mbits per second per household. Unless you're willing to put up with compression artifacts, skipped frames, poor color depth, etc, you won't want to do this, in whichn case you need more than a few Mbits/second to download a movie in a reasonable time. Apart from the storage problems etc... If it takes two plus hours to download something in near HD, most consumers (who are not geeks) are gonna skip it in favor of buying/renting/borrowing a disk.

    B) How many actually care? Granted PAL already has better picture quality than the rubbish NTSC they have over here in the states. However many, many DVDs encoded for PAL regions are not enconded to the full PAL standard (576 lines)and are little more than scaled 480 lines from the original NTSC encoding. So when it comes to it, 720p (1280x720 @ 60 frames per second is substantially better than either 720x480 @ 29 frames or 720x576 @25 frames which takes care of both NTSC and PAL (even at their theoretical best). 720p is basically a megapixel frame 60 times a second is vastly superior when compared to NTSC with onlyly 0.35 of a megapixel 29 times a second, or PAL with 0.4 or a megapixel 25 times a second. If you make the leap to 1080p you're talking a 2megapixel image, 60 times a second. The comparison is shocking. You don't have to be a film buff to tell the difference between a picture taken on an old VGA resolution digital camera and a newer 2MPeixel one, do you? HD TV is no different.

    C) Very funny, you may want to sell that HD-DVD player on Ebay, I hear that there are quite a few chumps buying them as replacements for their old ones just in case they fail.

  17. Highlander

    Article sub-head.

    Tony, I wish you'd keep your personal bias out of the sub-head on your articles.

    "But not for much longer?" Hello? Where in your impressively written article did this little gem come from? Oh, that's right, it didn't. You added it as a sub head for the article listing on the main page. Rather set's the wrong tone considering the actual information in the article, don't you think?

    I'm not sure what the point of that is. Irreverent is fine, until it steps into the mire that the Inquirer inhabits. The INQ spends most of it's time spinning news in whatever fevered direction the editors and/or 'writers' want. The Register has generally stuck to irreverence and steered clear of spin. Why are your articles the primary exception?

  18. W
    Stop

    You're only able to sell BluRay to those with HD display.

    On an SDTV, DVD was a big improvement over VHS. Not big enough to warrant the pant wetting hype that was knocking around at the time.

    On an SDTV, BluRay does not offer the step up over DVD that DVD did over VHS. You need an HDTV. Lot's of folk have 'em. But not enough to sustain growth in BluRay player sales. I'd say the narrowing ov the curves is due precisely to saturation of the technophile HDTV owners.

    Add to that the fact that the consortium is vainly lumping in PS3 sales without making adequate comment on disc attach rates in terms of both sales value volume and sales value.

    Desperation is not an attractive trait, Mr BluRay.

    Like Dyson vacuums, so many folk are buying no brand HDTVs from supermarkets and similar outlets as a status symbol. It's got little to do with hankering after the step up in quality that a decent display + BluRay offers. Purchases are driven by the flatness (with a splash of "the shiny" marketing thrown in for good measure. Otherwise they'd be buying from somewhere other than Asda.

    Add in the fact that folk are probably playing DVDs through these crappy no brand HDTVs and not noticing and/or caring that what they're actually watching is of a *lower* quality than the same DVD through the half decent CRT that they've just dumped on the kerbside. And they'll listening through the built in speakers too, no doubt. What matters is that they've KEPT UP and have collected another trinket.

    I have a Henry vacuum, and a 14" CRT TV + DVD(/CD) player + sound chucked through an Amp. Sometimes we plonk the 13.3 laptop on top of the TV stick in a 3.5mm jack from the amp and watch the BBC iPlayer when Virgin Catch-up is down (90% chance).

    When the 14" dies, my next TV will be a living room friendly PC (Media 'Center' / EEE 'desktop') with a modest monitor + funneled through the same trusty Amp.

  19. W
    Flame

    Re: "SD, perhaps, HD, not a hope in hell."

    And your point is?

    I refer you to the prevelance of 128kbps MP3s. And that's before we get to the quality of "polyphonic" ringtones.

    See also: the graphical capabilities of the Wii or DS compared to the PS3/360.

    Also: DAB radio.

    It's not always about tech specs. Price, convenience, accesibility, fashion and marketing all play their part.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    It a movie on a Disk

    Why do think Blu-Ray successes is all down the PS3.

    If do think that then. DVD successes was down to PS2.

    The big problem with Blu-Ray at moment is price of the movie titles. There are to high.

    Well the PS3 is one of the best Blu-Ray / DVD players there is. Up-scalling is better on the PS3 just because of the cell and more complex up-scalling that can take place.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Eric Van Haesendonck

    PS3 has sold globally over 13million..

    That's official numbers, not the guestimates thwat VGAChartz produces, it's also sold TO CONSUMERS, not Microsofts sold to distributers/retails, that they use in inflate x-botch360 numbers.

  22. Sooty

    what blu-ray needs is some sort of upgrade path.

    Most people, myself included, don't see blu-ray as a massive improvement over dvd, at least not big enough to justify the £20 price difference in most cases. especially since, before that last year or so, pretty much no film came close to being transferred in the highest quality dvd allowed. The only real difference between dvd and blu-ray is that it gives you a better quality transfer of the original source material. If that source was bad, and a lot are, it will appear even worse than dvd.

    I would like a blu-ray player, but the vast majority of films i have are on dvd, i'd like to start buying blu-ray going forward, but i can't justify the price tag of the player, plus the hefty price tag per film when i already have a good upscaling dvd player and spend, on average, £5 per film.

    what is needed is some sort of promotion where you can hand in your existing dvd for a hefty discount, ie makes it the same price as a dvd, on the same film in blu-ray. failing that just make them a reasonable price!!

  23. Matt

    PS3

    Like most people I know with a PS3 I bought it for games but I do also watch films on it, some of them are Blu-Ray and you can easily see the difference when compared to an SD DVD on an SD TV.

    However, it's harder to see the difference with a 1080p upscaled modern DVD, so, until the price comes down, I don't buy all my films in Blu-ray, only those I consider worth while.

    Unless some infrastructure miracle happens I don't think HD downloads are likely to become a reality, plus, as others have said, a lot of us like something more tangible for our hard earned cash.

  24. Andy Bright

    DVD successes was down to PS2?

    Actually I know a lot of people that got their first DVD player this way, myself included and for a very good reason. The macrovision hardware/software that stopped people copying DVDs straight onto VHS was broken on the PS2. It didn't look great doing a copy this way, but it worked and was a shit load better than the crap you can torrent.

    As for downloading movies, forget it. The general public is not going to put a traditional PC in the living room, ever. Its been tried and its failed countless times already.

    What will work is on-demand downloads using a set top box from cable and satellite companies. I can tell you right now that in the US, on-demand downloads are as easy as browsing a TV guide, which is why they'll succeed.

    YOU might download movies on a PC, YOU might even download HD movies if you're willing to pay the price for the connection. But average joes who don't and can't be bothered to learn how to use anything that doesn't work as simply as a VCR or DVD player won't.

    Legitimate HD downloads won't happen until the movie industry wants them to happen, which won't be for a very long time. The reason is simple, they have too much to lose if they allow it.

    The reason Blu-Ray will be around for years is that it's a cash cow for the movie industry. They might bleat about lost sales due to piracy, but the reality is they know disk media sells and sells well. In fact it sells so well it often turns a movie flop into a profitable venture.

    The thing I don't get is why techies think that ordinary people will ever do more than the simplest method possible when it comes to movies. The easiest thing to do right now is buy a DVD player. Soon that will be a Blu-Ray player, because when they're cheap enough there's no reason not to. You guys do know that regular DVDs work in Blu-Ray players right? When these things cost less than $50, as they eventually will, why wouldn't the general public buy one? Because you know they're inferior to some other arbitrary format, created by another set of conglomerates for the purpose of lining their pockets?

    Well even IF that was true, it doesn't mean shit. The fact is it isn't true, neither format was so much better than the other that it mattered which was dropped. There were just as many shit HD-DVD masters as Blu-Ray masters, I know because I have both formats. To get emotional about a format war is as retarded as getting emotional over a video card, yet for some reason techies do. Well guess what? The general public knows nothing about these things, and if they did, would consider them too anal to matter. And they'd be right. All they care about is price, and when Blu-Ray players cost $50 from Walmart, they'll sell by the million, and the movie industry will get no incentive whatsoever to help bring about HD content via the internet.

  25. Liam

    hmmm

    @ Mark

    "Blu Ray is rubbish - HD-DVD FTW!" - erm... the blueray spec actually yields better image and audio quality over HD DVD... just wanted to clear that up! now, im not sure if movies on HD will really take off... remember how many nay sayers there were when DVD first came out (i seem to remember ps2 using dvd heavily and all the experts said how shit it was and would never take off)

    also, who the hell will PAY for downloaded films. ITUNES seems already a damn site more expensive than play.com et all, and then you have to wait hours to download a HD quality (stereo!!! and i bet 720p!!) version. of course, this still doesnt explain the fact you have NO CAPITOL... i.e you cannot sell the film if its shite, or lend it to people (which is illegal i bet lol)

    so, pay more, get less and pay for the delivery system too...

    BD is new, like DVD was - which was bloody expensive remember! lots of people are still using shitty old TVs or simply dont have the eyes/ears to see/hear the difference...

    i must admit - i still dont own a BD disk. too expensive and waiting for some films to really show it off! im more interested in HD football on BBC HD channel at the mo! BUT my ps3 is on almost every day!

  26. Eddie
    Thumb Up

    @Mark

    About 6 years ago, I had a discussion with a Reg Hack who was firmly of the opinion that film piracy would never be a problem due to the size of the files involved. You are falling into the same trap. Broadband speeds then were normally a wopping 512kb/s - I now have 40 times that speed.

    At the moment, a gigabyte takes about 10 minutes to download on my 20Mb connection (slightly less, but still...)

    That means about 400minutes for 40GB of the BD, or about 7 hours - that's at current speed (ignoring STM and congestion, i.e. not easily achievable but theoretically possible), and assumes that the network doesn't improve at all, and all the disk content would be wanted, which is possibly an invalid assumption.

    I don't think that it's too much of a leap to assume that broadband speeds will at least quadruple, and probably multiply a lot further in the next five years - Virgin are talking of 50Mb within a year, and more soon after, and in the arms race of the internet, they won't be left alone at those speeds - already that BD disk is down to my hard drive in 2 hours or less - it's not long before HD BDs come down that pipe a lot faster, in an acceptable time frame. How much of that bandwidth will be available to the end user may be a moot point, I grant you, but let's stay theoretical.

    It's already not only possible, but actually happening that people are downloading HD television programs and HD films by BitTorrent - not that I would know anything about that, of course...

    Back in the good old days of dial-up, I knew folk who would download linux distros at 56k. An HD BD is smaller than that in comparison to the pipe size.

    There will always be folk who want the physical object, but they may not be that common, in my opinion

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Why would anyone want to PAY AGAIN?

    who in their right mind would want to pay

    YET AGAIN, for films on discs when they have them on dvd, and why should they, i mean i dont know about anyone else but i feel rather cheated after seeing a bluray film and then going back to my dvds and now they want me to fork out all over again for the same films on a bigger disc that costs more, there should be some kind of a discount at the very least, for all the people that have the films bought on dvd already, though the chances of that are 0%.

    Besides i prefer this solution myself, its alot cheaper, and i dont have to sit through loads of crappy warnings (http://tinyurl.com/57kq8z) and trailers.

    Popcorn Hour, Newsgroups, External Hard Drive, if no one has heard of .mkv, where the hell have you been.

  28. eddiewrenn
    Thumb Down

    No Blu-Ray for me

    So bored of the format wars. Regardless of whether downloading becomes a true replacement or not (I hope it does), and I am 100% for solid state memory. Versatile, generally reliable, easy-to-back-up, easy-to-use from multiple locations, space-savers, and with 1TB for less than £100, or 32GB for about a tenner, I have no need for Blu-Ray.

    I heart my 1TB media server!

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Video rentals are the real issue

    The issue is not really about "owning" a movie as many suggest, but rather about renting. Streaming HD, which is already available on Xbox 360 and AppleTV and which will likely be coming to the PS3 this summer, may be far inferior to BD's picture quality, but it's infinitely more convenient than any other movie rental scheme out there. There's absolutely no action and no planning involved--it's 100% impulse-catering--and the movie starts up within minutes of clicking on it. The physical rental industry can no longer be counted on to stick around and keep purchasing and circulating discs. That's got to reduce profits a bit.

    Movie purchases, on the other hand, are still likely to drive Blu-Ray sales, at least for the next few years. I could see the increase in quality compared to the rentals/downloads be a key motivating factor in purchasing BD discs.

    Five or so years from now, though, when the Net is faster, hard drives bigger, and devices like the AppleTV (or the PS3 for that matter) have established a firm place in a large percentage of households, I think we'll see something start to happen to the disc-based movie industry similar to what's happening to the music industry now.

    Luckily for us, even if BD declines at that point, we'll at least have a nice, big archive format for all of our enormous files. Hell yeah!

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    PS3 Sales ARE BluRay Sales

    I don't know a single PS3 owner who does not use their machine as a BluRay movie player. Not one. Arguing that the PS3 numbers are not representative is simply ridiculous.

    In fact I, like many of those I know, actually bought their PS3 *primarily* as a movie player. It happens also to play games. Very good ones. Bonus.

    As for disc sales - it's really no surprise that BluRay movie DISC sales haven't taken off - the simple reason is that the catalog sucks, and consists to a large extent of back catalog titles that people already own on DVD.

    The BD *disc* market is still in it's fledgling stages - perhaps even more so than the DVD disc market was at this point in that format's life. A lot of stores were holding back and not stocking EITHER HD or BD until the "war" was over. Now that it is, I see those stores that were stocking both devoting more and more shelf space to BD (literally, more each week) and more stores that didn't use to stock EITHER, now starting to carry BD.

    Even so, there are still some stores that have shelf upon shelf of DVD and not a single BD title at all.

    But until the catalog improves, this isn't really a surprise. I, again like most every PS3/BD player owner I know, isn't in any great rush to re-purchase movies that we already own on DVD (with some exceptions for the much loved titles), especially not at BD prices, but we do buy far fewer DVD's now than we used to, and tend to buy NEW releases on the BD disc, even if it means waiting.

    And again, this is perfectly predictable - anyone with their PS3 hooked up via HDMI is getting their DVD collection upscaled too, and for a HUGE number of titles, HD (of any format) simply isn't important. Animated/CG movies look fabulous even in unscaled SD anyway (there's a reason that stores use these movies as demo loops on their TV/DVD gear) and we don't really need "Pretty Woman" and the like in HD at all now, do we?

    I was there in the hay-day of laserdisc and was an early adopter of DVD. I hung back while HD/BD sorted themselves out but now I'm there with BD too.

    It will take off, but perhaps will never achieve the penetration that DVD did simple because for the majority of the mass market, DVD is simply "good enough" (until they actually *SEE* BD, then they will want it too, just like VHS used to be "good enough" until they saw their mates/brothers/uncles/cousins system hooked up and prices fell to chump change levels).

    As for downloads - geez. If people think BD will "fail" because it won't achieve mass market appeal then they are living in cloud cuckoo land if they think that high capacity download and storage in the home will find a larger market.

    Paris, because she looks good in a Blu movie.

  31. Martin Usher

    Even if you've got a (large) HD display the delta's not that good...

    "You can only sell BluRay to those with an HD display." Here lies the problem with BluRay. The disks only work with the BluRay player while the SD disks work everywhere. Since the improvement in quality is slight -- noticeable, fun but not earth shatteringly good -- its better to opt for SD disks which can be played everywhere in the home.

    I liked the idea of HD DVD not because of the "HD" bit but because it had the promise of dual-format disks. If BluRay is to ever take off then its got to either be backwards compatible or sufficiently cheap that it can replace legacy kit. Its neither so its not very interesting -- in fact its a backwards step since we've now got DVD's technology tamed (and BD is designed specially to make it much less easy to do so).

  32. Shabble

    Sales levelling out

    Take into account the fact that 5 million of last year's increase was down to the PS3, and that lots of people will have been holding off until the format war was decided, and it looks like BR player sales increases are levelling out at a much lower level than DVD player sales did. This means that this time next year, DVD sales for the first seven years will be higher than sales of BR for the first seven years. The year after DVDs will be significantly higher than BR.

    There are occasional headlines of BR sales rocketing, but the graph shows that this isn't happening. 'BR sales growth shows small but significant year-on-year increases since 2003' doesn't make for great headlines. Create an Excel spreadhseet and plot a graph of sales increases (and take off, say, 2 million, for PS3 correction), rather than total sales, and you'll see my point. What I want to see is DVD player sales for the last year to see if BR is outselling DVD.

  33. stolennomenclature

    simply a matter of price

    Surely uptake is directly related to price. The quicker the price comes down, the faster will be the uptake. Perhaps Blu-ray is simply proportionally cheaper than DVD during the same period. I am not sure this says anything about the relative merits of the two technologies.

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Movies??? What about good old data?

    Ignoring the movie side of things Bluray is bound to be picked up by the masses purely because DVDs are just too small to do any reasonable backing up nowadays.

    What are DVDs mainly used for now? Movies? or Data? I'd bet my mortgage on the second. I'm hardly a big downloader (it's illegal I've heard :) ) but over the last 9 years even I've just sneeked past the 1.5Tb mark. That's 327 DVDs, or 61 Bluray discs.

    The size of hard drives have raced ahead since the release of DVDs and really Bluray is only a small catch up step - but a necessary one. Yes HD-DVD or Bluray matters not alot - it is just the size, cost, and access to the masses for backup that will drive sales.

    When DVDs were released we were all happy with our 40 or 80Gb drives. Thats only about 20x bigger than a dvd itself. Now we have 1Tb drives, so we are at 40x for Bluray. The gap is growing and its an issue for cheap home backups.

    @ Martin usher:

    ""You can only sell BluRay to those with an HD display." Here lies the problem with BluRay. " Ummmm no HD display insight on my computer, nor compatible GFX. But that's my point. Don't assume the use to be movies.

    Anon incase some nasty american organisation decides to kick my door in. :)

  35. Highlander

    @Martin Usher

    I'm not sure whether you're simply uninformed or being misleading in your comment.

    You wrote : "If BluRay is to ever take off then its got to either be backwards compatible or sufficiently cheap that it can replace legacy kit."

    First of all every Blu-Ray player can play DVDs, as well as CDs funnily enough. Most can handle MP3 discs as well. Strangely enough, they'll also upscale the DVDs over that nice shiny HDMI cable. It's been that way since day one. So, I'm not sure how you think they need more backwards compatibility.

    As for the second aspect, being reasonably cheap. Blu-Ray players recently started manufacture in China which is a sure sign of dropping prices in the near future. Contrary to someone else's comment above, I don't think that the $50 price point it the one when a lot of people make the decision to opt for Blu-Ray instead of a cheap DVD player. I think that's about $100, though more people will do it as the price goes lower than this. Cheaper HDTVs are on the way too.

    Folks seem to have very short memories. DVD players and disks were more expensive at this point in their introduction. Accounting for inflation and the growth of incomes, they were considerably more expensive in real terms.Color TVs cost a fortune when introduced, and their prices fell very slowly. By comparison, HDTV is being adopted by the mass market at warp speed. Both BD and HDTV are doing quite nicely. It's predominantly ex-HD-DVD fanboys and MS stooges that are pushing downloads as a realistic option - mostly because MS can't bear the idea of doing Blu on their 360 and need another option. At the end of the day, reduced quality of picture and sound is not a good deal for consumers who will end up paying more for less with less control over what they can do with their purchase than ever before. For all those blithering idiots who bash on about DRM in Blu-Ray, here's a question : while you can probably more easily copy (read steal) the movie you download, how does it's quality stack up against real 1080p Blu-Ray? Yeah, I know, it doesn't.

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    History Repeats

    Isnt this a similar argument for the adoption of DVD?

    I remember people buying the PS2 for its gaming caperbiites AND the fact it was a DVD Player?

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    Apple TV HD downloads

    I bought a PS3 and was happily buying Blueray titles... until I got myself an Apple TV this year with the new software on it.

    Its plugged into my 50" Samsung 1080p Plasma, and with it I can rent an HD movie (I only want to watch a movie once, why buy a physical copy??) which you can start watching within 2 MINUTES of clicking 'RENT' and which is comparable to BD!! I seriously have no idea how they do this, nor do I have any idea with the file size (their SD movies from iTunes are 1 GB, so they must be larger than this) - but the quality is unbelievable and the movie downloads as you watch it. I have an 8MB connection which I believe anyone can get in this country.

    The Apple TV has completely sold me on digital downloads, and now I rent all my movies through it (although it admittedly needs a MUCH MUCH larger selection).

    Seriously guys, try it. Or come round my house and I'll show you.

  38. ShaggyDoggy

    DVD

    How come they included the BD drives in consoles, but didn't include the DVD drives incorporated in consoles ?

    No need to answer

  39. Andy Worth

    @Eddie

    "I don't think that it's too much of a leap to assume that broadband speeds will at least quadruple, and probably multiply a lot further in the next five years - Virgin are talking of 50Mb within a year"

    To be fair though, Virgin "talk" a lot about speeds, but I know very few people who actually get the speeds they talk about.

    I disagree with you where you mention that you believe people desiring the physical media will not be that common. As another poster mentioned, there are a number of things that people see as benefits to owning the physical media. People who are downloading pirate copies are not really part of the same discussion, seen as they do it purely so they don't have to pay for the film. We're talking about people splashing cash out here.

    Let me offer another piece of reasoning to back up my point. A music track download is relatively cheap in comparison to what a film would likely be - let's say £0.70-£1.00 compared with a minimum of £7.50 for a new release. Despite being relatively cheap and MUCH smaller in file size, it still accounted for only around 15% of the market during the last two years (certainly in the UK, not sure about elsewhere), and actually it fell 2% from 2006 to 2007.

    So, despite it having been a few years since music downloads became available, there being a much smaller financial (and bandwidth) commitment, people are still preferring to own the physical media in quite a high majority and in fact the trend even turned to favour them in the last year.

    If anything I would suggest film downloads will have an even more difficult time grabbing a slice of the market, because most of the people who can be arsed to download a film will just grab a pirate copy anyway.

  40. Liam
    Thumb Up

    first bluray

    well, after me moaning about the price of BR media, i got home last night and play.com had sent me the alrt that transformers is now available on BR :) so i bought it. it was the first film i wanted to buy when i got my ps3 but the studio were refusing to release on BR as it was a HDDVD backer.

    the thing is very few titles will benefit from 1080p (new james bond looks really grainy), but having been to the cinema to watch the film and forgetting my glasses meant i misses a lot of detail, that i can now try to see :)

  41. Gordon Pryra

    These figures are rubbish

    Remove the PS3 and your left with very few

    I remembered testing the first batch of DVD's for inclusion on machines for Mesh Computers back in the day, and all we had to test them against was a copy of The Running Man and Porkies Revenge (best watched on the beta max format imho)

    Considering those lines in the graph are almost the same, the REAL results are (taking out the fake PS3 numbers)

    "No one is buying Blu Ray, and even though there were zero DVD's availiable when the older format came out, the Running Man and Porkies Revenge, were enough to put sales above the crappy Blue Ray readers, and thats with FAR fewer people at that time buying kit like this"

  42. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

    BD equipment runs on malware

    When I buy a DVD player I only need to unlock it once. I am also sure that all DVDs that I already have and will have in the future will play on it.

    With BD you are not sure of anything!

    If you region-unlock the player you should expect that at some point some "clever" BD+ disc will refuse to play on it.

    Even if you do not do anything you should expect that at some point you will buy a BD disc that will not play on it because the player's keys have been revoked.

    Moreover, *every* time you buy a new BD disc and attempt to play it on your player you should expect your player to be disabled through a system renewability message - all at the whim of a recording studio or MPAA.

    If you buy a BD player you don't own it and you don't have any rights to expect it to work.

    If you like having to ask daddy's permission every time you want to do something in your own house - by all means, go ahead, buy BD. Otherwise, I recommend to think twice before doing it.

  43. Daniel

    like the death of the concorde, digital download is a step backwards

    Now don't take this the wrong way, but digital downloads are a step backwards in my eyes. We're willing to sacrifice quality for convenience? that's just rediculous. Digital downloads has it's place but I don't think movies are a viable option. music works because even at crappy bitrates theyre only going to get played through earphones (generally). Compare that to a movie, people want to watch a movie on a nice big TV with cracking sound, not a portable media player. I have seen the difference between SD and HD and its a nice jump. I have played a blueray in my ps3 and its unbelievable, epecially at 1080p!

    This argument about it not being a step up is rubbish. 720p is a nice step up, but lets face it, that isnt true HD, 1080p is amazing in comparison to standard definition. As for the internet progressing... the bloody iPlayer nearly brought down the UK infrastructure and you're considering HD... are you mad!!?!

  44. Liam

    hmmm

    @ martin usher...

    "Since the improvement in quality is slight" - wtf? for me its bigger than video to dvd (since i had a very good vhs player and my first dvd player was bobbins). the problem is lots of people have el cheapo 720i 'HD' tvs but then dont see the difference between that and PAL...

    on a decent player with a good 1080p TV the difference is MASSIVE! even the audio sounds much crisper - and i have a decent AV system too...

    mind you tho... i have a VM V+ box that can stream HD movies. and unlike the (cr)apple tv (sorry - rip off for what it is, and no surround sound?!?! wtf!) it support PROPER DOLBY DIGITAL 5.1 too... just realised i havent even had a go on that yet! prices seem pretty cheap compared to other sources too... plus i guess it uses the box's bandwidth so not limiting my daily quota :)

  45. Mark
    Gates Horns

    Sometimes I post anonymously, sometimes i dont

    Because i'm a bit scared to say what i really feel - even though this is the internet!

    I can't wait to get home tonight and make love to my PS3.

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