Blu-ray Disc sales to hit 100m by Xmas

Punters across North America, Western Europe and Japan will buy in excess of 100m Blu-ray Discs by the end of 2009 - almost three times as many as were sold in 2008, a market watcher has predicted. The Futuresource Consulting group also forecast that, by 2012, around 50 per cent of US and 35 per cent of Western European pre- …

[Paul Murphy]

So ...

People with a PS3 also buy BlueRay disks? well who would have thought.

I'm sticking with our 'lo-def' Tv and DVDs for now thanks, until I have enough money to buy a new TV and Blueray player I'm not even going to pretend I'm interested.

ttfn

[Anonymously Deflowered]

Action Adventure dominates

That's hardly a surprise even if you put aside the fact that most of the early BD adopters are male PS3 owners. Not many genres are worth the extra cost of high definition, I mean who wants to pay £10 extra per film to watch rom-com or black and white classics in high def when standard DVD will do the job just as well.

[Flocke Kroes]

Given the population of EU+US+JP ...

... on average people are going to buy under 0.1 blue ray discs this year.

Sounds about right to me.

[David Paul Morgan]

rent not buy..?

Even though we've just invested in the Panasonic Freesat HD tv, have a V+ HD box AND a new PS3, we have yet to actually play a BD. DVD looks really good 'upscaled'. Rome and LotR were particularly good.

We've signed up to Blockbuster rental-by-envelope again, but there's not a good selection.

Iron Man on Virgin HD on-demand was particulary stunning!

[Anonymous Coward]

wow such hatred of larger 'bandwidth'

so Flocke Kroes, Anonymously Deflowered, Paul Murphy

did you all rail against the 3 1/2" disc's 1.44mb, the compact disc's 600mb, the dvd's 8gb 'bandwidth' as much as you do against the 50gb that blu-ray gives you?

were you member of keep discs floppy society?

(i say bandwidth, because thats all that physical media is a way of getting data from a to b)

blu-rays here, it aint going nowhere, get over it

[Anonymous Coward]

DVD Works for me

At least it will until a blu-ray player costs 24 quid like my last DVD player.

[Greg]

I'll be buying Blu-ray

Hell, my HDTV doesn't even arrive for another month and I've already got several. I don't think I'll be going out and replacing my DVD collection with BDs like I did with my VHS tapes (at least, not for a good while), but once I have a proper BD setup, and I know the places to get them at reasonable prices, I can see me buying BD over DVD for new stuff, and having an upscaling DVD player for the rest.

[Carl]

@Flocke Kroes

"...on average people are going to buy under 0.1 blue ray discs this year."

I think that you are getting you figures confused, surely 0.1 is the BluRay profile version? :D

[Anonymous John]

"a greater prevalence of HD TVs"

Apart from small screen sizes, all new TVs are HD now. It doesn't mean that consumers want HD.

It seems an odd prediction in view of the Global recession.

[jai]

using recent market data?

did the analyst use recent sales as part of the prediction? because that might be mis-leading because i'm sure most of this years blu-ray sales were from Zavvi as they were selling them at a reasonbale price during their closing down sales

[Sooty]

it's quite possible

"100m Blu-ray Discs by the end of 2009 "

If this means they are dropping the prices to reasonable, dvd-like, levels, i could quite easily see these numbers being achieved. So far i've only bought a few discs when their prices have dropped to under a tenner on play for a few days.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Anonymously Deflowered

Don't believe the FUD, it's rarely £10 extra, if you shop at Play.com, it's usually £5 or so difference, and worth it IMHO.

Seems the Sony haters are getting more and more desperate it seems. I wonder how long Microsoft can actually put off losing face and putting a Blu-ray player in the 360....

[Keith Bee]

Who Needs BluRay

The best thing about the rise of BluRay is there are tons of cheap DVDs out there - suits me down to the ground. Get yourself an upscaling DVD player, pick up some bargains.

[Vladimir Plouzhnikov]

They are consultants

They are paid to make positive predictions. Positive predictions make CEOs happier. They also let the CFOs to ask shareholders and banks for more money. If the prediction will prove to be overoptimistic, noone will care because by that time they will commission another positive forecast report.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Anonymous Coward 12:08

I think you misunderstood me. I'm a fan of HD and blu-ray not a hater, but I was pointing out that the format only really shines on source material with plenty of colour, detail and movement, for instance the Action Adventure genre... see?

[andy gibson]

Crisis

There's a global financial crisis, people getting made redundant in all fields and someone things a luxury item like BD is going to be huge?

I'd rather keep the money and use it to pay my mortgage or feed my family.

No "sorry kids, we're homeless and there's no food to eat but here - watch this great new Disney BD. Oh hang on, the BD player was repossessed...."

[Yorkshirepudding]

realistic use

i have a ps3 and a decent dvd player which outputs in component and to be honest for most things im happy to watch DVD's the quality is still fine, i watched an old babylon 5 tape the other day and was shocked at how it had degraded!

i have a few films on bluray and i consider these to be good examples of how good the picture can be. so if any other films come out that will look great in HD ill get them but for now ill stick to DVD, for one i aint shelling out for BSG season 4 in bluray

[Andy Worth]

Re:wow such hatred of larger 'bandwidth'

I own a BD player but I'm with Anonymously Deflowered on this one. I buy BD's very occasionally and still buy DVD's much more regularly. Sure, it might not be £10 more, but even £5 more isn't worth it unless the visual effects are going to be "worth the difference". This is where romcoms differ from effect-filled action blockbusters, because who really cares if you can see every hair on *insert male romcom stars name here* nose?

Whereas in contrast, watching a good action or sci-fi type film in HD can provide a different experience to the SD version.

[John Bayly]

Can't see the point...

But then I don't count watching movies as a hobby. Some people do, and fair enough, they like to see movies in the best possible quality.

The only thing I can say about the 100m number is; was this number calculated before the WORLD FINANCIAL CRISIS (tm). Somebody's come up with 100m, which being a nice round number leads me to believe that they may be being as optimistic as our current government has been for the last few years.

@AC "wow such hatred of larger 'bandwidth' "

Did you actually read their comments. They're not railing against Blu-ray, they just don't appear to believe the extra cost is currently worthwhile. I don't, but then I don't have 20-20 vision, and apparently it's quite important for HDTV:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/15/hdtv_eyesight_warning/

Also, seeing as you're referring to capacity, if I want to transfer 50GB of data, I'll plug in my USB HD, not burn to a Blu-ray disc for one-off use.

[Cameron Colley]

How's their scratch resistance?

I stopped using a DVD through the post service because half the DVDs skipped -- I did wonder if it was my equipment (DVD ROM drives, rather than stand-alone) but friends tell me they've had the same problems with stand-alone machines.

I'm still awaiting Linux support too -- once I can slap a Blu-Ray drive in my media PC and use it under Linux I'll start to give it serious consideration.

[Paul]

There's a lot of cheap DVD offers out there........

But there's also lots of Blu ray bargains too. Last batch of of ten Blu's I bought worked out about £6.50 each and this included some newish movies as well as classics like Men in Black and 300.

Don't think I've paid more than £12 for any Blu - Ray so far and prices are heading towards reasonable prices at last.

When you've got 50 inches then upscaling just doesn't cut it anymore although admitedly there has been some awful Blu ray transfers too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Switched over xmas...

It's a whopping $80 or something for a bd drive for a PC. The difference is nothing short of staggering. I guess if you have a 14" TV propped on a cardboard box next to a pile of empty beer cans it's not going to make a difference, but saying upscaled DVDs match bluray is sheer lunacy. And I've got about as good a DVD upscaling setup as is possible.

And as far as high-def TVs costing too much.. WTF? I got a 42" HDTV off craigslist for the budget killing price of $0, plus half an hour to put a $15 convergence chip in. I've got a 100" projection setup down stairs that cost me $400 for 1080p - it's a big honkin' old-style projector, but honestly, money is hardly a reason to not have an awesome HT setup.

[Anonymous Coward]

a title,

@John Bayly

not sure how plugging in a usb drive will help you get a hd film from distribution warehouse to you tv, but i'm sure you'll be happy to fill

50gb at 'next day delivery' is pretty speedy considering the average speed of uk net connections

@Andy Worth

and i'm sure people said the same about 'rom-coms' when colour tv was invented,

talking of colour tv looking forward to the metropolis blu ray

[Anonymous Coward]

@AC - wow such hatred of larger 'bandwidth'

'blu-rays here, it aint going nowhere" - Well, you got that much right anyway.

Let see how this all adds up:

World economy in dumper - check

HD sales in dumper - check

Bluray player sales in dumper - check

Bluray disc sales in dumper - check

HD, player, & disc prices higher - check.

Oh yeah. you are so right.

[Anonymous Coward]

lol?

3.5mill in the UK is 40%, so only 8.75million Bluray discs sold in Europe?

That's a pretty catastrophic failure for a media format when you take into account a movie is something you buy on a whim for £5 to £20 but they've not shifted as many movies as say Microsoft has shifted £150+ consoles.

It's going to take some work to reach 100mill worldwide, but even if they do that's only just as many discs as Nintendo DS' have been sold- again, a £90 - £120 piece of kit vs. a £5 - £20 disc.

Bluray it seems, despite winning the HD format wars, is still a total flop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried bluray a few weeks ago.

Quality was excellent, the machine did a very good job of DVDs and CDs too.

However, the DRM was the killer. It refused to work with older screens (ie without HDCP). Original disks took several minutes to load (and that's before the mandatory anti-piracy clip).

I had been loaned a few original disks and a few ripped blurays. The ripped disks played perfectly and quickly with the minimum of fuss. The originals were slow and cumbersome and some disks crashed the machine. (since this never happened with a copy, it implicates the extra work of DRM.)

Many of the ripped disks would also play on geexbox (obviously there is no chance with the originals.)

So thanks to DRM, I'm going to avoid bluray. (other than that it's very nice)

[Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse]

Why I won't be buying one...

I bought "Cloverfield" in Tescos on DVD for £4 at the weekend. I watched it on my 3 year old Panasonic HD-TV (which has yet to play any HD content) via my 2 year old DVD player, amplified very loudly through my 10 year old Yamaha DSP.

It was terriffic.

I've seen Blu-Ray demonstrated, and for the time being - DVD is perfectly fine for me.

But then I'm not a tech-nerd.

[Jim]

In Other News...

Northern Hemisphere Crack Dealers report that they are sold out.

[Anonymous Coward]

@AC Dumper,

so whats your alternative for HD goodness?

digital, maybe in 10 years and as the leading seller of digital content says they're only in the video game at the moment to keep their foot in the door they only just break even / loose money

that hardly seems a good strong footing for the next few years

stick with dvd, maybe its cheaper but the market is shrinking

one things for sure, i am interested in what msoft will do with the xbox3, they're already suffering with lack of space (pgr4 springs to mind)

one things for sure, aint technology great and no matter what new developments come out theres always somebody whining about it, will the luddites who dislike hd bitch and moan about the next system whenever that turns up?

[fishman]

BD will win. Eventually

BD doesn't have a huge advantage over DVD that DVD had over VHS tapes. And as the price differential drops, the market will slowly shift. Unless it turns out the BD discs aren't as reliable as DVDs.

I look forward to writable BDs at the current prices that writable DVDs are now.

[Dan]

Blu day

Blu-ray ought NOT to take off, simply because:

We SHOULD (but not necessarily are) be starting to see sufficient bandwidth to the home that video streaming is the norm, making HD discs the last generation of physical media

Blu-Ray doesn't offer the same huge step up from DVD that DVD offered against VHS. The step up that it does offer comes with a relatively high entry point (new TV, new discs etc)

Business outlook for BD is pretty bleak, as pointed out by the funny post above (everything in dumper... check!)

DVD finally took off big-style because Joe Average could buy one for £30 in Asda. Sure, this will probably happen eventually to Blu-Ray, but we really ought to be streaming everything by then, forget about disc players.

All that said, BT's lacksadaisical approach to infrastructure upgrades, plus the inclination of the media industry to punt physical products using age-old business models means that we'll probably still be using discs of one sort or another in ten or twenty years, and right now Blu-Ray is the one new format gaining any traction at all.

[Neil Daniels]

@David Wiernicki

Get the right upscaler and the results can be amazing - thus a PC will outperform almost any standalone. PureVideo and a 1080p telly via HDMI = unbelievably good DVD playback.

As for BD itself, until it's as easy to play any and all BDs regardless of region as it is with DVDs I'll probably hold on to my cash.

[Anonymous Coward]

xbots

"I don't, but then I don't have 20-20 vision, and apparently it's quite important for HDTV"

There's a wonderful new invention called 'spectacles' which aid vision! Yes... it's true!

"World economy in dumper - check"

Can still afford computing/internet costs - check

Money to buy xbox games - check