Blu-ray’s format war success an underwhelming victory
By John Lister
Blu-ray may have won the next-generation DVD format wars, but it’s only barely in more U.S. homes than HD-DVD and that’s thanks to the PS3. To make things worse for the DVD-player industry, three-quarters of people without Blu-ray say there’s little chance they’ll get a player any time soon.
The figures come from a survey by Harris Interactive, which compared some of the results to a duplicate survey a year ago. At most only 30 percent of Americans have some form of next-gen DVD player, and the true figure is likely lower as that’s a total of people with the various forms of machine so doesn’t take into account people with, for example, both a standalone player and a games console.
HD-DVD, the “loser”, actually has a slight lead over Blu-ray in standalone players with 11 percent to 7 percent. That gap is made up by 9 percent owning a PS3 (which has Blu-ray built-in) compared with 3 percent having the X-Box’s optional HD-DVD drive. Still, aside from drives in computers, that’s a total of just one in six people who have the ability to play Blu-ray discs.
Perhaps the most surprising statistic is that the 11 percent of homes with a DVD player compares with 6 percent in the same survey in May 2008 – several months after it was clear the format had no future. Unless there’s a bug in the questioning, for example people mixing up the two formats, the most likely explanation seems to be that manufacturers were successful in offloading the “obsolete” players at credit-crunch bargain prices.
The immediate future doesn’t look all that strong for Blu-ray either. When those without players were asked to describe the likelihood of buying a player in the next year, just 7 percent picked options including “extremely likely”, “very likely” or “likely”, a drop on last year. 17 percent opted for “somewhat likely” (down from 26 percent last year), while “not at all likely” rose from 65 percent to 75 percent.
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Stumble It!
June 22nd, 2009
Truly my DVD Player hardly gets used mainly because of my cabel company. On Demand is just great so who really needs a DVD player. Which begs the question who really needs a Bluray player. Great try Sony but physical is going out the door.
I do find it intrestion, but it something I already knew, that HD DVD players account for more then standalone Bluray players. It just goes to show that Sony truly did pay for Bluray to win the war because it is more then obvious that the customer did not decide the battle like they were saying at the time. I own a HD DVD Player and it serves as my upconverting DVD Player now and it’s just fine for me considering it does not get much use.
June 22nd, 2009
Now that HDTV has gained a reasonable amount of populatiry, it’s an economic chicken and egg as far as I’m concerned. BD adoption will take off when the prices of players and titles approaches traditional DVDs but the prices won’t approach parity until adoption takes off.
BD players shouldn’t cost more than 50% more than DVD players. BD discs shouldn’t cost but a dollar or two more than the same titles on DVD (if indeed, there should be any premium at all). If the player costs and authoring costs are so much higher (presumably caused by licensing fees in addition to manufacturing costs) that those differences can’t be achieved then BD may well fail in time.
We went with a BD player when we picked up an HDTV for our bedroom. However, our main set remains at SDTV resolution until we can afford to replace it as well. We buy a mix of BD & DVD titles; the format depends on the titles.
BTW your article contains a factual error: Blu-ray is not the next generation of DVD as Blu-ray discs are not DVDs. The DVD Forum backed HD DVD ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_definition_optical_disc_format_war ). BD is, however, the next generation of optical storage.
June 22nd, 2009
Blu-ray = expensive, not a massive leap, slow & clunky.
No wonder very few are interested.
June 22nd, 2009
Blu-ray is over hyped, over priced and not at the point where everyone can use them in place of a DVD…and probably won’t be for a long time. Just like VHS had a really good long run. DVD will too for the foreseeable future.
June 23rd, 2009
JohnJ, I agree with you, I think Bluray adoption will increase if the price premium drops. When it cost as much to buy a VHS as it did to buy a DVD, people decided not to bother with VHS any more. The irony is that the whole reason why Bluray & HDDVD were introduced is because film publishers and manufacturers were tired of ever decreasing profit margins so they wanted to introduce a new format that they could control better and improve their profits. Unfortunately for them that didn’t work. People are so used to cheap DVDs they are reluctant to pay that premium. As a result those film companies and manufacturers will have to approach dvd prices if they want greater market penetration, with the result that their profits will decrease even more thanks to the increased cost to produce Bluray discs and Bluray players, which are inherently more complicated than a simple DVD player. How is that for an own goal! That is what happens when you try to force the market to follow your path (I’m looking at you Sony!). Oh the crocodile tears I cry for them.
June 23rd, 2009
The price of stand alone players is dropping dramatically, as predicted
(http://www.tomshardware.com/news/bluray-player-cost-production-movies,8109.html) but the cost of the BDs themselves definitely needs to drop as well before proper saturation can take hold.
As it stands now, there is no new tech that is positioned to usurp the role BD has to play in the forseeable future. Digital Downloads and Streaming HD are not realistic products for saturation, as the current broadband availability (in both locations and price) is far too low to be a real threat anytime soon.
I mean, sure, if we could all get free wireless 100mbs connections from anywhere on the planet, then BD would be totally boned. Since that is on the far side of the fantasy/reality line, BD will just have to do. The global economic situation has had a serious impact on the timeline originally targetted by BD backers, but that same effect will lower the rate of broadband saturation, as well.
Meh.
June 28th, 2009
I think the main problem is the high price of blu-ray player and disc than dvd.