Blu-ray a bust on PC drives
By John Lister
A market research firm claims there’s no prospect of Blu-ray drives becoming dominant on the PC in the foreseeable future. The firm claims that even by 2013, just one in six new machines will include a drive.
ISuppli says it expects 3.6 percent of PCs shipped this year to include a drive, a figure which should rise relatively rapidly over the next three years before largely leveling off in 2012/13.
There are several factors behind this reasoning:
Price
At the moment, as an example, Dell charges $120 to upgrade a basic PC with a Blu-ray reader drive, and $200 if you want to write to Blu-ray discs. That’s a pretty significant add-on for a machine costing a few hundred dollars, particularly as a standalone Blu-ray player can cost as little as $149.
Movies
While it’s now standard for new titles to be released in Blu-ray editions, the market is still in a chicken-and-egg situation with many people not buying the format until they get a player, but not getting a player because they don’t have enough titles to justify it. There also appears to be little appetite in this economy for replacing existing DVDs in a home collection with Blu-ray ‘upgrades’.
Replacement
Consumers generally only replace technology they are familiar with when they can clearly see the advantages of the new system, such as the improved picture quality and extras of DVD titles over VHS releases. With standalone players, Blu-ray has had some success appealing to consumers, particularly those with HD televisions. However, with most PC users having a small monitor and fairly primitive stereo speakers, the DVD/Blu-ray gap isn’t always particularly noticeable.
At this stage it looks like Blu-ray drive manufacturers may find they have more success targeting the data market: if the pricing of drive and discs is right, 25 to 50 GB is potentially a pretty useful capacity for backing up data, particularly music or video collections which don’t change rapidly enough to need daily back-ups.
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Stumble It!
August 26th, 2009
Good, maybe this will finally help end the mindless and senseless hype surrounding Blu-ray.
And who would want to watch a Blu-ray movie on a cramped 17″ computer screen anyway. The idea is almost as stupid as getting a Blu-ray player to watch it on a analog or SD TV. That is if people can afford to buy the player and then the expensive discs…which brings up another matter…
With this economy, some people “don’t even have a pot to piss in” (so to speak) and believe me…Blu-ray is least of their concerns.
If anyone wants to back up their data, you could do it with DVD. Approx 47 GB would cost about a paltry $2.50 cents given frequent sale prices on a 100 pack of DVD’s for $25…that is 25 cents per disc folks…
And if you wanted to transfer those files to another computer…chances are good it has a DVD player in it…chances are next to none that it would have a Blu-ray player in it.
Hey I am all for new technology…but lets get real…
August 27th, 2009
All the same arguments as when DVD readers and writers were supplanting CD readers and writers.
The holdup on consumer adoption is the same as it was with DVD, media price. Until the price of blank discs becomes competitive on a $ per byte basis with the fewer discs factor included, DVD will remain the king. Those of us who bought dvd writers early can easily recall when that 100 pack of blank DVD’s was $200+, and will recall taking our data DVD’s to a friend PC but alas he ONLY had a CD.