The future looks bleak for Blu-ray:
http://features.csmo...whats-to-blame/
Good article. On the positive side, news broke last week that Walmart is now affering a $99.00 Blu Ray player. Once more players get away fromt the $300.00 price range and into the $100.00 range, Blu Ray sales will increase.
But I don't think the price of the players is the real problem. I found a perfectly cheap Blu-ray player recently (while the "perfectly cheap" bit does trip off my keyboard quite airily, believe me, I'm not a rich man), and thankfully it's served me very well.*
Firmware problems and the need for an HDTV to get the most out of the format are bigger issues, I think.
To my mind, the biggest problem by far, though, is the (relative to standard DVD) dearth of titles. There quite simply aren't nearly enough films on the format for Joe Blow to seriously consider junking regular DVD and starting over.
And it seems to me that the industry has been striking airs and graces, e.g.: no STAR WARS on Blu-ray until His Exellency the Lord and Master George Lucas is good and ready to throw some crumbs to you little people. Only nine of the James Bond films and that's all you're getting so bloody well be grateful, and, no, we
won't tell you when the rest are coming out. No TITANIC, no BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy, no INDIANA JONES box set, no ALIEN box set, no ROCKY collection, no LORD OF THE RINGS (well, the theatrical cuts have been announced, but no word on the extended versions) - none of the things you really, really want until it suits
us.
And then the industry wonders why people are slow to adopt Blu-ray.
*However, I do think the discs themselves are overpriced. I agree with the following comment made on the page I linked to:
The Blu-Ray consortium would have helped their case by not presenting this as a premium product. This would have been a very different story if they’d simply treated it like every other technological advance, where consumers expect dramatically improved quality at steady price points. Pricing discs on par with DVD would have been smart - pricing them slightly below would have been *really* smart.For this reason, I'm very, very cautious indeed about the Blu-ray discs I buy. I need to be 100% satisfied that they're films I'll want to watch over and over again (and also films that will truly benefit from the transfer to Blu-ray). Speaking purely for myself, the format would be worthwhile even if I only watched Bond on it, but you can't build an industry on selling the Bond films to hardcore 007 fans but hardly anything else to them.
Apart from a relatively small number of firm favourites, I have no need to buy anything on Blu-ray because it's easy and cheap to rent Blu-rays through the post.
