There is little reason for people to burn BDs really. It's cheaper and more convenient to get a bigger HDD.

DVDs and CDs are pretty much equally unneccessary to burn, but for them there is still the usage of an AVI player or handing them out to people if you have to distribute something large enough.
Just for portability's sake and giving some data to a single person, USB HDDs and memory sticks once again do the job more conveniently.

That if cost reduction goes as usual for electronics, BD will become affordable for most roughly towards the end of next year and commodity one or two years later, and as usual PC drives that haven't all the extra circuitry needed for stand-alone players and recorders, will be first. Expecting it to achieve this goal earlier is unrealistic, but even more it would be to expect BD to die, as any newer removable format should start from zero and without Sony's huge investments it would struggle even more to arrive where BD is now. Plain and simple, BD is growing slow, but DVD too was slow to arrive where it's now. CD was a little bit faster apparently, but only because CD-ROM had existed for years, and audio CD even longer before CD-R/RW were released, so economies of scale were already starting on a lot of components. But if you look back to audio CD birth, it took more than 16 years to have affordable CD-R drives and, during this long process, a lot of years too to get rid of many different and incompatible proprietary interfaces for them, DVD and BD are indeed a lot luckier about this issue.

Cheap external HDDs and USB sticks are good backup media, but they can't totally replace optical discs, so the more HDD capacity and the amount of data stored by users grow, the more BD-R/RE becomes appealing compared to DVD+-R/RW. But just like CD and DVD before it, BD too won't ever be good for any backup need, we can't expect this.

I rather have a backup on a disc, than to find my HDD failed. I personally back up on HDD and DVD, once I have enough data to use the disc up. In till SD cards or SSD become afordable (I'm talking 1TB SD/SSD), discs will last for a while.

There is still RAID for backups, which is fairly cheap (plus it's convenient and real time), but if you have to wait until you accumulate 4.7Gb worth of data to backup, then you probably don't have to burn all that often and it's fairly convenient.

When we talk about burning 25/50Gb though, it's almost always movies (unless you actually backup some multimedia working assets), and people usually do it not to backup but to free up space for more.

Good move. Burners are still somewhat pricey as are the discs.

I picked up a bluray reader for 60 bucks when i was building my last Pc. Turns out it was the best decision I made as it will be the only way that my 3D capable DLP TV will be able to watch 3D blurays.

But yeah...I wouldn't bother with burners for a few more years until media is 2-3 bucks per disk.

Sure, there are 128GB memory sticks but those cost at least 300 bucks each. Memory sticks are still very expensive per gigabyte compared to practically any data storage, even BD. Even though BD discs are still very expensive those are still much cheaper per gigabyte than memory sticks.

I can't really blame you at those prices. The SD TV also makes BD fairly pointless.

For me it made sence $110 12x LG BD-burner and $1.70 (25GB) discs off of NewEgg is pretty unbeatable- even by HDD's which seem to burn out at an insane rate these days. Not that BD is for everybody, if you have no need for the benefits of a disc based medium, or want to run a media server then obviously a harddrive is a better choice. But if you want to archive, transport over to watch on a friends PS3 or player, or just want damn near the cheapest cost per gig its a darn good choice.

Yes, at those prices it would be a lot more attractive, but here retailers are still too greedy, and the fact that two of the biggest chains of electronics and appliances megastores are owned by the same German company, while their competitors are either smaller or financially less healthy, doesn't help competition (online stores, even the biggest, don't have the buying power of these megastores, so the best offers for mass produced items are almost always found advertised only on brick and mortar stores leaflets). And my town is a lot more expensive than Italian average, and going shopping in another region would mean spending most of the saved money for fuel and highway toll, not even considering the risk of finding the best offers sold-out.