| Kasz216 said: "Without such a shift, the format might perish. Market penetration remains low, and every month people don't buy a Blu-ray player is a month they get closer to downloadable HD movies and the death of the format as a whole. Sony would be wise to step it up and do a better job at getting Blu-ray players into people's homes." Blu-ray isn't going to just die or anything... unless it gets replaced by flash drives or something... but that's a ways down the road still. |
He's not going over the top. He's saying the BD is at risk for losing more ground to HD downloads and streaming HD rentals. And looking at the Xbox 360, which currently offers unlimited HD rentals through an inexpensive Netflix subscription, you can see that this is a very real threat.
Netflix has few HD downloads right now (a couple hundred, I think), but there are also Xbox marketplace HD downloads/rentals for new releases. If you add them up, they compete well with BD and they're a hell of a lot cheaper.
The biggest advantage BD has is that broadband penetration is poor in the US. However, those outside of broadband range may be just as happy with DVD as BD, another issue for the format.
It's clear to most that BD will not see the same kind of adoption that DVD saw. And it's clear to most that Sony will not profit from the PS3 overall. It's a huge loss for them -- both financially (literally) and in terms of the future with marketshare and mindshare.
I'm not talking about just customers, I'm talking about developers and exclusives. Developers now see that high end A, AA and AAA games always do better on the 360 than the PS3 and should always be 360-first developments. Microsoft will keep this mindshare into the next gen.
