"Blu-Ray Dead In 5 Years" Says Samsung!

[Millennium]

Mummelmann said:

Edit; Millenium: you actually think technology will revert? That is ludicrous. And don't tell me there was no price difference in discs and players when DVD started taking over, DVD discs are still horribly expensive considering their age and both players and discs were atrociously priced when they came out so the leaps in consumer costs were equal to if not greater than the consumer cost of making the HD era come true (except TV's of course). I bet you also believe that they will stop sending digitalized TV signals too then? And go back to cassette's or LP's? It makes just as much sense.

I assume you're actually asking if the new technology will fail to take hold; it cannot "revert" since the "more advanced" technology has yet to take dominance in the first place. I fail to see how it's ludicrous, either; it happens all the time. To cite another example from Sony, MiniDisc failed to overtake CDs.

There is no valid reason for DVD's price to be impacted by its age. This has yet to affect any other media format until such time as it has actually been overtaken; it didn't happen for VHS, nor for records or casettes. Why should it happen for DVD (or CD, for that matter)? While DVD players did indeed start out more expensive than VCRs -a fact which hurt them early on- DVD discs were cheaper, but just being cheaper isn't what tipped the balance. DVDs crossed under a psychological barrier price wise, to a point that made them easily collectible in a way that VHS tapes were not (this was, in fact, part of the point of DVD from the makers' standpoint: leverage collectibility to increase sales). Blu-Ray can't be collectible in this same way, because the discs are back up in the VHS range price-wise.

But this is not a matter of "reverting." The HD era has yet to begin, and it likely won't during Blu-Ray's lifetime: the market is rejecting both HD disc formats due to insufficient value for the price. This has happened time and again over the course of the history of home media, and Sony seems to often be on the losing end of things, largely because it has yet to learn that niche formats for marketroid technophiles usually don't have mass appeal. Its minor victory over a format that was doomed anyway, for exactly the same reasons that Blu-Ray is, will not change this.