Blu-ray continues its European dominance.

[dbot]

welshbloke said:
If Blu Ray catches on before the next tech supersedes it, I will be surprised. HD DVD would of been the best choice for the consumer as it had a better pricing structure and had both formats had the same movie support would of been a shoe in. The movie houses decided that the public should not have that format most likely because of the perceived levels of encryption they could shove on the disc and profit.

The public do not by and large seem to care probably because they do not see the benefit especially with up scale DVD offerings.

Now that they wasted all that time quibbling it may be to late for Blu Ray to make a big enough difference as it is just still to expensive. I for one thing they deserve to lose out and hopefully the public will not be suckered into the BD debacle.

The HD war has not been won as it rages on, I think the recent innovations of HD streaming on Netflix in the US point us in yet another direction. I think On demand viewing is becoming more and more common place and certainly judging by my household they would appear to be happy to download watch and forget minus the wrapping and the trip to the shop.

HD DVD did not provide enough of an improvement over DVD to gain widespread studio support.

There is no other optical disc based tech currently in development that has a chance to supercede Blu-ray.

The public does seem to care.  The Blu-ray adoption rate is growing as seen by recent news releases.

Streaming media services face a host of issues that will prevent it from being a mainstream solution for sometime.

• Streaming providers are the last in line to license content.  That is why their libraries are poor at best.
• Streaming/Digital Distribution currently accounts for .06% of a typical movie studios revenue.
• The Internet infrastructure does not have the bandwidth required to support the number of unicast connections that would be required to host streaming as a mainstream solution.
• The current 4 bar connection(best speed available) for Netflix streaming requires a 3 Mbps downstream connection.  This will give you a 720x480i encoded at a 3mbps bitrate.  The current Blu-ray movie will give you a 1920x1080p encoded at a 40mbps bitrate.