| akuma587 said: You could have said the same thing about VHS (and a lot of people did). And the fact is that a lot of people would have kept buying them if the studios had kept making them. But they all decided to pull the plug. VHS was pretty poor on a technical level though, I do admit. Nobody really missed it. A lot of you are missing the key, planned obsolescence. ssj12 has it figured out. Some people will never support a new format, but eventually they HAVE to when studios and retailers start pulling the plug on the old format. My parents didn't even own a DVD player before Best Buy quit selling VHS! Blu-Ray has shown some power this year, so I wouldn't be surprised if in 2009 we start to see a few titles get the Blu-Ray version a few weeks ahead of time like we did with DVD. Retailers make more money off Blu-Ray than they do off of DVD. That alone is enough reason for retailers to push it harder than DVD. They did the same thing with VHS. Anyone who thinks they won't do the same thing with DVD is fooling themselves. It may not take place overnight, but at the end of the day big companies don't give a shit about the customer. They give a shit about the customers money. And if they can collusively force the customer to buy more expensive things, they will. Do you think retailers sell HDTV's out of the goodness of their heart? NO! They sell them because it makes them more money than standard televisions.
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Movie studios decided to pull the plug on VHS tapes *after* VHS sales fell far below DVD sales, not the other way around. Movie companies will decide to pull the plug on DVDs *after* the sales fall to a small percentage of Blu-ray sales. They will not pull the plug on their cash cow (DVD) prematurely in a gambit to force Blu-ray adoption. I know a lot of us (including me) would like to believe that the movie studios will make our video-phile dreams come true by forcing consumers to adopt an HD disc format, but it doesn't work that way. The studios are in this to make money, and companies that decide to force adoption of a new standard (IBM's Microchannel bus for example) by cutting off supply of the old format are almost guaranteed to fail. Even MS can't force adoption of Vista... many customers are paying premiums to have XP installed on new machines.
Even assuming the studios all got together and decided to make this fantasy scenario become real, the FTC would be all over that like hair on a gorilla. When the major players in a market decide to force consumers into a more costly, artificial situation not driven by market dynamics, that's called collusion, and it's illegal in the US.
