| gebx said: I think Blu Ray will have a much tougher time then DVD. Blu Ray is competing against some tough competition Also, these won't go away. Digital downloads are here to stay and illegal downloads will be a bigger influence then ever considering that the high school and college students that pirated the most are now in their 20's and early 30's. So Blu Ray as to compete against a much larger population who's tech savvy unlike the start of the DVD generation where only a select few knew how to copy and burn dvd's. Will Blu Ray be as big as DVD? Nah, I see Blu Ray only reach approx 70% of DVD's market size... which is still freaking huge and should make the Blu Ray group pretty happy. |
You missed an up and coming 4th competitor... broadcast HD. As over-the-air, cable, and satellite HD becomes more widespread and popular (and HD DVRs become cheaper), many consumers will simply record the movies they want to watch more than once to their HD DVR, then purge them when they grow tired of watching. One of the engineers that works for me has an HD-capable tuner card in his PC and 1TB of disk space to record and archive his favorite HD-broadcast movies. He also has software which allows him to quickly and easily remove commercials.
As hard drive prices fall and broadcast HD becomes common, keeping individual copies of HD material on optical media will become less compelling. Yes, broadcast HD is often 720p instead of 1080p, but most consumers won't know the difference, and bandwidth tends to go up, not down. This is the same disruptive technology that hit CDs... a handheld iPod can hold an entire music collection, so why have a wall full of CDs that can be damaged? My CD collection is converted to high-bit-rate MP3s and stored on a hard-drive with another hard drive as backup. Now I find myself downloading music instead of purchasing CDs. As broadband bandwidth goes up, I will probably do the same with movies.
