It won't become as big, but as BD drives are DVD compatible, BD will flank DVD and will become the physical format of choice for HD contents. Any new alternative and competing physical format should start from zero, so it would be hurt even more by external factors hurting BD growth.

As for digital download, my current supposedly 7Mbps connection is struggling to reach 500kbps real whenever the net has even the slightest hiccup, dd as dominant format is still far away and it will stay so until the majority of world population will have access to really fast connections.

Slowly, in USA maybe will gain a lot of traction soon, but in other countries (like mine) it will take a lot of time.

and we still use cassettes

Factors in blu-ray's favor:

-growth of HD TVs-- specifically, the new OLED TVs that are coming out will both reduce cost when compared with a similar LCD HDTV -same size, resolution in pixels, etc - by about 30%, gives a really thin TV which will really push the "cool" factor, and give more vibrant picture

So, all things considered, in the next 5 years when OLED TVS take off, it will push blu-ray sales


-growth of 3D -- 3d means mroe content, which means that there will be some need for a larger storage, and thus blu-ray will be the solution

-XBOX 720/ Wii HD - I'm assuming that the next XBOX will have blu-ray, the WiiHD? possibly, but this will come eventually as well. Both of these competing systems will help push blu-ray

When the 3D revolution begins.

Yes.

i think yes it will, the HD market is going up and up...and we always need a optical format to carry our HD movies and lots of data. digital distribution can't give me a 1080p Avatar Movie.

The first HDTVs were sold in the mid 1990s and since then there has been a steady belief that widespread HDTV adoption was only a couple of years away. For well over a decade adoption of HDTVs failed to meet even pessimistic projections. In the past 5 (or so) years HDTV adoption increased dramatically because it was a feature that was included in the very large flat screen TVs that people were buying; and the main selling feature of these TVs was that they were very large and were thin (so you could fit them into any room) and not necessarily that they were HDTV compatible.

Today we’re getting pretty close to (or may have passed) the point where 50% of households will have HDTVs in them, but we’re still many years away from 50% of households having HDTVs that are regularly displaying HD content. By the time HD becomes enough of a selling feature so that Blu-Ray will become the ubiquitous format that DVD was it is likely that another format (quite possibly digital download) will be cutting into the sales of Blu-Ray.

Or to put it another way, Blu-Ray is a videophile format that will likely never fully catch on with the mainstream movie viewer; and will likely never be a dominant format.

Bluray will take over for sure.

I bought Avatar on DVD and I was a little disappointed with the quality. So I bought it on bluray and it looks 10x better. I wanted to save money by getting it on DVD but now I think paying the extra for better picture and sound is worth it.

It will yes, digital distribution is unrealistic at present and will be for many years. Having a physical disc has many benefits such as storage benefits. You will fill even a 1tb-2tb harddrive pretty quickly with bluray size movies.

I think the success of 3D will have a large factor on just how quickly bluray takes over.