Blu-Ray just comes off as a terrible deal when they put them on the shelf right next to the often 10-15 dollar cheaper DVD version. Turns me off anytime I even think about it. I'll look at it and just go "...I don't really care about owning this movie that much."

Then I go home and stream.

I'm glad I was able to get my panny 60vt60 in December. It's disgusting how wrong the general public is and was about tvs.

And that´s why Sony punched MS last E3, for the DRM that would make Discs pointless.

The situation would be much more critical if MS didn´t put the 180 and gave BluRay a few more years of relevance.

Awesome!

I think it will continue to grow steadily. The market for good physical media isn't going to vanish, as online streaming is just .. not that great honestly. The quality is poor to terrible depending on many factors, and the price of streaming is set to explode with the death of net neutrality and increasing data caps.

People really don't know how good they've got it these days, we're set to de-evolve the internet over the next decade. Tiered data like Cell phone plans, and packet shaping/corporate-dictated throttling will destroy what we have taken for granted.

Also : more and more people are dropping old TVs, and it's just painful to watch a good movie on a good TV from a crappy stream.

I do subscribe to netflix, and for old TV shows, documentaries, etc, it's alright. But yeah, throw in the Gladiator re-master in 7.1, holy crap. The audio quality is staggering, perhaps even more so than the massive gap in picture quality.

Enjoy your HT! :)

Who said anything about xb1? And what do the preferences of the masses have to do with people spending time on forums talking about video games? I care about quality and try not to watch movies from netflix with friends. The quality seriously affects my experience, but all my friends have no problem with it. 

I like the way you think.  Not discounting the masses or anything like that, but typically the masses are normally ill informed, causing quality products to succumb to the effects of mass ignorance.

As for Blu ray movies being expensive, just like video games, one can always wait for price drops. I bought the Lord of the Rings trilogy for about £15 and saw recently that play.com was selling it for less than a 10er. I think £5-7 is perfectly reasonable, so I either wait for a price cut or go to a second hand store.

I purchased a lot of Blu-ray movies when they first appeared, but now we have RedBox.

Blu-ray is still my preferred way to watch movies. Digital movies services have gotten better, the price to buy a digital HD copy is about the same as a Blu-ray, and the price to rent digital HD is higher (~$5.00 vs ~$1.50 from RedBox).  The quality can be quite good for digital, but can be stuttery depending on the connection quality.

Blu-ray is a decent deal on Amazon US, but I noticed in Japan they are often asking $40 for a Blu-ray movie.  How could it possibly dowell when it's sold as such a luxury item?

Meh, if Sony dies, I'll switch to PC gaming. Don't really care eitherway.

Physical media is slowly becoming niche. Sure, BD offers better quality, but the number of people that care that much is very low. Those are the collectors, true fans, who are willing to spend more and who care about the difference. But they are not the majority. They are actually a miniscule minority. A niche market.
Most average folks watch films as a brief entertainment. They'll go to movies, rent from Netflix, or just watch any film on TV at a convenient time. Most people have a regular 32-40 inch TV, without extra components. Most people still have DVD players, and a PS3 or next gen acting as a BD player. But they don't care about expensive BD films, when they can pick up a 1-2 Euro film on DVD at a convenience store. And even then they pass because they don't need to own a film.
And they don't care that their $8-10 monthly fee doesn't give them ownership. They actually don't want ownership once the service (film) is consumed.

Gamers are a slightly different breed, and the two categories are not comparable. That's why BluRay will actually have its last stand in the gaming industry, and disc based games will stick around much after disc based films perish. Unfortunatelly, the volume of discs will not be enough to generate any profit to disc makers.