Someone here mentioned no money being made from the industry through downloads. Thats not correct. The music industry fought this for years and we no where this ended up. The movie industry on the other hand is well aware of that and are being wise to adopt it strait away. The music industry makes plenty of money now from downloads and the same will be for the movie industry if they dont fight a battle they will lose. And as many articles show (some of which Ive already posted) the industry is adopting downloads and streaming quickly.

This is not a dig at Sony at all (for those who think it is) but using an old tech for HD films wasnt the best option as well as how fast the online services have grown in the last 6 months for HD films I think like most tech websites and publications do that BD will be fairly extinct in 2-3 years in terms of sales.

The most major problem that streaming HD media has to overcome is bandwidth limits. Comcast recently announced that they cap their bandwidth at 250gb a month - and that's considered extremely generous in an industry where most other limits aren't even one-tenth of that. And what happens when companies start rolling out streaming HDTV services intended as a replacement for cable/satellite TV? We'll have people reaching those limits in two weeks just from content streaming, and the limits of other companies in the space of a long weekend.

Sony is a big supporter of Digital Downloads, and people tend to forget this.  I have only bought one Anime episode off the PS3 store, but I have rented several times.

From my previous post, they should market BD as they do in Japan - emphasize the storage capabilities more than the quality difference.  Heck, I may buy more DD films if I could burn them to BD and store them on the shelf rather than always having to shuffle my hard drive space.

Last week it was at 12% of marketshare.

The price cut on standalone players is only in old 1.1 machines that they have to get rig of.

The economic crisis and all may have a role in all this ,but I dont think the BD situation is any worse now.

BD recorders haven't taken off here because there is a vastly superior technology that's often provided free of charge: the DVR.  My HD DVR is a couple of years old now, but it was free when I got it (although I pay $6/mo instead of $5/mo for standard receiver fee so it is an extra $1/mo) and it provides about 800GB of storage including the external disk.  Plus, it can record 3 programs at once in HD while watching a prerecorded program -- something you can't do with a BD recorder.

BD recorders aren't popular in the US because we have better for less.  They'll never be popular in the US.

Heroes: Season 2 [4 Discs / Blu-ray] [Widescreen Subtitle AC3 Dolby] - Blu-ray Disc $54.99 http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8915873&type=product&id=1884461

Heroes: Season 2 [4 Discs] [Widescreen Subtitle AC3 Dolby] - DVD $34.99 http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8915891&st=heros&lp=2&type=product&cp=1&id=1884459

Apparently you forgot that TV shows will be in HD on Blu-ray negating the space advantage.  Obviously they could put a full season of a show in DVD quality on 1 disc but nobody would buy that unless they had a Blu-ray player with a SDTV with no plans to upgrade to a HDTV.  Same argument for multiple movies per disc.

Blu-ray will not take (if at all) off until the content is at a 10% premium over DVD instead of the 50+% it currently is, players are near $100 and HDTVs are in the majority of homes.  The first 2 have a chance of happening by Xmas 2009 but the HDTVs will probably take a while longer.

Amazing Sony actually thought 50% BD market share by the end of 08. Even with the best case scenarios that would have been seriously difficult. I do not see any short term upside either. The next generation of consoles will be out before BD may even have a majority stake.

BluRay = meh. Apart from being a nice little "bonus", its just not something I would actually pay money for.

A few people have recently asked what BluRay is about, so I show them:

I switch my TV to channel 12 (Australian Channel 10 HD)
...then I switch the TV to channel 10 (Australian Channel 10 SD)
(with a show being broadcast in full-HD of course)

The difference is extremely minimal - the average consumer just couldn't care less, and would almost always go for the "cheaper" option.

If BluRay has done anything, its forced down the price of DVDs (& players) - and brought downloadable movies to the mainstream.

People dont feel like being forced to spend more money for the same stuff all over again. Especially in a time of terrible economy. BD is cleaner version of DVD. Thats it! Its not as revolutionary as VHS to DVD in which the entire physical format changed and offered real benefits such as smaller shelf space, no more rewind, and scene selection.

Exactly that's the problem. The big difference are not the pure replication costs but the number of licences  that have to be covered. This makes BluRay more expensive than DVDs, so the companies have no real reason to drop the BluRay prices to the DVD level, they would only hurt their earnings.

In fact if I remember correctly DVDs were not such a clear winner in the beginning. Yes, they were much more successful than the LD but they were mainly a game for film enthusiasts. In Germany the advantages in tzhe picture were only one important feature, the second was: you cvan hear everything in its original language, while films on VHS were always dubbed.

But then something strange happened (at least in Germany, I can't talk about the US in this case) the prices for players dropped and suddenly there were many people who wanted to buy a player, but they were not interested in DVDs, theywanted a player that can handle VCDs (at that time this was the satandard format for movies on filesharing networks)!

In the meantime the prices for new movies remained more or less static, but the older DVDs got cheaper and cheaper until they passed the VHS prices due to their cheaper replication prices. The producers were able to earn a lot of money at prices that were below the replication prices of VHS Tapes and their were people who owned DVD players and were very price sensitive. The DVD only were the medium of choice ones they were at the same or even lower prices than the VHS tapes. Only than the general public acknowledged that they got more and better material on the DVD.

I don't really see a rerason for companies to enter a price battle with DVDs because there is no price advantage. This would only make sense if they would get rid of the DVDs and then they would rise the prices again, but at that moment there would be new DVDs. Yes BluRay Players will probably drift in the long run into the general market and replace DVD players, but this does not mean that they will watch BluRays on it. In many cases they would simply use it to get a better picture out of their existing DVD collection. This is one of the big differences. With the DVDs people replaced their VHS collections with DVDs but I don't see this for BluRay. Even I have only replaced special films but in many other cases I don't care so much about the picture of the film. I Have the tendency to always compare my collection and in some cases the differeces were rather small.

You can't really compare the situation of the early DVDs with BluRay. As an example: Anime was quite connected with DVDs, especially in the US. There was a mediam that contained the subtitled and dubbed versions on the same medium, together with the better picture it was definatly a winner. Even more impotant Pioneer tried to push the new medium but while they didn't own general feature films, they had their own Anime productions so they realeased many animes, which pushed other anime distributors to release on this medium too, while many of the bigger companies were not active in this dangerous market. Quite a lot of the first customers had the problem that they simply had all interesting normal films in their collection and they started to look at these "cartoons". Anime distributors were quite startled when they realised how many DVDs they were able to sell, while the number of sold VHS tapes didn't fall as steep as you would expect.

Now the Anime distributors in the US and Europe are in deep trouble. While some talked about BluRay most of them are no longer in the market and the rest doesn't even have the money to dub a film. And if you compare the quality of the few BluRays with a upscaled DVD, you won't find a big difference simply because the tiniest details that are drawn are much bigger than the resolution of the DVD. In fact, when we tried it together with a beamer there was no one was no one able to say what they were looking if they didn't have the direct comparison and there were no subtitles on the screen.

So I don't really see how the BluRay could become such a clear winner as it was the case with the DVD. Add to this the difficult financial situation and a rather depressing outlook (climate Change, declining oil reserves) and I don't really see a situation where many people will pay more money for a better picture quality.