makingmusic476 said:
You did read the next three paragraphs in my post, right? Things are expensive now, but they won't remain that way.
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When you buy a Blu-Ray player, all your DVDs will play in the machine, and they'll all look better because of it, due to up scaling. When you bought a DVD player back in 1998, it made all your VHS tapes obsolete, unless you kept both players around (which many people did). It also did nothing to increase the quality of the movies you already owned.
That only helps ease a transition, it's still not much of a reason to actually take the plunge. And I can't speak for everyone, but there were about a half-dozen reasons my family went from VHS to DVD, and picture and audio quality weren’t one of them. Backwards compatibility on a Blu-Ray only helps to sell the player, it still doesn't do much to convince to buy the actual discs to go with it.
In a few years, standalone Blu-Ray players will have dropped to or past the $100 mark. At this point in time, what will keep people from buying a Blu-Ray player over a regular old DVD player? Hell, manufacturers could just advertise it as a DVD player, and the few uninformed consumers left would never be the wiser.
$100 for a stand-alone DVD player is the United States is extremely high unless it's a good upscale player, which most people don't have much interest in either. And why should we expect uniformed consumers to Blu-Ray movies if they're not even sure they own a Blu-Ray player? You're assuming the only hurdle Blu-Ray has to overcome is price.
In an age where a lot of people are contempt with watching blurry YouTube videos on small computer screens, it should be obvious that convenience is huge selling point. It's why people buy iPods and iPhones despite being "expensive" compared to other MP3's players and phones with better hardware. The convenience of the iPod's dial or the iPhones touch screen are of a greater value to consumers then high quality hardware without these conveniences.
Blu-Ray drives will probably end up like DVD drives for PCs today. They can play practically everything, including obscure formats like DVD-Ram, but that's just about all they make, because it's cheaper for manufacturers to focus on 1-2 SKUs. That's just what you buy. You don't track down a CD drive for your PC if you have no interest in playing DVDs. You just buy the DVD drive.
DVD drives became standard in PC's because it was the dominating format. Everyone wanted it, they were in high demand, and it became impractical to not include them. Five years ago, when DVD was just very popular, I helped to order my sister's old laptop and we had to pay extra for a combo DVD/CD-Rom drive, the default choice was CD-Rom.
Computer companies didn't include DVD ROMs to push the format, they included them to push their computers. It was another popular feature that made computers more appealing. Now you can play DVD's on your computer in addition to a dozens of other things. I find it unlikely many companies will make Blu-Ray drives standard unless there's a huge demand for it. It’s a hard to justify including an HD movie player on a small laptop screen where the benefit is even less noticeable.
Since Blu-Ray it just an extension of DVD, it'll likely always have a place on the market since it doesn't take much effort of change to accommodate both. But I can't see it becoming the format of choice for the mainstream public unless companies actually force it on them. In a way, that's a big reason why it's even sustainable now. If Sony hadn't used the PlayStation brand to carry Blu-Ray, there would probably 15 million less Blu-Ray players in homes right now.
