Sony are Samsung's biggest competitor in TV and cellphone markets so of course they'll say shit like this. Sony also slanders about Samsung in turn and the cycle goes on forever. Nothing new here.

Nope it will be selling in 5 years becouse it will be bundled in every magazine and newspaper for 1 or 2 bucks.

@megaman79:
Broadband, except negligible exceptions, still reaches almost only towns, and not entirely too, maybe in a few years it will be ubiquitous, but this won't kill BD that by then will have comfortably taken off, it will maybe kill a possible next gen physical format, making BD the last successful one.

If Blu-ray is a HDTV pusher, why would Samsung (makers of HDTV's) say it won't last..

I mean you would want something that shows how well your TV looks, not trash talk it unless you know something is around the corner, and it's been talked that other formats are on the horizon.

technology is constantly improving:

20 years - VHS

10 years - DvD

5   years - BR

To think nothing better will be out is naive.

^^
Samsung only needs one or more HD media to fully exploit and make desirable its HDTV's, not necessarily BD, so trashing it and pushing, for example, HD broadcast and HD downloadable contents is not completely outlandish. But they talk b.s., because people without access to broadband or wanting a physical medium for HD contents need something with BD capacity, and right now, excluding HDD recording, BD is the most widespread medium with the desired features. But quite obviously the goal is only to hit Sony, hoping that the current crisis increases the effect of the blow, weakening their competitor.

True,

but what about this

And 

This

I mean they even make Blu-Ray Players, strange....

^^
Very strange indeed... unless... maybe are they launching indirect signals to obtain lower BD manufacturing royalties?

It offers a marginally better picture and a sound increase that most people can't even perceive, but only if you spend $500+ on a new TV, hundreds more on a new system, and a new player and discs that, unlike with the DVD->VHS transition, cost more than the stuff you're replacing did.

Incidentally, having seen the HD gimmick in the action, I'm perfectly satisfied with my DVDs, and in fact can even do VHS when the need arises. This is because I didn't drink the marketing Kool-Aid; I can in fact "go back" because I see the small improvements for what they are: small ones. DVD made meaningful improvements over its predecessor; Blu-Ray does not; they're there, but they're just not enough to be worth the price. HD-DVD was no better about this, of course; neither format ever stood a chance against DVD. But one shoe has dropped. All that remains is to wait for the other.

First off; Blu-Ray is a Sony product and it makes sense for Samsung to talk a little trash on competition, as in all other markets. And; there is nothing right now that goes beyond Blu-Ray as far as audio and visual quality goes, which kinda makes it look like there's going to be quite some time before something better, quality-wise, shows up. Downloads? It takes a helluva lot of space to store HD content, let alone anything that would be above, not to mention the fact that no HDTV ever made could process the image. Anything better than an HDTV is quite a few years off yet, and most likely the next generation of Tv sets will be made off of Sony's pioneer OLED technology, if anything, which isn't exactly good news for Samsung when you think about it.

Nothing is around the corner, HD signals are massively expensive to broadcast and as a consequence; buy. New TV sets supporting above full HD (1080p) will be many, many years ahead and will hardly be available to commoners in the first turn at any rate. Talk of new formats? I've heard of no such thing, I have heard of advanced imaging panels that can in theory outperform HD resolution but such panels are barely above the experimental stage and as of yet there is not definitive new format "around the corner" that will take over. We're back to downloads and/or streaming, which again will rely heavily upon better compression, super fast internet connections and not to mention screens and equipment built to handle it. You can't download a 25 GB or 50 GB (or 100 for that matter) movie into your TV, nor is it very practical storing such massive files on todays harddrives or flash technology, if one movie takes up maybe 1/5 of your harddrive it starts to lose all meaning downloading it in the first place rather than rent/buy on optical format, not to mention how much space would be required to store something even more storage demanding than HD files.

Of course technology moves forward, but it has to move in synch, there's no point in developing a new format now, no one would afford, want or be able to use it for years. Of course something better will be out, but if you truly believe that HD will be obsolete within 2-3 years (which will be around the 5 year anniversary of the Blu-Ray format) then I have to say that you are the naive one.

HD signals will not replace SD as standard for quite a few years yet, HDTV penetration rate ww is still quite low and even most LCD PC monitors don't support resolutions higher than 1080p (mine is 1600x1200 for instance). HD will move slowly into media as standard, much like digitalized signals did/are, most radio and TV signals ww are still analogue, which speaks volumes of the slow speed in which these things happen. Its not just "BANG" and the whole world upgrade, it doesn't work that way. As a TV format, HD will live a long and prosperous life, while downloads will make up the majority of games and music and perhaps even reading material in the quite near future (don't give me the "but you can hook up your PC to the TV, silly" argument either, that kind of defeats the purpose of the TV and it still won't output better quality visuals than it was initially built for).

Edit; Millenium: you actually think technology will revert? That is ludicrous. And don't tell me there was no price difference in discs and players when DVD started taking over, DVD discs are still horribly expensive considering their age and both players and discs were atrociously priced when they came out so the leaps in consumer costs were equal to if not greater than the consumer cost of making the HD era come true (except TV's of course). I bet you also believe that they will stop sending digitalized TV signals too then? And go back to cassette's or LP's? It makes just as much sense.

I assume you're actually asking if the new technology will fail to take hold; it cannot "revert" since the "more advanced" technology has yet to take dominance in the first place. I fail to see how it's ludicrous, either; it happens all the time. To cite another example from Sony, MiniDisc failed to overtake CDs.

There is no valid reason for DVD's price to be impacted by its age. This has yet to affect any other media format until such time as it has actually been overtaken; it didn't happen for VHS, nor for records or casettes. Why should it happen for DVD (or CD, for that matter)? While DVD players did indeed start out more expensive than VCRs -a fact which hurt them early on- DVD discs were cheaper, but just being cheaper isn't what tipped the balance. DVDs crossed under a psychological barrier price wise, to a point that made them easily collectible in a way that VHS tapes were not (this was, in fact, part of the point of DVD from the makers' standpoint: leverage collectibility to increase sales). Blu-Ray can't be collectible in this same way, because the discs are back up in the VHS range price-wise.

But this is not a matter of "reverting." The HD era has yet to begin, and it likely won't during Blu-Ray's lifetime: the market is rejecting both HD disc formats due to insufficient value for the price. This has happened time and again over the course of the history of home media, and Sony seems to often be on the losing end of things, largely because it has yet to learn that niche formats for marketroid technophiles usually don't have mass appeal. Its minor victory over a format that was doomed anyway, for exactly the same reasons that Blu-Ray is, will not change this.