The market share graph is more likely revenue from BR sales graphs. The Market share has been conveniently put as the title of the graph.

I know it sounds stupid and like something a fanboy would make up, but Sony actually said that.

Do you have an exact quote (US press reliability and accuracy is often very bad), maybe it regarded Japan where Blu-Ray recorders have captured over 50% market share.

If it was a Japanese guy speaking Japanese, a recording may be more usefull. Most people in the US speak very limited Japanese.

Long, distant future, with a change in human preference and perception even.

It's nice to see BR doing well. That means more good movies on it, more compilations on it... hopefully we'll see rock bands release HD concerts too!

i don't know but considering the story is on a million sites all over the net i doubt there's a translation error.  Of course i would never expect MikeB to believe it anyway. 

This is the original source of the quote -> http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20080407PD201.html

It seems like a translation issue.  At one point they are discussing BD globally and then they are discussing Japan and US.  Anyway, the source claims Blu-ray had a 20% marketshare earlier this year which I find hard to believe as well.  Things are definately looking up for Blu-ray. 

The BD's 20% market share is referring to Japan so the 50% is Japan only  imo.

Or maybe they were talking about this : http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/12/09/blu-ray-recorders-surpass-50-market-share-for-dvd-recorders-in/

@ Johnsobas

Stories related to this were also all around the web. Like almost always Sony didn't respond to such rumours:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/756/1011756/man-admits-making-up-ps3-fire-story
or
http://gadgets.fosfor.se/the-european-ps3-launch-a-fiasco/
or
http://news.digitaltrends.com/talk-back/158/optical-hd-battle-may-be-over-hd-dvd-wins

There's a long list of very bad reporting with mass coverage and wrong data from leading US press, like CNN, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, etc. Not to mention all the FUD and misinformation being widely covered on gaming dedicated US websites.

 3-4 years maybe. It is possible right now, but you have to download quite a bit. I live in a small city in Germany, so I just got 3mb/s. I need like 2 hours to download / stream a HD movie (720p). I don't know how MS is doing it but the quality was great, even a movie like "No Country for old men" with 5.1 sound and 720p was 4.2 GB. But the quality was great. I have got like 40 HD-DVDs (bought them for 4-5€, after the death of HD-DVD) here and the difference is very small.

In bigger cities like cologne they offer 100mb/s-connection. So you can watch HD-movies in no time, if you have such a connection. I don't know the price right now, but like every new technology it will be much cheaper in 3-4 years. I don't know about the connections in NA. There won't be big differences between UK / Germany / France / Belgium / Netherlands / Austria /Switzerland. Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway ... Iceland) is superb when it comes to connections. So it will be possible in the near future. It is possible right now.

And as we have seen with music, the human preference is changing. Hi @ iTunes.

You're right Johnsobas, there are a lot of articles about it, but every single one of them refers to the original digitimes article http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20080407PD201.html, which is not very informative and only says that it "aims to increase the global share of its blu-ray products from 20 to 50%". And it doesn't actually quote Chubachi, it just has a photo of him karaoking Whitney Houstin's I Will Always Love You.

Anyway, we don't know if he actually said that, but if he did which does seem a little crazy then I guess they missed the mark. Which given that the cheapest blu-ray player I've seen in Oz is around $300 still, its not that surprisi ng it hasn't taken the market yet.

I'm not sure if blu-ray will ever be as successful as DVD, but i don't think it needs to be to make it all worthwhile for Sony and partners. Its no laserdisc, that we can say.