Is Blu-ray in trouble or is it still just very early days?
When HD DVD fell by the wayside, it was very easy -- particularly for Sony fans -- to declare a landslide victory for Blu-ray. The only problem is that Blu-ray really isn't doing all that well yet.
Three pieces of research which have been published over the past week have added to the pile of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Blu-ray just isn't ready for prime time yet.
First up, ABI Research's "Consumer Video Technologies Forecasts" report states that "the state of the Blu-ray player market is not all that encouraging" and relies heavily on the success of the PS3.
Over four in five Blu-ray players sold in the US market this year have been PS3s, and ABI Research analyst Steve Wilson believes that it will be another five years before standalone and PC-based Blu-ray players are "up to speed".
"The studios better hope that people are playing movies on their PlayStations," he said. "Otherwise there's very little installed base."
Secondly, a report from Bernstein Research suggests that mainstream Blu-ray adoption will take another year, when players fall below US$200. That will account for about a quarter of US homes.
Added to these adoption statistics is the rather worrying suggestion that mainstream consumers just can't tell the difference between Blu-ray and standard DVD.
That suggestion certainly got a lot of people riled over at Alley Insider, but again I refer to the issue that many consumers don't have a home cinema / audio set-up that does justice to high definition formats. Many can't see the benefit of upgrading, even if it's to buy new movies on Blu-ray, when there are cheap upscaling DVD players that do a good enough job.
Added to all this is the threat to Blu-ray of high definition video on demand and download services, which are sure to have developed further over the next few years.
Problems for Blu-ray, or is there time for it to become a mainstream technology?
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