News
Blu-Ray sees low sales
Matt Grainger Aug 4 2008, 11:59am
Comments (2)
Survey shows widespread reluctance to buy high definition format
Consumer reception for high definition Blu-Ray players is lukewarm, according to market analyst ABI.
In a consumer survey, over half of the 1000 respondents said they had no plans to purchase one, citing “other priorities”, while a further 23 per cent said they were likely to buy, but not until 2009.
The high prices of Blu-Ray players constituted a major barrier for sales, as well as the accompanying need to buy a new HD television. The combination of these two factors has left many consumers questioning the value of such a product.
“Consumers were happy to embrace standard DVD when that format arrived because the improvement in quality over VHS was dramatic. Standard DVD didn’t require the purchase of a new TV either,” said Steve Wilson, principal analyst at ABI.
However, the Blu-Ray enabled Playstation 3 has seen increasing popularity in the games console market and so the numbers of installed Blu-Ray players continues to climb – ensuring an ongoing market for Blu-Ray discs.
“While you might think gamers purchase fewer movie discs than others, we didn’t see any significant evidence of that in our results,” added Wilson. “PS3 console shipments will go a long way to help bring down manufacturing costs and drive down Blu-Ray player prices.”
Link: Business Wire
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Comments
“The problem is...”
Posted by: Allan - Aug 4, 3:05pm
that along with the purchase of the hardware (tv and player) the movie companies are doing there best to get us to buy all our old movies again. And quiet frankly, they can forget it. My movies are on DVD, thereby I'll stick with DVD.
The PS3 maybe selling well, and getting a player for Blu-ray into peoples homes. And over time this installed userbase may buy the odd movie. Then again, they may just download it and watch it off the PS3 which is both cheaper and doesn't mean you have all those boxes cluttering up your home.
Maybe its just me, but I don't see a point in Blu-ray. Downloadable media is going to kill it. All we need is a massive online movie download service to get mainstream and it's had it...kind of like the ones both Microsoft and Sony are trying to go for on there consoles.
“Re: The problem is...”
Posted by: James - Aug 5, 8:52pm
Nobody was demanding better than DVD picture and sound. For 10 years the trend has been for people to stay home and buy the dvd over going out to the movies. A warning against High Def formats if there ever was one. DVDs are constantly beneath the quality a Theater provides, but that doesn't seem to matter to people who just ant to enjoy the story and not the background.
The other warning was the popularity of portable devices, downloads and internet video (youtube).
The problem for blu-ray's future is that combined with DVDs undying popularity is the new DVD 2.0 online features (that mirror blu-ray) and the 960p upprocessing from regular dvds.
Bottom line is for the money blu-ray isn't that big a upgrade nor that big a deal. Videophiles and audiophiles obviously feel differently about it, but their feeling are not reflected by the majority, so far.