In an interview with Home Media Magazine Pioneer's SVP Andy Parsons reminded Blu-ray haters that winning the format war wasn't meaningless. Parsons, who is also chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association promotion committee, compared Blu-ray with the paperless office.
"I'm fond of recalling the old visions of the past that the paperless office would completely obliterate the need for paper," he explains. Now many still seem to use the good old pen and paper and Parsons seems to be sure that his physical high-def product won't be killed.
Many expect Video on Demand and online downloads to take over especially after last August's Blu-ray sales drop, main reason behind this drop is a lack of good movie releases since all are old like Batman Begins. Although movie sales dropped in August, Adams Media Research shows that 60% of all BD software sales occured in the fourth quarter of 2007, meaning that many studio executives are feeling lucky for this year's fourth quarter. But, what do you think, is Blu-ray this decade's pen and paper and will it coexist next to downloads or die just like its physical brother HD DVD did earlier this year?
Now that ISPs are capping bandwidth (comcast has a new hard cap) these 'innovations' in downloading/streaming aren't nearly as attractive to me anymore...
Like cloud software if you don't have a connection then you just have a dumb computer or empty screen. maybe when WiMax rules the world.
Co-exist with downloads. Full feature video downloads still seem a long way of in the US (that is in a practical sense, not the various "experiments").
Blu-ray will die - a testament to corporate greed by both the movie studios and Japanese CE cartel bent on cornering the optical disc market.
Why the studios shot themselves in the foot by going with the more expensive (hardware AND disc replication) format shows that they were given substantial royalites by Sony.
Good riddance to the whole bloated mess. Bring on downloads!
Downloads are ok, but they tend to have to compress them more then on a blu-ray to make them a reasonable size. Not to mention ISP\'s make their connections restricted even more every year. Caps/Throttling. How you can you legitimately think downloads will catch on when ISP\'s are trying to prevent from download large files. I think blu-ray will find its own market, maybe not as big as dvd, but a fair bit. I also think because to get better quality your going to need an 80 inch tv, that it would be a good while before blu-ray became obscelete, as there would be no real need for a replacement format, unless everyone has a theatre screen in their house.
I agree with Zod and Klark_Kent. It will be hard for downloads to compete with anything if ISP's start putting caps on downloads. So far, Comcast is the only one doing it but it could be a trend. Personally, I think these ISP's should be sued. They advertise "unlimited" accounts yet implement caps. They advertise "bandwidth" that you never ever get. I get near what they advertise on mine but never at the rated speed. Comcast probably "oversells" their pipe anyways. That is probably why they are capping bandwidth. The more people they can fit on their "pipe" the more money they make.
Bluray movie sales are probably going to get worse. Box office attendance is low. The movie disc releases are mediocre at best to bad. I looked at the rest of the month releases and it still doesn't look good. Watching an HD movie that sucks means you are watching a highly detailed movie that still sucks and probably more so since you are able to see more detail. So no help there either. If the movie industry wants to "resurrect" sales, they need to start releasing movies sooner rather than later. For instance, Iron Man, it has been out since 2 May and now we are going into almost mid Sept.. Really, it should of been released by now on disc but it doesn't look like it will to at least the end of this month or early October.
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