More Research Asserts that Blu Ray Adoption Isn't Apt to Surge (1 Viewer)

[gallandro]

Thanks Doug for bringing a little reality to the forums. Sure prices have gone up on certain items, but it is nowhere near the doom and gloom the media would have you believe.

For example the so-called housing "crisis" and homes in foreclosure affects barely 4% of homes in the U.S., up from around the average of just over 2%. Now being in foreclosure DOES NOT mean your house is going to be taken from you tomorrow, it simply means you are at least three house payments behind, and most mortgage companies are at least willing to work out the problem.

Additionally what the press doesn't bother to tell you is that the MAJORITY of homes in foreclosure ARE NOT the primary homes of the homeowner. They are second houses or homes that were bought as rentals with quick fix ARMs or Interest Only loans in an effort for people to make quick money with rental properties, now that interest rates are going up the "chickens are coming home to roost" as it were.

Blu-Ray's failures are simply price of players and price of movies versus perceived value over standard def DVDs. If the economy were the only reason for Blu-Ray's failure then please explain how a $60 video game (Grand Theft Auto 4) broke all records and in one week generated over $1 billion in revenue for Rockstar Games/Capcom, or how that same week Iron Man generated over $100 million at the box office from Thursday-Sunday?

If the economy were in tatters and we were on the brink of a fiscal meltdown people would not be spending money the way they are today!

Yancy

 

[AlexCosmo]

Things are moving faster now, downloading doesn't even have to be genuinely THAT close to make most people want to pass on Blu-ray. The mere potential is enough, it's like a relief to them to not buy movies and players again. (plus, it sounds stupid, but it's not helping that many stores have the discs in those thick plastic theft cases that have to be removed. People see those cases with some movie they've already bought once and they head for the hills.)

 

[Michael Reuben]

No one has argued any such thing.

M.

 

[Maxpower1987]

Escapism...

The 'golden years' for Hollywood have always been in times of depression/recession. Entertainment always makes more money during a recession, technology, though, doesn't.

Also, it is easy to spend money when they print so much of it...

 

[Douglas Monce]

Actually movie attendance did drop in the great depression and several smaller film studios went out of business. It went up dramatically during the boom of world war 2 to a high point in 1947. Of course one could argue that there was nothing else for anyone to spend money on in the war years.

Doug

 

[gallandro]

Great point Doug.


Yancy

 

[Goko]

I think this is a stupid way to conduct business. I think you got to go "old school," i.e. to make money you got to spend money....
Just look at the huge gobs of money that other forms of entertainment are currently spending to stay in the public limelight. I see more commercials/newspaper ads for games/Dish/DirecTV than I do for Blu-ray.
The only way all of this makes sense to me is if the HDM industry already has accepted that HDM will never go mainstream and, like Laserdisc before it, is satisfied with remaining a niche product.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Strong language to use for such a dubious point. I have to suggest that an economic problem becomes severe, & its effects broadly felt, long before 50% of the population is dispossessed. Even a rise of, for example, 5 percentage points in the unemployment rate, or an equivalent increase in bankruptcies, considerably alters the balance of the economic system.

 

[Michael Reuben]

As I noted earlier, no one has made the argument that gallandro is "refuting". The whole thing's a strawman.

M.

 

[troy evans]

I hope the download revolution for films is many years down the road. I still like physical media. I believe most on this forum do.

 

[troy evans]

I do acknowledge the troubled economy. It just seems to me that we always seem to base sd dvds, blu-ray dvds and players on the J6P crowd. Those in that demo are buying $40 dvd players and shopping exclusively out of the Wal-Mart $5 bin and $1 racks for sd dvds. I really don't find them as relavent as some here do. My thing is that the people who populate this forum on the average don't strike me as J6P. The arguments that stem from this excuse seems to be just another way to piss on Blu-ray for whatever reason. Sometimes it seems like the format war hasn't really ended.

 

[Douglas Monce]

I don't know about your Walmart, but the only thing in the dollar bins at mine are Spanish language videos.

J6P is the crowd that is going to have to buy into blu-ray if it is going to be truly successful. I'm not saying that all of the J6P crowd, but a significant portion of them. If not then blu-ray is really just a niche product and it will go nowhere fast. I just don't think it can survive on the Home Theater Group alone.

Doug

 

[Chris Gerhard]

Blu-ray growth has been slow, but HDTV adoption is great. I believe it is close to 40% of households in the US have an HDTV now. What percentage of HDTV owners already have Blu-ray capable hardware including the PS3? The respondents owning an HDTV are the only ones I would be interested in. Blu-ray isn't a product that will drive HDTV adoption, it is the other way around. Once an HDTV is owned is when Blu-ray comes into consideration, people just aren't going to buy Blu-ray without an HDTV or plans to get one, and people aren't going to run out and buy an HDTV because they want Blu-ray. Satellite and cable and OTA are the reasons consumers buy an HDTV. Wanting the best picture quality for their new HDTV will result in a signifcant market buying Blu-ray.

I have been predicting that HDTV will be in about 70% of the households in the US in 2011 and that half of those will have Blu-ray at that time. Blu-ray sales and rentals are going to be about 35% of the DVD market at that time and will still be growing compared to DVD is the what I expect based on this survey and all other research I have been reading. If someone wants to call that a niche market, fine, it isn't going to be comparable to the DVD penetration at the same time in DVD's life and will be a fraction of the DVD market at that time, but it will still be a big number.

I expect this holiday season will result in some surveys and market research indicating Blu-ray is growing and will do much better than these recent articles are claiming.

Chris

 

[Robert Crawford]

Blu-ray can still be successful without being totally massed market with 90% penetration. So what if Blu-ray only achieves 40-45% penetration, to me that's too big to be considered a niche market.




Crawdaddy

 

[Jesse Blacklow]

Utter hogwash.

By your rationale, DVD should have died already because of the "extremely fragmented" market of cable/sat, VOD, DVR, and download services. Yet surprisingly enough, it's still a multibillion-dollar industry. That doesn't even take into account the enormous problems in most of the world concerning bandwidth for mass downloads of HD material that are in many cases a decade away from being fixed.

 

[FrancisP]

A lot of this technology was not practical when dvd hit its stride. As a result,
dvd's only competitor was videotape. Given the technological improvements over the last few years, these technologies are more available today. DVD will be a major competitor to bluray as well as downloading and other technologies. As time passes, the technology will only get better. Given the
wider choices available to the public, it will result in an extremely fragmented market.

 

[Edwin-S]

Oh Oh! Format war, Version 2.0.

 

[Jesse Blacklow]

Can you get your arguments straight? First, it doesn't matter because of where they were, now it doesn't matter because of where they will be, and you're under the assumption that Blu-ray will remain static in things like pricing. And you're still avoiding my statement that Blu-ray's issues have a much higher potential of being fixed in the near timeframe than that of anything else. After all, Blu-ray basically only needs price changes that can be done with the approval of a governing body. Every single technology that you so desperately want to "fragment" the HD market not only has a longer road, it has a astronomically more expensive road with dozens, if not hundreds, of different directions. Not only does each individual carrier have to invest hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to overhaul the infrastructure, they have to adhere to the different standards from every level from local to international, they have to choose from the various draconian DRM schemes to employ (all of which are much more draconian than anything Blu-ray has), and they have to convince people that never owning anything they've paid money for is awesome. Tell us, when will all of that happen?

And remember, it took 3-4 years for DVD to really take off, and Blu-ray has been around for less than 2 years. I'd love to hear your explanations on why you set the baseline at the most successful media in history by a huge margin. By that measurement, everything is a failure.

 

[Chris Atkins]

I see that Wal-Mart is putting in an entire 1/2 row of Blu-ray product (including $299 players). Does anyone know what price point Wal-Mart will be selling new and/or catalogue Blu releases? Seems to me that the faster new releases come down to $20, the better for software sales.

 

[Michael Reuben]

Yep, some people seem to need it.

Let's all try to moderate the rhetoric. Anyone slipping back into the tone and idiom of last year is going to find themselves in an awkward situation.

M.