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Steve Jobs Taking Medical Leave of Absence Until June
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Maybe you live in a low-income area? Where I live (in the south of the UK), all the local DVD dealers have prominent BD areas and they all report healthy (and growing) sales.
So why do movies and TV shows on DVD sell in such massive numbers, if people are only going to watch them once and it makes more sense to rent? Why aren't rental figures massive and sales figures tiny?
For sure, but it's a fair way off yet. A typical 90-minute movie at full BD quality is about 20Gb - how long will that take to download? Most internet users are still on relatively slow, capped connections. When the average user can download 20Gb in around 10 minutes, we'll be getting somewhere. I'm not holding my breath.
Well, it's a fact that BD, at this stage in its life, is selling better than DVD did at a comparable stage in *its* life. And that's not really surprising; HD-capable flat-panel TVs have been selling like hot cakes for the last couple of years, and people want to be able to actually watch stuff in HD.
However, this whole debate over and concern with Bluray only really matters under one condition...
Here's a relevant post from an earlier thread.
You don't understand the issue - it's not whether the 13.3" screen is ideal for seeing full 1080p quality.
The issue is that we're buying BD movies for our home systems, and we can play them on our Windows machines just fine.
Apples can't play them, though. Are we supposed to buy both BD discs and DVD discs just because of Apple's pig-headedness? Or are we supposed to buy Windows systems from other companies if we want to play BD discs? (The latter works for me.)
By the way, I'd rather watch a 1920x1080 BD movie scaled *down* to fit the 13.3" 1280x800 screen, rather than the 640x480 (or sometimes 720x480) DVD movie scaled *up* to fit!
And, of course, the video professionals and amateurs would like to author Blu-ray titles on their Macs, but that's another discussion entirely.
Perhaps you should look and see that 10 of the top 16 bestselling TVs at Amazon are 40" or larger.... In fact, 6 of the top 16 are 52" sets. http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/172659/ref=pd_ts_e_nav
And, while you're at Amazon, notice that 3 of the top 5 selling "DVD" players are actually Blu-ray players! http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/172514/ref=pd_ts_e_nav
Fortunately, your opinion doesn't match up with the facts about Blu-ray.
Blu-ray Sales on the Rise in Japan
March 6, 2009 by Josh Dreuth
According to a recent report from GfK Marketing Services Japan Ltd (GfK Japan), sales of Blu-ray Disc recorders increased by over 800% last year in Japan. In 2007, only 160,000 Blu-ray Disc recorders were sold in the country, but that number jumped to 1.34 Million units in 2008, representing a huge uptake in adoption of the high definition format.
The overall optical disc market decreased by 1%, but DVD recorders dipped by 26% as the format gives up ground to Blu-ray. Last year, Blu-ray recorders represented 37% of all optical recorder sales (53% of revenue), and that number is expected to grow substantially this year.
http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=2469
and
Blu-ray is being adopted faster than DVD
January 3, 2009 by Mike Ferro
It was a stellar holiday season for Blu-ray with movies like The Dark Knight breaking records. According to two research firms, Blu-ray movies and players were top on most holiday shopper's list. This is pretty much what I predicted a few months back when I compared Blu-ray as this year's Tickle me Elmo.
According to DVDFile, surveys conducted by both, Greenfield and Zogby International, Blu-ray players and movies were ranked high on holiday shopper's lists. In the survey conducted by Greenfield, it also indicated that Blu-ray players were number one on the list of HD TV owners. The survey conducted by Zogby revealed similar results ranking Blu-ray players as second on the list after HD TV.
I indicated that there will be a strong correlation between HD TV adoption and Blu-ray, and these two studies definitely show this to be true. Blu-ray sales are starting to eat away at DVD sales, similarly to how DVD sales ate away at VHS sales over 10 years ago. According to Richard Greenfield, analyst for Pali Capital, indicated that results for 2008 are expected to show a decrease in DVD sales by 6%. This is in contrast to original predictions of flat sales for the year.
Greenfield also indicated that the adoption rate for Blu-ray is much faster than DVD was. He states, "Interestingly, two years into the standard DVD cycle, the DVD installed base was only 1.2 million and players were not nearly as inexpensive as $129 [BD players were] on Black Friday." As indicated before, Blu-ray sales are twice of that of DVDs at the same point in its life.
I predict that the Blu-ray adoption rate is actually much faster than twice that of DVDs when you consider out of the two years on the market, only one year was really spent as the sole format. The first year was spent battling it out with HD-DVD splintering the market in half while leaving many on the fence. This holiday definitely showed that consumers have made the jump to Blu-ray.
http://www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.cfm?ID=18670
and
Blu-ray Dominates Christmas Sales
Jan 5, 2009 by Scott Nichols
Back before Thanksgiving I predicted that Blu-ray sales would suffer during the holiday season due to the high cost of both the player and HDTVs combined with the current economic recession, among other reasons. But after seeing the report from the British Video Association declaring Blu-ray sales have risen almost 400 percent for the 2008 holiday season over the same period of time last year, it is clear that I was wrong.
Across the whole holiday season 3.7 million Blu-ray units were sold in Britain, and that doesn't include sales of Sony's Playstation 3 console, which also plays Blu-ray movies. A large contributing factor to the rise in Blu-ray sales was the release of the movies The Dark Knight and Mama Mia on Blu-ray. The Dark Knight sold almost 300,000 copies in its first few weeks, becoming the fastest selling Blu-ray title to date. Mama Mia was no slouch either selling 5.1 million copies by year-end.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/156327/blu_ray_holiday_sales.html?tk=rss
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There are lies, dammned lies and then there are statistics! BD disc sales in America in 2008 were 4.5% of the total, i.e 95.5% were DVD's. That's great success? BD's main backer, Sony lost 2.9 billion dollars last year and has never made a cent on any PS3 sale to date.
No you are just twisting statistics in desperation. Sony made vast profits on PS2's whereas they are subsidizing PS3's and losing money on every unit they sell. 2.9 billion dollar loss last year! The technical difference between VHS and DVD was so compelling success was almost guaranteed, whilst the difference between DVD is much less marked ( It is better, just not worth junking your existing DVD library and investing in new HT theatre amps to take advantage of Dolby and DTS HD audio formats) DVD also never had to deal with a debilitating format fight or the first world recession since 1930. BD disc sales in the USA last year constituted 4.5% of the total. Pretty much a minority interest wouldn't you say? Face facts DVD, BD even the venerable hard disk will all disappear as Flash Memory drops in price and storage capability. Don't you remember FDD's?
If you are renting Netflix DVD's and ripping them it is against copyright law. If you are just ripping your own privately purchased DVD's to watch on a computer or iPod, then it would be ok.
i've never seen such a community so concerned about blu-ray on their computers. Seriously, most people do not care about blu-ray. It's cool to use on your hdtv, but there's really no need for it on a home computer unless you are producing HD material.
I have my own custom built PC I built, and I bought a blu-ray/hd-dvd drive for it for $80, and I returned it after a week because I realized how useless it was. Seriously, most people on the pc side do not care about blu-ray. Mac people are overly obsessed with it just because they can't have it, at least yet. It's really not that big of a deal. And knowing apple, they'll charge a huge premium for a blu-ray drive and act like they were the first ones to ever have blu-ray on their computers.
I have my own custom built PC I built, and I bought a blu-ray/hd-dvd drive for it for $80, and I returned it after a week because I realized how useless it was. Seriously, most people on the pc side do not care about blu-ray. Mac people are overly obsessed with it just because they can't have it, at least yet. It's really not that big of a deal. And knowing apple, they'll charge a huge premium for a blu-ray drive and act like they were the first ones to ever have blu-ray on their computers.
You've never seen a community so much in a rage over being so ripped off by Apple's premium prices and NOT getting cutting edge computers (equipped with Blu-ray) for those premiums.
Undoubtedly. But for the first time in almost three years the premium will finally be worth it and Apple will warrant the hype.
Actually both are illegal. The laws contradict each other. It states that you can copy your own DVDs as means of backup, but it also says that it is forbidden to violate the copy protection on said DVD. Since copying it violates the copy protection, it becomes illegal anyway.
4.5% is significant! Don't you realize that 4.5% is almost 5%? Never mind that 95.5% of sales were DVDs - this doesn't count, it's nonsense, I tell you!
Pro video content creators needed Blu-ray LAST YEAR to deliver hi-def video to their clients to display on the plamsa screens in their offices and to view in their homes.
Ditto wedding videographers to THEIR clients.
The fact that they can't do it unless using Windoze is unforgivably bad business and simply unsustainable by Apple.
The world doesn't revolve around movies and movie piracy.
That said and done, speaking of movies, any trip to Fry's will show the Blu-ray section growing by leaps and bounds each week. SOMEONE is buying Blu-ray. A LOT of someones.
The only reason DVD's outsell Blu-ray is because there is more available on DVD. For now. This is a temporary situation.
As prices of large screen plasmas continue to deflate, more people will finally understand that Blu-ray is here and is going nowhere for quite some time. A blu-ray disc will always be cheaper than any kind of drive and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. As prices come down for drives, Blu-ray discs will keep pace and keep lower.
And then there are those who stick their heads in the sand and pick and choose their statistics. I remember VHS fans making the same market share argument against DVD. What they foolishly ignore is growth and the trend. Like global warming chicken littles, they assume the current state is how things always were and how they always should be. They don't see a dynamic world.
From www.thedigitalbits.com:
digitalbits said:
digitalbits said:
digitalbits said:
videobusiness.com said:
homemediamagazine.com said:
When THE hit movie comes out and 20-30% of the sales are on a new format, stand up and take notice, you're being left at the train station by the emos with eyebrow piercings at the Mapple store.
So clean the sand out of your ears. Waaah, my Mac doesn't support something, so therefore it isn't important, waaaah.
Yeah, I'd rather believe some wanker on a Mac forum (many of the Blu-Ray opponents have already been exposed as not even owning HDTVs, of course they wouldn't care, and so much for the whole Mac-buyers-are-affluent fallacy) who has never seen a Blu-Ray disc over The Digital Bits and Videobusiness.com, people who make a living covering the video industry.
And what's the Mac's market share again? The difference is that Blu-Ray won't remain at 5% for 20 years.
And I'm sure that within two minutes I can go back to alt.video.dvd archives from 1999 and find some fools making the same arguments for VHS over DVD. Where are they now? They bought Macs, apparently.
See, if you look at the trends, Blu-Ray is not failing, it is succeeding, and it is growing exponentially. Disc sales are growing exponentially during "the worst economy since the Great Depression". It was at 0% three years ago; it's at 5% now, it will be at 50% and higher in the next several years.
We know Blu-Ray is here, we just don't see the point of it on the computer right now. Or rather, don't think it's worth it right now, considering the licensing issues.
jW
The point of it, that everyone should give a damn about, is keeping Apple afloat as a computer manufacturer, and not bankrupt as a former toymaker of kiddie iCrap that went belly up once China started making their own cheaper flashier iPhones and iPods.
Amiga never crapped all over its highend workstation base and it's long dead and gone. Anyone who thinks the same thing can't and won't happen to Apple if it refuses to keep pace and even ahead of the competition (to JUSTIFIABLY earn its higher premium from implementing cutting edge technology BEFORE everyone else, rather than AFTER, and rather than momentum and aura) is woefully ignorant.
So how about no more defense of dinosaur reasoning. As far as licensing issues, piracy be damned.
Just what is the problem? Nobody is stopping anyone from installing a Blu-Ray writer into their Mac's and using Adobe CS4 etc to make the discs.
Okay, so the laptops don't have BD capability, but then no serious Pro would master their clients discs on one of those! Mac Pro all the way.
Okay, so the laptops don't have BD capability, but then no serious Pro would master their clients discs on one of those! Mac Pro all the way.
Vista Home Basic and Business doesn't even ship with DVD playback built in, you need to install your own software.
Windows hasn't ever shipped MPEG-2 codecs with any OS due to licensing issues (MPEG-2 is a bag of hurt, you know).
See http://www.windows-vista-update.com/Windows_Vista_codecs.html
If you buy a Windows system with a pre-installed DVD player, it will come with a DVD player that installs the codecs. Most aftermarket DVD drives include a player in the package.
More like Elcaset!
BD is doomed to failure because storing data on discs is clumsy and so 20th century! Get with the program SSD of various hues are the future, you can consign BD to the room where they store the Elcaset machines! Seriously walk into any store in the UK that sells DVD's and you would be hard pressed to find more than a 100 BD's and i'm talking about HMV on Oxford Street in London on e of the worlds major shopping streets. I have state of the art full HD Panasonic Plasma a superb 5.1 surround sound system and just can't find any reason to purchase a BD player, partially because of the additional cost over DVD and the dire state of the BD catalogue. Very happy to watch BBC and SKY HD at 720p or 1080i. BD just doesn't make any economic sense to buy a BD player which would gather even more dust than my DVD player does! At least DVD has a vast catalogue.