Blu-ray Adoption Soft, More Still Own HD DVD 685
MojoKid writes "A new study by Harris Interactive notes that currently,
one in ten Americans (10%) own an HD DVD player, while just 7% own a Blu-ray player. Crazy, right?
More Americans own HD DVD right now than the 'winning' format, Blu-ray. If you think about it, that statistic isn't that shocking. When HD DVD was around, it was far and away the 'budget' format for high-def. The players were cheaper, the films were cheaper. In other words, it was a format more ready to thrive in a down economy. Blu-ray was always viewed as a niche format for those absorbed in A/V, not the common man's format. The survey also found that on average, consumers purchased approximately six standard format DVDs in the last six months, compared with one in HD DVD format."
I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
how many people with a regular up-scaling DVD player think they have an HD-DVD player?
No Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what is more telling is the fact that so many people are still buying standard def., original flavor DVD's over Blu-Ray. In some ways, I really think this should come as no surprise.
DVD player in the minivan/SUV: Standard def.
Portable DVD player: Standard def.
The majority of televisions still in the USA: Standard def (digital or otherwise).
Cost of a perfectly capable, plays-all, region free DVD player in the supermarket: $20.
Whichever big-business sector you hate this week (the hardware makers, the movie studios, the publishers, the MPAA, whatever) are pretty much trying to cram a high cost technology down the thoats of people who by majority don't want it, can't use it, or can't afford it.
Clarification? (Score:5, Insightful)
When Blu-ray player or PS3 owners are asked...
I take it they're counting the two separately, which would show Blu-ray ahead. Am I missing something?
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I've even downgraded from dvd quality. I am very happy streaming things from Netflix.
Re:But... (Score:0, Insightful)
...does this statistic take into account PlayStations, laptops, and other electronics which include Blu-ray players?
Did you even RTFA? http://hothardware.com/newsimages/Item10047/blu-ray-adoption.png [hothardware.com]
You must be new here.
It was budget because it was failing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Weird... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course there's a high number of HD DVD players (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I work in he rental industry (Score:5, Insightful)
You're only looking at one market segment though - people who still rent from a physical store.
Early adopters and people who have invested in home setups which would make Blu-Ray worthwhile are more likely to rent from other places (Netflix, iTunes) or just buy the movies outright. No point in owning a Blu-Ray player if your only TV is a 10 year old 27" Panasonic tube.
Never FORGET The Real Reason They Gave In!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Most people don't remember that Sony paid off Toshiba with a big sum of money to exit the market. And, in return for letting Blu-ray win, Toshiba was granted the right exclusive right to embed a Blu-ray player in their laptops. That is the only reason that Sony won the format wars, their format was actually a lot less successful than Toshiba's HD-DVD.
I bought one, my parents bought one, my brothers all bought one (3 brothers), my newphew and uncles all bought one (4) and my best friend from college bought one. Essentially, everyone I knew was ticked off that they spent several hundred dollars on a player that was now obsolete almost instantly. On the bright side, all the HD discs went on sale fast.
I'm pretty offended that Toshiba gave in, and that Sony forced them to. Neither had the customer's interests in mind when they made that deal. They screwed us out of quite a bit of money. So, will my family or myself buy a bluray? No, because it still stings. They lost a lot of hearts and minds. And, our wallets still feel a bit empty.
Both are obsolete. (Score:5, Insightful)
The real telling issue is that less than 20% of US Households have adopted either, and it's been out for years. Frankly, this should be no surprise, the "format war" dragged on for so long that by the time the victor had stepped forth, the market they were fighting for was already passing them by. The migration to HD video on demand, online streaming, and yes, downloading of material makes disk-based distribution an out of date concept who is slowly fading into the past.
Re:Clarification? (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone who buys a Blu Ray player does so because they want to play Blu Ray discs.
Not everyone who buys a PS3 does so because they want to play Blu Ray discs (In fact, one would assume that a minority do).
Thus it would be disingenuous to claim that all PS3 purchases equate to a Blu Ray player purchase when measuring the "popularity" of the format.
On the other hand, a 360 HDDVD drive purchase *does* equate to an HD-DVD player purchase as that is its sole purpose.
Re:really? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. The statistics are clearly faulty.
First, 1 in 10 Americans does not own either of these formats. Come on, really? 30 million Americans own HD-DVD players? If Toshiba and their partners had sales like that, the format war would have been over long before it was - in HD-DVD's favor.
Second, this clearly isn't taking into account the 22 million PS3's out there, of which about 12 million are in the United States. This is still the player of choice for most people - at least until that $99 player announced over the weekend comes along. But this is one case where a game console is actually clearly better than most standalone players and most people know it.
Re:early adopters VSs the luddites (Score:5, Insightful)
HD-DVD is dead. There's no need to wait to see who will win, as that question was answered a year and a half ago when Toshiba (the banner carrier for HD-DVD) announced that they would discontinue all HD-DVD production. According to the wiki article, the entire HD-DVD promotion group was dissolved March of last year. To my knowledge, no one builds a new HD-DVD player; there are a small number of PC drives that include HD-DVD compatibility, but I assume that's because of the low cost of inclusion once the blue laser diodes for Blu-ray are already in the drive. You can not walk into a retail store and find an HD-DVD player unless they found some hidden stock in the back and are clearance selling it for $20. You can't find HD-DVD discs unless the same thing happens. Any movie that's come out since then will never come out on HD-DVD. HD-DVD is dead and voluntarily buried by its own support and manufacturing group.
In summary, there is no more waiting. The race was over last year. You can debate whether the quality improvement is worth the money, and there's some definite complaints to be made about the cost of the discs. If your only concern, however, is which of the formats will win, then there's no reason to continue waiting. Blu-Ray won last year.
Physical media is dying (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a lot of experience in this field, and here are the reason why physical media is doomed, probably even sooner than many expect.
Here's why:
1. BluRay licensing makes it very difficult (expensive) to enable mass-adoption.
2. Bandwidth is getting cheaper while high-speed internet is becoming more accessible.
3. DRM is slowly dying.
This will lead to Downloadable HD content which you could stream/burn/transcode to any format you want within the next 2-5 years (on a mass-market scale as we're already seeing this in some fringe markets).
And if the establishment wont move in this direction, piracy will only grow as people want things to be easy and will take the path of least resistance (if DRM is more complicated/unreliable than Piracy, we'll see more content pirates).
Death to physical media! (Score:3, Insightful)
Owning movies really isn't worth it these days. First off, there's rarely a movie I'd want to see more than once. Second off, services like Netflix make it easy to get the movies I do want to see, first time or repeat, with very little delay. And as they're working out the legal kinks with the streaming service, it'd be just like owning the originals at home. Why clutter my life with all those discs? Let's not forget there's also the issue of format wars, buying all your movies again when the latest format drops. Who needs that? I'll stream the movie at HD resolution and when they come out with super-HD a few years from now, I'll stream it like that as well, no worries about buying new hardware.
Granted, there's still going to be the situations where you don't have broadband and want to bring your movies with you. If Netflix has good lawyers, they'll be able to let you operate in cache mode. Select the movies you want, plug in your thumb drive, you download them and are in cache mode and can watch them on the go wherever you want. If they don't have good lawyers and can't make that happen, I can still bittorrent what I want to watch offline.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:3, Insightful)
You may have a 40 inch monitor or have your computer wired to your plasma/lcd but most people do not. You may know how to use torrents but most people do not.
Re:It's all about the names (Score:5, Insightful)
Discs still too expensive (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now, you can get a cheap Blu-Ray player for not much more than what I paid for my first DVD player. However, I have not even felt a twinge in that general direction; I've been too spoiled by $4 to $6 movies, and until I can routinely get Blu-Ray discs for under $10, forget it. There are really very few movies I would re-buy in Blu-Ray, further reducing my desire to buy one of those things.
I do have a 1080p TV, and a usable 7.1 receiver waiting for the day when it does make sense though...
SirWired
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe downloadable content will be the winner much further down the track, but for the moment I think the problem is that Blu-ray hasn't done enough to dethrone DVDs as the standard format.
Think about what DVDs had to offer over VHS - much smaller form factor (you can get about three TV seasons worth of content in a case the size of a VHS tape), significantly increased quality (both picture and sound), the ability to choose subtitles in dozens of languages with a click of a button, no rewinding, multiple soundtracks on the one disc, selectable camera angles, chapter selection, usable menus, special features, audio commentaries, no degradation of the signal from repeated use, etc...
Blu-ray offers... a slightly better picture. If you fork out ridiculous amounts of cash for the new discs, players and a HD Television to go with it.
Sure, I can tell the difference, and so can most people, but DVDs are actually reasonably good quality to begin with, and good enough for most people out there, myself included.
Re:really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, this clearly isn't taking into account the 22 million PS3's out there, of which about 12 million are in the United States. This is still the player of choice for most people - at least until that $99 player announced over the weekend comes along. But this is one case where a game console is actually clearly better than most standalone players and most people know it.
On the other hand, games compete with films -- quite a few of those PS3 owners do not own a single Blu-Ray movie.
The install base is there, but it doesn't translate into market potential in the same way that standalone players do.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:5, Insightful)
People who have broadband and no caps, have their PC connected to their TV and are generally computer savvy can just download stuff in any format.
There. Fixed it for you.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been winning that game for a long time now, as has anyone else
who cares about their rights as consumers.
VHS is a factor, too. (Score:2, Insightful)
I haven't even finished replacing all of the VHS tapes I own with DVD. The VHS tapes still work. What makes them think I want to be updating from two different working formats, simultaneously? To a format that is substantially compromised with DRM, and that they'll want me to upgrade from in about five to ten years?
Planned obsolescence is not a sustainable strategy, culturally, economically or environmentally.
Re:really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:4, Insightful)
If you look at the chart, they've separated out the PS3 owners from the Blu-Ray player owners. Combine the 7% Blu-Ray owners with the 9% PS3 owners, and that's 16%. I'm sure that most PS3 owners didn't feel the need to buy a separate Blu-Ray player.
On the other hand, some of the people who owned a PS3 and no other separate BD player, might have ticked Yes to both questions. In other words, you can't necessarily add together the numbers for BD players and PS3s together, as you may be counting some devices twice.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:4, Insightful)
That is the most true statement that can ever be made about Sony. Sony is an amazing company. Their product line is extremely wide and varied. Their quality is also extremely wide and varied. Their policies are consistently crappy and unfriendly, even suspicious, to the consumer.
No more Sony. Just that. No More Sony.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:5, Insightful)
Conventional movies shown in theaters show more detail than HD; if the appearance was that bad then it is because 300 had exceptionally poorly executed visual effects, not because of any fundamental problem with HD video.
Re:early adopters VSs the luddites (Score:2, Insightful)
Your claim only makes sense in a world where there is only two options: Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Unfortunately, the market has more options than that. The market has spoken: DVD (plain old regular, non-high-definition) is the format war winner.
VHS died a quick and painful death at the hands of the most quickly adopted consumer technology ever, the DVD, simply because the advantages of the technology so favored DVD. That is not the case with DVD vs. Blu-Ray.
In short, Congrats Sony! Welcome to the LaserDisc club!
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree absolutely. The real reason the HD disk formats have struggled is because DVD is "good enough" for most people. DVD replaced VHS because of better picture and sound, but also because it offered the convenience of no rewinding, more stuff on one disk, the ability to skip to different chapters, etc and it's more robust than tapes. Blu-ray (or HD-DVD) doesn't offer anything above slightly better picture (assuming you have a decent, and expensive TV with a decent sound system).
CDs replaced cassettes and vinyl for much the same reasons, the sound is better, but one of the biggest selling points is being able to skip tracks and not have jammed tapes or scratched vinyl. CDs were then replaced not by higher quality CDs, but by more convenient downloads. Similarily, the only thing to dethrone DVDs will be convenient and cheap movie downloads.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:4, Insightful)
Practically every movie on the big screen is high-def -- or filmed at even higher "resolutions" if actually filmed. If the special effects were bad enough to see the green screen effects or make the CGI noticeable (such as in Langoliers - which was lousy processing even for its time, even for a made-for-TV movie) then blame the special effects house, not the process itself.
Film movies can appear to be low-resolution, but that is because of using low-quality prints. Film should ideally offer resolution that is much, much higher than "hi definition" digital formats. Many directors will choose a high-grain film or print though, for "ambience" or "effect" and I've even seen that grain on "digital" movies, so YMMV, etc.
Don't most films look amazing on the big screen? Well, providing the "projectionist" actually focuses it? All too often when I go to the movies the ads before the movie are in perfect focus then the movie is out of focus, which makes me prefer watching the movie at home on my old, crappy, 36" NTSC CRT. However, when the film is in sharp focus, it's amazing - and very revealing of flaws. Remember when A New Hope was re-released in the theater? Even though they cleaned a lot up and re-did a lot of the effects digitally, the old green screen process was still evident in many of the scenes, and was a bit distracting.
High-Def is great. I like it a lot. However, as I've said many times on here, it doesn't make lousy writing worth watching, and doesn't make good writing better. High-def does inherently improve make documentary and instrctional videos though. IMHO High-Def is good for these things:
1. Documentaries and instruction videos
2. Gaming (but you could use a PC or Mac with a high-res monitor for that!)
3. Turning you into a "pixel peeper," focusing on the format rather than enjoying the story (which seems to be the case referenced in your post)
4. Raises revenue so our government can continue its onerous trend of runaway spending
5. More revenue for retailers by forcing everyone to upgrade televisions, or at least buying set-top boxes.
My CRT is still running, so I put off upgrading. I came this ><& close to buying the Samsung LN46A650 but I put it off, thinking LED backlighting will go mainstream in the next model. I was wrong on that. You have to go up to the UN46B7000, and even then, you're getting edge lighting, not an LED backlight. :(
Re:Don't buy into that lie (Score:3, Insightful)
It's STATISTICS.
Mac OS X does have 10% market share - because it runs on all Apple products regardless of purpose (embedded, desktop)
Linux does have 50% market share - in embedded products because it's the most stable and has the best performance for those purposes and it's cheap for integrators
Apache does have 90% market share - on web servers because again, it's the most compatible and best known solution out there and since most Apache run Linux you could say Linux has about the same market share.
Cisco runs 60% of the Internet - because Cisco products simply have the best routers a million dollars will buy
HD-DVD is in more households than Blu-Ray - because they are being resold as upconverting DVD players for $99 - half the people probably don't even know they can play HD-DVD movies (as if you can get any)
Re:Don't buy into that lie (Score:3, Insightful)
the movies border on extortionist in pricing
only one of the circle of friends who has a PS3 have more than two blu ray movies
Cool stats. Bad ones of course. 14% of movies sold today are on BD. Easy stats. Not like the dumb-ass stuff the OP quoted. Dumb-ass not because I disagree with it but because it was astonishingly wrong. Tosh never sold enough HD-DVD players to cover 11% of the US market. Even if all of them were sold in the US.
Enough sour grapes for 200 gallons of bad wine. Wrong too of course. Why don't you just check Amazon for BD movie prices please?
Oh, and forced play has been a part of all movie formats since (and including) DVD. It was part of HD-DVD too. Please try to get your facts straight before you take the offer of a tissue from the Anonymous Coward below.
Re:I always maintained blue ray was moot (Score:3, Insightful)
Your right, one movie is enough, however that's only if that one movie is indicative of the norm for filming. 300 is not the norm. The point is, the style of filming was vastly different from the norm. So making sweeping judgments about films on a particular display technology based on a unique film is utterly ridiculous. Take something like Ironman or Batman: Forever and see how those rate up in HD, or even better use a James Bond film, but to use 300 as your sole factor in the worth of technology is utter stupidity.
Re:I work in he rental industry (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no such thing as the "correct" viewing distance. I like to watch at such a distance that the screen takes up about 20 degrees of visual angle. That makes me comfortable, even though I know a lot of people enjoy 30 degrees, and some of them consider me "insane." I don't watch movies to demonstrate my sanity, I watch them for enjoyment. It doesn't matter to me even a tiny bit that I might be missing out on some of the resolution of the image. If some new video standard had a zillion times the resolution of blu-ray, I wouldn't sit with my face pressed up against the tv.
Hardware not expensive, the disks are (Score:3, Insightful)
The hardware isn't expensive if you already have a HD TV, and here in the UK the TV's seem to be doing well enough even though the only widespread HD content is from a games console. Compared to the TV the BR drives are cheap - decent units can be bought for cheaper than when DVD got popular. But people still aren't buying them because the movies are still very expensive. I can go to my local store and walk out with 6 good DVD's for the price of a single Bluray (plus the choice of titles on the shelves is about 40x wider, and the difference gets much bigger using online stores).
The only thing IMHO holding Bluray back is that the disks themselves are far too expensive relative to what people are used to paying, given the real-world benefits are not perceived as being that great. Sure, BR is technologically vastly better, but people are still quite happy with DVD and for most movies the higher resolution is just not important - and as for audio, most people use the TV speakers anyway. I have a BR player and use a a subscription rental where a BR is the same as a DVD - for blockbusters I go for BR, but for the vast majority I really don't care.
Sometimes I actually go for the DVD version. The "don't pirate me" messages at the start of DVDs are bad enough but with every BR they are infuriating, can't I just tick some "I acknowledge piracy is illegal" box once and have the other disks see that I've already sat through this crap? I just got Band of Brothers on BR and since I watched an episode a night I sat though 90 seconds of crap for 10 nights - 15 minutes in total. There's something wrong when I'm making a habit of loading the BR then switching back to the web browser while it gets to the menu. All I am going to say about the required firmware upgrades is that an unexpected 40 minute routine (OK, counting the PowerDVD patch) is not welcome when I have deliberately left myself just enough time to watch the movie to finish off the night.