HomeJust before Toshiba threw in the towel, I ran a poll on Digital Digest asking our visitors when they were planning on getting into high def (either Blu-ray or HD DVD). Shortly after Toshiba had broken the hearts of HD DVD supporters worldwide, I ran another very similar poll, this time asking people with the knowledge that Blu-ray has won the format war when they were going to get into Blu-ray. The two polls, when you analyse the results, paints what I thought was a very interesting picture. Then there’s the poll that I’m currently running, which is about Blu-ray hardware pricing.
Just a note to say that none of these polls are scientific in nature. They are more just a general indication of the feelings of people who have found this website.
Let look at the first poll, results below:
It’s interesting to note that a large percentage of people who voted had already gotten into Blu-ray or HD DVD, which I guess for a website of this nature, it isn’t too surprising. What wasn’t too surprising back then was the fact that an equally large number of people were waiting for the format war to end before jumping into either format. The rest of the people were split between waiting a certain time prior or not wanting to get into HD at all. Remember that this poll was taken just before HD DVD folded, but it was at a time when the writing was already on the wall.
Now let’s look at the second poll:
Now the above two polls couldn’t have been more than a month apart, but the results are somewhat different. Around 10% of the people polled still didn’t want anything to do with HD. Another 10% in both polls signalled that they wanted to wait another 6 months. But it seem the people who said they were waiting for the format war to end basically switched to the “when DVDs are no longer available” camp, and a bunch of former HD DVD supporters probably went with them.
While again stressing that these polls are nowhere near scientific enough to tell us much, but I thought it was interesting to see that the poll did manage to predict that there wasn’t going to be this surge of Blu-ray buying by curious by-standers (those waiting for the format war to end) and former HD DVD users. It seems when the format war was raging, people used it as an excuse not to get into HD, and when the format war ended, they found another excuse to use.
And then you look at the current poll I’m running (still not fully finished), and you begin to see perhaps just why people are staying away from Blu-ray:
Obviously, people are always likely to say prices are too high, but the lopsided nature of the result shouldn’t be ignored. I will run a similar poll about movie prices next, and it will be interesting to see whether the results are as one sided.
