HomeTwo months ago, I posted an analysis of some polls that I ran on the website, which told us a little bit about the state of Blu-ray before and after the end of the format war. The conclusion I sort of came up with was that Blu-ray’s success was being hindered by high prices.
I promised that I would follow it up with two more completed polls that would concentrate on both Blu-ray hardware and movie prices, and what people thought about it. The results are finally in, and they paint a very clear picture: Blu-ray is too expensive.
Here are the results:
Seldom have I seen such one sided polls. Hardware prices are obviously too high, with only 6% of the people polled believing the “price is right”. It was a little bit getter for movie prices, which have come down quite a bit recently (both in the US and UK, Australia should soon follow) – 12% polled felt pricing was quite good already.
I need to stress again that these polls are hardly scientific, so the margin of error is quite large. But even with that, the picture is clear … Blu-ray needs price cuts before people are interested. The good news is that Blu-ray movie discounts are quite common now, not only in the US, but UK stores such as The Hut and dvd.co.uk are offering discount deals such as “2 for £18”, and this will surely drive sales upwards.
But I was thinking just today why people still buy music CDs, when downloads and higher quality audio disc formats are available. Would Blu-ray suffer from the same phenomenon, in that people won’t upgrade from DVDs even though there is something clearly better? Obviously the average person is less likely to be able to appreciate the difference between CD and higher quality audio, or even if they can hear the difference, they may not care about it. Video is different, in that the differences could be quite noticeable, so perhaps Blu-ray will do better than CDs. But to displace DVDs as the preferred video distribution method is going to take something quite amazing.
There was a recent, somewhat optimistic prediction, that Blu-ray sales will overtake DVD sales by 2012. Even if this were to come to fruition, it still means that at that time, nearly half of movie sales will still be DVD based. That’s four years from now, and still Blu-ray will not established itself as the totally dominant video format. And this not even taking into account the effect downloads will have on optical disc sales. Toshiba, the major backer of DVD, is now planning to launch “DVD 2.0“, which will include downloads as part of the DVD specifications, as well as including many of the technical advances used in the defunct HD DVD format. So the next four years will be quite unpredictable, I think, and it’s hard to say who will come out on top.
But competition will be good for consumers, and having so many choices when it comes to watching and purchasing movies is a good thing too.
P.S: Totally forgot that today was Digital Digest’s 9th birthday. Can’t believe I’ve been working on this website for 9 years already. You know how they say time flies when you’re having fun, the last 9 years seemed only like 7 years, 8 at most!
