News and Reviews....

    Blu-Ray Embraces Online  November 2009

    Some of the largest manufactures of the Blu-ray format are making their players with Internet capabilities. The main focus is to deliver more features in the name of movie delivery. Retailers and manufactures including: Best Buy Company, Samsung, and LG are incorporating an Ethernet connector that will tap into movies from online rental companies and provide an alternative to cable pay-per-view services. The hybrid movie players link onto online shows from Amazon, Netflix and CinemaNow. Some are a pay as you watch service and others allow unlimited movie streaming for a fixed rate. The feature itself might make the players themselves irrelevant over time but allows the players to be sold as multi-purpose machines. The machines are in direct competition to services like HULU and VUDU, one a free service and the other a pay service that downloads to a specific storing device.

The Blue-Ray technology itself is an interesting beast in that SONY, its creator, has all the licensing and has been promoting the process for about seven (7) years. It eliminated the HD-DVD format, we believe, through the political process of pitting Sony Entertainment and a number of studios against the other manufactures and what studios were then left on the table. The format is a 1080P process and stands a bit above the current DVD process when the 480 process is up converted. The price of the Blu-Ray has come down from $30 USD to $24.99 USD which was the initial price of standard DVD first run movies. This has driven the price of standard DVD to $18.99. We feel that the price of all DVDs regardless of their process should be under $10.00. And even at that price, the margins are there. 

Blu-ray Disc purchases dropped 13.8% during the 3rd quarter of 2009 alone, as internet streaming and cable pay-per-view rose 18%. Blu-ray disc sales are up 80% year to date, but remain a fraction of over-all disc sales. What is interesting is that consumers like the downloading process even though the quality of the download is well below the quality of a Blu-ray disc. Manufactures backing the multi-use players, see enormous potential in the feature of updating the internal software of the player as more sites come on line. The player might also veer to places not associated to the sale of movies alone and open up the consumer market to what was really initially wanted..... a full blown in-home entertainment unit, far and away from the initial purchase of a disc player alone. Analysts expect big brand versions of these hybrid players will sell for about $150 USD apiece on the day after Thanksgiving 2009.

   A Restated Comment .....  While we feel that nothing stops technology, and that their will always be a better or newer method and equipment for consumers to embrace, we also believe that the current DVD (480i) is heavily entrenched and High Definition (1080i) is well on its way into the Television market. Once HD has a good enough foot hold in the Television market, then and only then will the High Definition Blu-ray disc become the everyday format. The question is will they arrive together or will the Blu-ray format succumb to slow and eroded sales figures, before the next format (2K,4K) takes over the reins. Eventually the transition of new movies and entertainment into the home will be completely from the online world regardless of format. 

For information leading up to this article see:

    Beyond Blu-Ray  February  2005

    Birth of the Blues    February 2002

    DVD - Blue/Out - Red/IN    March 2002

    DVD - New Standard    May 2002

    Next Generation DVD    December 2002

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