News and Reviews....

    Blue Ray Takes All  March 2008

By Robert Lieto

    As you probably have heard by now, the battle of the Hi-Definition DVD Discs is over. Toshiba announced that they would stop marketing the HD-DVD products and discs as of February 14, 2008 and left the field to rival Blue-Ray format. What I think is interesting is that the HD-DVD format had some very good reasons to hold out. For one it was backwards compatible with the current DVD disc in that the HD-DVD player could play both, and it could be manufactured for a cheaper price as well as along the same manufacturing assembly lines as the current DVD. Those two reasons alone should have pulled it through. When your current DVD player plays its last DVD, the logical choice would be to step up to HD-DVD player and support your entire standard DVD collection as well as putting you in the HI-DEF level. But NO, it seems the money behind the Blue Ray disc won out and now you will need two distinct players to continue to access your current library and to advance to the next level. Does it make sense ? Will standard DVD players be phased out ? Some day I am sure it will. Take a look around and see if you can purchase a standard VCR or Mini Disc Player or a Reel to Reel tape deck, you will have to search high and low. Those formats have been phased out and supplanted by new and better formats, even though I still know folks that still have and use them today for one reason or another.

    The thing that was keeping the major studio heads up in recent months, was that nether of the formats could take off fast enough and hopefully before consumers found a new medium to supplant their purchases in either of the High Definition DVD formats. You see, 50% of the movie studio's income comes from DVD sales and the other from Box office and other sources. So, the DVD is a big thing, even though it peaked in 2004 and has been level ever since. So the format war was effectively slowing down the process of getting the consumer to spend on the next level of disc and soon, because the next predicted source will be downloaded movies directly from the computer, their time was "Timing Out" so to speak.  At this moment, the next hi-def market remained untapped and might likely be a shorter run then desired for the studios. They wanted the format war to cease so that the timing of the next big thing, gave them a span to sell. That span is shorter due to the time it took the format war to end.

Now lets talk about what is left. The Blue Ray disc is a hi definition format. It will provide a full Hi definition 1080P picture to your display device, providing your display devise is capable of delivering the additional resolution and whether you can see a difference.. The key words here are "capable" , and "see" that being the capability or native screen resolution of your display device, and also the distance you are viewing from. Both play a key role in whether you obtain any advantage in the extra cost of a Blue Ray disc over a standard DVD. The ultimate return of your hard spent dollar is if those two factors are both satisfied. It is a harder sell to convince the consumer to spend the extra cost of a Blue Ray which is now approximately $30.00 each when compared to the cost of a standard first run movie at $15 -$20 on standard DVD if the conditions are not met. On top of that the potential audience for standard DVD is everyone that owns a TV, the potential audience for Blue-Ray is limited to household that has a High Definition TV.. 

Comment .....   We will know soon if the whole process is going to take off. The economy, gas prices, food prices and other underlying costs in today's world are going to play a part on the spending of the consumer. That extra spending might prolong the take-off of the format. Keep in tune, we will have more on the format sales in the coming months. No excuses, no format war, just how well it is accepted.

For information leading up to this article see:

    HD vs. Blue-Ray   April 2006

    Beyond the Blue Ray   February 2005

    Blue Laser vs DMD     July 2004

    BattleLines are Formed    February 2004

    Next Generation DVD    December 2002

    DVD - New Standard    May 2002

    DVD - Blue/Out - Red/IN    March 2002

    Birth of the Blues    February 2002

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