"Blu-ray is dead" proclaims Robin Harris.
 

Just Curious to see what you guys think of this. I have changed my mind ever so slightly and am now possibly leaning toward the purchase of a Blu-player sometime in the future. (See the Southland tales thread for my opinions.)
But this article scares me. Digital Bits denies it but yet they dont dispute the facts Harris writes about.
And again dont pay attention to my signature. I'm not hating on Blu here.


http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365&nl.e539:

"Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product.

With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it.

16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose?

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
Delusional Sony exec Rick Clancy needs to put the crack pipe down and really look at the market dynamics.

In a nutshell: consumers drive the market and they don’t care about Blu-ray’s theoretical advantages. Especially during a world-wide recession.

Remember Betamax? SACD? Minidisk? Laser Disk? DVD-Audio? There are more losers than winners in consumer storage formats.

It’s all about volume. 8 months after Toshiba threw in the towel, Blu-ray still doesn’t have it.

The Blu-ray Disc Association doesn’t get it
$150 Blu-ray disc players are a good start, but it won’t take Blu-ray over the finish line. The BDA is stuck in the past with a flawed five-year-old strategy.

The original game plan
Two things killed the original strategy. First the fight with HD DVD stalled the industry for two years. Initial enthusiasm for high definition video on disk was squandered.

Second, the advent of low cost up-sampling DVD players dramatically cut the video quality advantage of Blu-ray DVDs. Suddenly, for $100, your average consumer can put good video on their HDTV using standard DVDs. When Blu-ray got started no one dreamed this would happen.

Piggies at the trough
The Blu-ray Disc Association hoped for a massive cash bonanza as millions of consumers discovered that standard DVDs looked awful on HDTV. To cash in they loaded Blu-ray licenses with costly fees. Blu-ray doesn’t just suck for consumers: small producers can’t afford it either.

According to Digital Content Producer Blu-ray doesn’t cut it for business:

* Recordable discs don’t play reliably across the range of Blu-ray players - so you can’t do low-volume runs yourself.
* Service bureau reproduction runs $20 per single layer disc in quantities of 300 or less.
* Hollywood style printed/replicated Blu-ray discs are considerably cheaper once you reach the thousand unit quantity: just $3.50 per disc.
* High-quality authoring programs like Sony Blu-print or Sonic Solutions Scenarist cost $40,000.
* The Advanced Access Content System - the already hacked DRM - has a one-time fee of $3000 plus a per project cost of almost $1600 plus $.04 per disk. And who defines “project?”
* Then the Blu-ray disc Association charges another $3000 annually to use their very exclusive - on 4% of all video disks! - logo.

That’s why you don’t see quirky indie flicks on Blu-ray. Small producers can’t afford it - even though they shoot in HDV and HD.

The Storage Bits take
Don’t expect Steve Jobs to budge from his “bag of hurt” understatement. Or Final Cut Studio support for Blu-ray. I suspect that Jobs is using his Hollywood clout from his board seat on Disney and his control of iTunes to try to talk sense to the BDA.

But the BDA won’t budge. They, like so much of Hollywood, are stuck in the past.

A forward looking strategy would include:

* Recognition that consumers don’t need Blu-ray. It is a nice-to-have and must be priced accordingly.
* Accept the money spent on Blu-ray is gone and will never earn back the investment. Then you can begin thinking clearly about how to maximize Blu-ray penetration.
* The average consumer will probably pay $50 more for a Blu-ray player that is competitive with the average up-sampling DVD player. Most of the current Blu-ray players are junk: slow, feature-poor and way over-priced.
* Disk price margins can’t be higher than DVDs and probably should be less. The question the studios need to ask is: “do we want to be selling disks in 5 years?” No? Then keep it up. Turn distribution over to your very good friends at Comcast, Apple and Time Warner. You’ll be like Procter & Gamble paying Safeway to stock your products.
* Fire all the market research firms telling you how great it is going to be. They are playing you. Your #1 goal: market share. High volume is your only chance to earn your way out of this mess and keep some control of your distribution.

Time is short. Timid incrementalism will kill you.

Like Agent Smith delivering the bad news to a complacent cop: “No, Lieutenant, your men are already dead.”"

I agree with some points but not all. The biggest hurdle BD faces this Holiday season is the poor economy...and unless they get BD software down in price I don't see it being a smash hit. They finally managed to get players down to an aceptable price, but software is still priced a bit too high - especially for catalog releases.

Oh, and Southland Tales better be good. Just got the BD and will be giving it a spin this weekend.

I refuse to believe a future with only digital distribution.

I disagree with this. If anything, I think the formats were launched before there was any real enthusiasm. Although the number of people I know with Blu-ray is about as low as it was when the format first launched (in my circle of not-Internet-friends and co-workers, only one other person has a Blu-ray deck, and that's a PS3 purchased as much with gaming in mind as Blu-ray), but awareness and interest seem to be much higher now.

Hmmm? I spent $120 on a pretty nice upconverting player three years ago. I don't think this is unexpected at all.

I dunno. Maybe on the hardware side. There are plenty of small studios releasing Blu-ray discs, though, so I don't think it's cost-prohibitive.

So go for a run of a thousand, save $500, and toss the extra 700 discs in the garbage. :)

Well, I don't think you see too many quirky indie flicks because it's a niche within a niche. There are some, but I think that number will grow with the install base.

I'm not sure I follow the logic. They say it's not mass-market, so that would seem to indicate that the format shouldn't have a mass-market price. The argument is that it's a premium product but shouldn't be priced at a premium...?

To a very limited point, I agree with the overall argument -- I don't think Blu-ray will ever be the dominant format. Just because something only has a fraction of the marketshare doesn't mean it's a failure, though.

I think someone else "is still smoking dope" and its not the BDA.

He's wrong. Dead wrong.

So is this guy, Jesus Christ?

I dont think one mans opinion is really going to throw this either way -- I enjoy Blu-rays and they are for my budget.

Nuff' said!

i agree with this point. the price on both new releases and catalog titles is still too high w/r/t SD.

Paging Pro-B...Pro-B please report to this thread immediately to refute said claim that "Blu-ray is dead."

:)

speaking of Pro-B, Does anyone know how many BD's he currently owns?

I wouldn't trust his opinion. Bebe's Kids was awful.

Another doom and gloom blog. Sales are increasing and player pricing is going down. Similar pace to that older disc format called DVD.

In case anyone doesn't know, this "blogger" has been selling/marketing data storage for over 20 years. I wonder why someone in that business would say digital downloads are the future?

Like I and others have said several months ago, Blu-ray is going to slow down because of the economy, but by no means will imply it is dying or dead. It just means the format is going to slow down like every other sector in the economy.

BUT.

It is possible we might see strong sales, regardless of the economy. It's possible we may have a consumer market who's been laid off or cut from the payroll, but have enough money to spend on a Blu-ray player and some movies to alleviate the stress. It's a possible holiday surprise. We'll just have to see.

A world-wide recession is going to cut into EVERYONE's pockets, not just Blu-ray product. Since this guy mentions "theoretical" advantages of HD, I'm going to say he's using his own theoretical bias which hasn't been tested in reality other than his own website where he can blabber endlessly.

Blu-ray--HD--does have advantages. I will easily admit we have transfers which could be better, but this is the minority of releases. Same with my experience in owning over 260 HD DVD discs. The resolution is easily a noticeable difference on most titles. The caveat is you should have a decent size HDTV to observe the differences between SD DVD and HD discs.

What this guy doesn't realize is Blu-ray is still a young format. It's infantile compared to DVD. Technically, I'd say Blu-ray began when HD DVD was officially out of the picture, because you had many more fence-sitting HD enthusiasts waiting for one format. While I didn't agree with one format, it is what it is.

Give Blu-ray some time, thanks. This guy sounds like somebody who shoots his wad in less than 40-seconds with a hot chick. He wants everything NOW. He doesn't believe in gradual market expanding vectors.

As to the small-time producer, well he can still make DVDs. If he can't sell over 300 discs, then I probably don't want to watch his stuff anyway. Besides, think about it. You don't want to release your small-time project on Blu-ray first. You release it on DVD on the cheap, make sure you have a DEMAND, then put your highly-publicized material on Blu-ray.

The guy who writes this article is mostly extremely stupid. Can't really phrase it any other way. Except for maybe a Digital Dumbass. A few things I agree with, but they are generally known facts, but most everything else is just illogical and hasn't been thought out.

Prices are dropping but you can't expect a brand new release for $10. Just isn't going to happen right now. What I do, is take advantage of B2G1 sales where you can average about $11.50 per disc. You won't get the latest titles, but you'll get some really good favorites to build your collection.

If you remove the title and the first sentence, and start reading this article from the second sentence... I'm much more prone to believe this. I'm not drinking any blu koolaid here. I'm open to thinking Blu-ray will not be a DVD replacement soon, but a niche product used by 20-25% of folks for the next 2-3 years.

I still firmly believe it's a little early to tell, though. Holiday 2009 will be the real test, that's when the adoption curve will show us a mountain or not -- and there will be no hiding from the numbers.

Why am I downbeat on 2008 holidays? A big indicator for me is the recent Sony forecast numbers. This holiday is already looking less than stellar for them. Wide cuts in their forecast, including lowered Blu-Ray stand-alone sales estimates, slashed by 12% based on pre-holiday performance.

As for those who scoff at upconverting DVD players being a surprise to the CE companies... it must have been for Sony. One of the few tech items with an uptick in forecast were SD DVD players, UP 5% in the forecast.

Clearly Blu-ray is selling more than last year and who is to say what's up with PS3 use as a player. PS3s are a fantastic Blu-ray player. Blu-ray is a great format. Not in debate. Is it going to be the next Laserdisc or the next DVD, though?

Take a look at the numbers yourself, July's forecast (fct) is right next to the current, adjusted forecast:
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/fina...08q2_eleki.pdf

I say if you look at those downticks on Blu-ray hardware and can rationalize them into Blu-ray World Domination... there may be some koolaid in your cup.

-beebs

sorry, I don't know who Robin Harrs is.

Too many people are now vested in Blu-ray to switch to a new format eventually, and many have and are switching from HD-DVD. Digital downloads can be extremely popular if done right, but it will never be a replacement for physical media. If anybody is at all interested in securing their favorite films in high definition, Blu-ray is the way to go. Niche market or not, it's only a 'niche' to those that want to upgrade picture quality, and as the only real option out there right now for high def discs, Blu-ray isn't going to go anywhere, and it's popularity can only go up over time as more and more people buy HD sets.

What's interesting is Robin mentions HD downloading, but then in another sentence, says upsampling players are taking a bite out of HD in general. So, which is it. Both? Ok, well, here's the problem. Suppose you initially download an HD movie. Then, you decide you want to build a physical collection because it looks darn good...

HD downloads can only help Blu-ray sales in the long-term, IMO. Sure, you will have those who try HD downloading and won't see any difference, but they wouldn't have bought Blu-ray movies in the first place, which is why they are trying the HD download option.

So, if you come to the conclusion HD downloads look great, you'll get more interested in HD in general and will want to look into having a collection for yourself to own versus always downloading the movie, which may not download perfectly every single time.

if Robert Harris said this I would be concerned
Robbin Harris ... who cares

Tell that to my wallet.

One thing that isn't helping, IMHO, is cases where prices are going up. Warner's digibooks, while they may be liked by collectors, push the price up by $5. Asking people to spend a street price of nearly $25 (more at B&M stores) for a catalog title, no matter how high in stature, is going to turn people off. Disney's decision to charge an extra $5 for the inclusion of a digital copy, while only affecting one title so far, won't help either. Fox continues to charge too much as well, even if they are making progress.

The talk of Robin Harris reminds me ... is House Party slated to come to BD? :)

Has anyone noticed recent commercials for new releases mentions and shows Blu-ray first, then DVD? Yup, used to be the other way around. That damn Blu-ray is just dying away.

I saw several James Bond on Blu-ray commercials during the World Series. Seemed like a pretty high profile place to advertise, although not many people watched this Series, relatively speaking.

I see Blu-ray going the way of DVD Audio and SACD.

yep, high def