Which might make sense, but Sony doesn't have a standalone UHD Blu-ray player.

They have one, it just hasn't hit the market yet.

They will soon enough.

A little, but not nearly as much as the PS2 helped with the success of the DVD.
No, bottom line is that unlike the previous generations, people just don't want to bother with physical media - the trends going from PS2 to PS3 to now bear this out. Convenience trumps quality. DVD was more convenient then, and streaming is more convenient now, with almost no concern given to streaming's inferior quality.

I love Netflix streaming, it's saved me a fortune on kids DVDs (which they don't even release season of) and even tv shows. However they don't have a lot of recent releases, so do people really rent streaming movies for whatever ridiculous price Sony and Microsoft charge?

If by "soon enough" you mean "possibly as late as April 2017," then yes:
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/1387...ear-until-2017
Sony could potentially completely miss the 2016 Christmas season.

As I recall, Blu-ray adoption was heavily tilted towards owners of the PS3 from November 2006 up until HD DVD called it quits in January 2008. I seem to recall some articles/blogs/whatever saying that although each average individual who owned a PS3 bought less discs than the average individual with an HD DVD player, the sheer number of PS3 owners was enough for Blu-ray to outsell HD DVD disc sales every single week or month. I remember when Transformers hit HD DVD (and not Blu-ray), it was the #1 title that week, but Blu-ray had a massive 2 for 1 sale (or something like that) which allowed the total discs sold that week to just barely outsell Transformers (or maybe it was a complete blow-out... but I remember that was the only time HD DVD had a chance of outselling Blu-ray, and it didn't end up working out for HD DVD).

Anyway... all I'm saying is... PS3 was definitely the biggest factor in that format war, in my opinion. It was cheaper than all the other Blu-ray players and it was better and faster than most players released in the following years.

I was never convinced that the PS3 needed to use Blu-ray discs for the games, though. Cross-platform titles were on Blu-ray on PS3 and DVD on Xbox 360, but (almost always) the 360 games ran 'better' even if they had to come on multiple DVDs. Sony's exclusive games may have made good use of the extra space.

But Adam is wrong about one thing... I think. PS3, from launch, always forced installations onto the internal HDD before you could play the games, just like the PS4 and Xbox One do now. Early XBox 360 games let you play the game "from the disc" but in the last few years before this generation, almost every game required installs for better performance. Luckily, both systems now have a "ready to play" feature when a certain percentage is installed instead of being forced to wait for 100% installation, but depending on how the game utilizes that, it's not always functional.

Yep, I was helping a friend move his TV/entertainment centre to the basement this weekend and had a conversation with his wife. She said there was no point in hooking up the BD player as they haven't used it in a couple years. She just streams everything now. She didn't understand why people still bothered with discs... they took too much space, get lost or damaged because of her kids and browsing through them to find something to watch was a pain. She loves just sitting on her couch and having a world of movies available to her at the touch of a button. She also said because of streaming she's watched movies that she wouldn't have known about otherwise - because it's all there at her fingertips. Plus it's much cheaper to stream.

When I told her that some people prefer the higher quality of physical media, she was confused and said she never noticed a difference in quality between the disc and Netflix.

There are millions and millions of people who feel the same way. To them, there is absolutely no advantage to buying discs. It's a really tough sell.

There are so many 4K TVs on the market now, including a bunch from Sony... yet they're taking this long to release a UHD stand-alone player and aren't going to include UHD-BD in the PS4 Pro? Does this sound like a company who has a lot of confidence in the format? There's no way to spin it... and their releasing some movies on UHD-BD does little to suggest otherwise.

Yeah, Sony is messing up left and right with 4k. So much for them wanting the Playstation to be the center media hub of people's living rooms. Overall, it's taken way too long to get UHD players on the market. I would have thought by this time (and the upcoming holidays) we'd be seeing 6-8 players at the very least. I guess not. And now Microsoft is one of the big UHD players. I hope they eat up Sony's profit line, which will be fairly easy to do if Sony drags ass on releasing their standalone players after the holidays. Which means every XBox One S sold will be one less sale for Sony.

Sony took an inordinate amount of time to finally get their first standalone Blu-ray player on the market as well, for what it's worth. They turned it around faster than they are with UHD BD, whenever that first player winds up launching, but they seem content to let other folks be first to bat.

Not "some movies"; more than anyone else. They're also moving forward with at least one standalone player. Does that sound like a company who has no confidence in the format?

I mean, I don't think Sony believes that Ultra HD Blu-ray will set the world aflame and immediately cement itself as the go-to format for consuming media. I'm sure they have realistically modest expectations. There's a healthy middle ground between cheerleading and that whole "See? See? Not even Sony cares!" mindset. If they thought it was a dead end, they wouldn't bother at all. They certainly wouldn't be the only ones sitting out on UHD BD at present.

I personally believe it's just a matter of cost, be it dollars-and-cents or some sort of opportunity cost. The numbers didn't work with UHD BD while including the features they felt like they had to have, so out it went.

Mandatory installs were very common, but it wasn't routinely like the PS4 where every byte of data on the disc is copied to the hard drive. For instance, Resistance 2 only required a 350 meg install, and there was definitely more on the disc than that.

Right. I'm expecting early next year, although I'd be surprised if it were that far into 2017. Hopefully we'll hear more on Wednesday during Sony's presser at CEDIA. There are murmurs that they'll be showing off two players, but I'm taking that with a few grains of salt.

I think you may have misread my post. I said nothing about HD-dvd. I said the PS2 (TWO), helped in DVD sales (not HD, but plain DVD) much more than PS3 helped in blu-ray sales. Part of it due to the dwindling interest in physical media going from the PS2 to PS3.

Well, if they aren't including it in their new system, and there is no reason to for Sony, then that pretty much answers the question, doesn't it?

It does seem strange that they are so Pro UHD on the software front, but lagging so far on the hardware front. And when they get an opportunity to put out a player, they choose not to.

Well, in that case they already had a blueray player out that they were trying to push, no? Granted, it was a gaming system.

They are putting out a player.

No, it doesn't.

This is debatable, especially since the Xbox could also play DVDs, once you got the remote control add-on. At least in the US, PS2 may not have had that much impact on DVD sales.
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/44-mov...g-dvd-use.html

By the time PS2 was released in 2000, the DVD format had been around for 3 years, had already killed competitor DIVX, and players were already averaging $200, less than the PS2. It may have been the first DVD player for many gamers, but non-gamers weren't getting a PS2 just to play DVDs.
http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=497


This is in contrast to Blu-ray where the format was only a few months old (June 2006) when the PS3 was released in Nov 2006, and it was the cheapest player by a significant margin. People were inclined to get a PS3 as their Blu-ray player, even if they weren't gamers.


DVD was a much bigger success, but I think the PS2's influence on that success was much smaller than the PS3's influence on Blu-ray winning out over HD-DVD in the "format war."

Yes, but Sony released the PS3 - which played Blu-Ray. And it's been said that Sony's delay of releasing a stand-alone player was to help to push the sales of PS3s. I know a bunch of people who bought a PS3 soley for the BD player. This time around Sony hasn't released a UHD-BD player in any form and won't have one until a year after the fact. So there's definitely a big difference this time around.


Yes, just like Sony released the more SACDs than anyone else... until they barely released any at all.

[/quote]They're also moving forward with at least one standalone player. Does that sound like a company who has no confidence in the format?[/quote]

No, it doesn't sound like confidence. It sounds like waiting it out and testing the waters and gauging the formats traction based on what's happening with other manufacturers. It sounds like very cautiously hedging their bets.

Just looking at it from a realistic perspective. IMO, Sony's actions are showing me that they don't even have modest expectations. It really seems to me that they're seeing this is a small niche - where even Blu-Ray would be considered mass-market appeal by comparison.

The fact that there are many others that are sitting it out - and not just the company that pushed their previous iteration of the format quite heavily kind of proves the point, no?

To me UHD-BD is a lot closer to SACD than it is to BD with regards to adoption. And from someone who actually owns a SACD player and SACDS, that's not a good thing.

Yeah, I rambled and threw in mentions of HD DVD. But jjcool said:
You responded with:

When I say I remember it differently, I just mean that I think the PS3 helped push Blu-ray adoption enough to kill off HD DVD, and that was as important (more important?) than PS2 helping DVD. That said, I wasn't paying attention in the first couple years of DVD, so I can't say definitively which had a bigger impact. I didn't own a PS2 until the slim one came out. One could say that DVD was headed for the popularity it had with or without the PS2... PS2 just made it quicker.

In other words, saying PS3 helped Blu-ray win over HD DVD "a little" is a vast understatement.

I think he means that Sony passed on the opportunity to include a player in the PS4 Pro, releasing a UHD Blu-ray player now, instead of waiting for the consumer products division to come out with theirs. It's certainly a less bullish move than they could've done.

I was one of 'em! I didn't even have any expectation that I'd game on the PS3, although it wound up being my platform of choice.

The Sony of 2006 would probably have put an Ultra HD Blu-ray player in the PS4 Pro.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Sony of 2016 would not have included a Blu-ray player in the PS3 if they could do it all over again.

That's part of what I'm getting at when I push back on the "confidence" argument. Sony deciding that Ultra HD Blu-ray playback ultimately doesn't make sense for the PS4 Pro does not inherently indicate a lack of confidence. If they had included Ultra HD Blu-ray playback, that wouldn't necessarily be a vote of supreme confidence either.

Are you arguing that the PS4 Pro decisions was solely about what's best for the console, not considering the rest of Sony and their investments in the particular media?

I'm still not sure that not including UHD Blu-ray in the PS4 Pro was the best move for the console. 4K UHD at the moment is niche, and the PS4 Pro is designed to market that niche, but it excludes a major source of 4K content that many 4K TV owners would like to have. I could see many of them picking up a XB1S instead and/or waiting for Scorpio. I mean, if a 4K TV owner doesn't care about image quality enough to want UHD Blu-ray, why would they care enough to by a PS4 Pro?

That's what I recall about 2006 Sony, was that the PS3 was being promoted as a full High definition media hub for movies and games. That never came to fruition, and combined with the age of streaming, they just don't see the value anymore in the promotion of physical media. Yet they keep pimping 4k. But there still are people who are more inclined to buy a PS or XBox if it has the capability, compared to standalone players. They're the same size, and price. Ask most people what they'd prefer, a gaming system that does full media, games, and streaming, or a player that plays certain media and has a few streaming apps.

I think Sony is a more conservative company now than they were ten years ago, and I don't think they'd be as willing to take a steeper loss on a console or raise the price to something potentially offputting to support UHD BD.

Even if including UHD BD would benefit other divisions of Sony, I do think that Sony Interactive Entertainment is in a position to push back if that support would negatively affect their bottom line.

I agree.

Well the question is if the person doesn't care about either, why did he/she buy a 4K TV to begin with? There are still plenty of 1080p TVs out there at this point, so it's not like they had no choice.

In any case, these are really two separate markets with different desires - although there's definitely some overlap.

Hardcore gamers are always seeking out visual improvements to their gaming experience, but also framerate/performance improvements. Maybe to them 1080p is good enough for movies - it certainly looks pretty damned good anyway. I know hardcore gamers who are perfectly happy with the reduced quality of Netflix for movies but are upgrading their PCs and consoles all the time to get the best visual and performance improvement.

I'm sure this definitely plays a factor.

Sony's been in financial troubles for years now and are still trying to dig themselves out. They probably don't want to risk hurting one of the few divisions that's actually making them money.

I remember a time when you would go to a store and see half the electronics would be a Sony brand. Now companies like Samsung and LG are eating their lunch big time and relegated Sony products to a much smaller portion of space.