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Today I’ve read two articles about Blu-ray, one CNET article describing why Blu-ray will succeed, and a reply article from CrunchGear tearing the CNET one apart. Or at least trying.
To make it all clear from the beginning of, I own a Playstation 3 and would describe myself as a fan of Blu-ray.
1. Digital downloads will not eliminate the need for discs anytime soon.
CrunchGear goes out saying “A high-def movie with perfectly good compression takes up perhaps 10GB”. As of now that’s balonie. The movies released onto Blu-ray now is on 50 gig discs. To download or stream this kind of quality will be impossible for most of the world the next ten years. Already ISPs are complaining about the amount of bandwidth used by their users, and they even throttle parts of it. If ISPs are expected to expand or be able to provide these kind of speeds I’m afraid we’ll end up in a net neutrality feud again. They will expect and demand money to evolve the current bandwith situation, and they will see prioritising traffic as a way to get it.
Another obstacle is the services. If digital downloads should eliminate discs soon they need services to provide the whole market with digital downloads. Not like today where only the main markets get to download movies from Xbox marketplace or Playstation store. The easiest way of doing this would of course be for the movie studios to stop being restrictive by selling rights to each country, and instead participate on a platform where the whole world could access and download the movies. I don’t see that coming.
Going back to my first argument, quality will only be more important in the future. With HD programming coming to more and more countries throughout the world, and the size of the televisions growing every year, people will start to notice the difference between a mediocre high defintion stream and the picture from a Blu-ray disc.
2. Having one clear standard is a big advantage.
Yes, big advantage. Buy a Blu-ray disc and it will play on all Blu-ray players you get to buy nowadays. Sadly some of the first Blu-ray players will have trouble with playback on a handful of discs.
3. Blu-ray isn’t going to be replaced by another disc format anytime soon.
My guess is that Blu-ray will be the last disc format we’ll ever see for video.
4. Prices for large-screen HDTVs will continue to drop.
Yes, bigger television will give better detail and will require higher bitrates.
5. Prices for Blu-ray players will continue to drop.
They have to get cheaper for people to buy them, and Sony would like people to buy Blu-ray players.
6. Prices for Blu-ray discs will drop to near DVD price levels.
Hopefully this will happen faster than with the DVDs, which took over a decade to get reasonably priced.
7. Sony will sell lots of PlayStation 3 game consoles.
8. Sony can’t afford to have Blu-ray fail.
9. Sony and its partners will figure out a way to have Blu-ray resonate with the public.
Yes, Sony will have to make an effort to give Blu-ray the status it deserves.
I do believe that Blu-ray discs will be around for a while, but I am fully aware of how it will end. Digital downloads will be the thing to kill Blu-ray, but as I’ve described in this post the reason for having a high definition disc format is to provide excellent video and sound quality. When digital downloads can give me the same or better video and sound quality, I’ll jump ship with no worries. Until then I’ll stick with having to walk to my PS3 and feed it a disc.
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