That's right both BluRay players and disks will reduce to the point where they are the same or similar price to DVDs and then DVD players will not sell and will be followed by the disks themselves. The timescales for this are not clear but it will happen.

I agree .

Once it is possible to download titles with decent quality - either Bluray or dvd quality - and in minutes rather than hours or days I think downloading will be a good alternative for those who rent- but lets be honest here - full quality in reasonable times may be years away yet.

But there are more collectors than there ever was with VHS so I believe the market for buying a hard copy is in no danger at all.

Even when the download and burn to disc option becomes more widely available I still think collectors will want the official release .

I'm wondering if you meant that VCD and LD were the old formats or the improvement from VHS.

They certainly didnt move things on in this country

In the UK both formats were total flops.

VCD as it never even offered quality equal to that of VHS and LD because tightarse Brits not bothered about quality failed to buy into it so Hollywood ignored it in the UK after a few attempts to get it off the ground.

At the moment Bluray is in the same position as LD was but with better studio support.

I dont forsee BD ever taking over from DVD but rather than be defunct by 2012 I would see it perhaps getting an equal share of the market.

Until someone does a "Video Collection" (1986) move and makes BD very cheap I think dvd will continue to be the choice of many who find its quality good enough - even on their HD tv's

Once Blu-ray takes a certain share of the market, they will push it more with exclusives and earlier release dates than the DVD equivalent.

BluRay players will become as cheap as DVD players and so the supermarkets etc will swap their cheap DVD players for cheap BluRay players since the Blu Ray players will do both formats. Once that happens there will be much fewer new releases in DVD and BluRay will become the norm - though obviously there is a great catalogue of DVDs out there that will remain.

That's my prediction - only time will tell as to what actually happens. Certainly however there's no technical reason why a BluRay player in 3 years time should be more expensive than a DVD player.

I agree partly.

Its obvious that as long as the Bluray technology is allowed to be licenced to the el cheapo supermarket companies then their budget players should move the market.

Remember it was Sony's refusal to licence out Betamax to budget brands that held Beta back

However I think it will be a long time after that before there is a Bluray only release - certainly with a Hollywood movie on it.

The first signs will be when a Bluray release appears weeks or months before the DVD version but I think piracy fears will make that unlikely also unless its music or other non movie content where they can afford to risk it

If Blu-Ray players become as cheap as DVD, ill look forward to buying one in Superdrug for £9.99 (the one im using)!! or £15 in Tesco/Asda!!!

You'll have to wait 2 or 3 years though it won't happen very soon but it will happen. (Unless Sony play silly buggers with the licensing).

I've not ploughed through the whole thread in detail but predictions of the death of blue ray within four years seem 'hasty' to say the least.

Somebody claimed that producing HD material was expensive. Well it's not. I can make you a five minute corporate video in HD for under £1000 and during the summer did a 25 minute public information film which weighed in at under £10K complete with well-know (read expensive) former BBC news presenter who accounted for 1/5 of that budget.

In TV terms these numbers are absolute chicken feed...

Personally I've not shot a frame of SD material in over two years now. And up until February of this year my problem wasn't producing HD material, but distributing it. We couldn't recommend to clients that they buy into EITHER system for playback. NOR were we keen on doubling the cost of authoring and duplication.

And right the way up the 'food chain' the situation was similar. From small corporate producers to Hollywood studios. That format war was killing the HD market.

It is just eight months since that war ended and we were able to say to our clients "this is what you need for playback"

Already the cost of players is tumbling and the titles in the shops are growing. Short programmes can be produced VERY economically in AVCHD (Blu-Ray) compatible format utilising normal DVD media. My own company has three short travelogues in production meant for release on Blu-Ray. And I'm aware of many other producers of 'sell thru' programmes who are making the move....

As for the own/download debate.... Well people in effect 'downloaded' TV from a central source long before the home VCR was a reality. It's called broadcasting. And the advent of the VCR simply opened up another means of distribution.

The infrastructure simply does not exist for downloading to become a 'universal' means of distribution. Nor is it likely to exist any time soon. Here, for instance, in a semi-rural village just eight miles west of the Scottish capital there is no cable service. Telephone lines are antiquated... Subscribers struggle to attain broadband speeds of over 1Mb.... We're hardly 'backwater' territory. Indeed the demographics of the place place it in the affluent commuter belt. Yet I can't see communications to the village improving for at least a decade. And this will be just one of many thousands of places in a similar situation throughout the UK.

Besides, stewardship issues means that even where material is obtained by one means it is often archived by another. Then there are issues of possession. Some people DO like to 'OWN' the material.....

Effectively the format is just eight months old. And for sure there are mistakes that could be made that will damage it. But to predict its demise? Unrealistic in my view.

Sanyo made Betamax as well as Sony, as did Toshiba, presumably under licence from Sony?.

The demise of Betamax was mainly due to the rental market in the UK, all the large rental companies rented out only VHS, because most of them were owned by Thorn - who owned Ferguson, who only sold VHS (badged JVC's).

This gave a massively high artifical boost to VHS - as a company we found more people bought Betamax, and more rented VHS - mostly because of cheap Sanyo Betamax machines.

I agree, although for a lot of people like myself, they'll need to be region free on at least the SD part or they'll be useless for over half my collection as they're r1 and r4 as there's very few titles I'd double dip on for a BD version and have lots of old TV shows that won't benefit from BD anyway in reality BD will most likely need a region free option as well as i can't see me going back to hacked to buggery versions of films now I'm used to getting uncut ones from the US.

Here in Ontario Canada,Walmart have a new blu ray dvd player for $199 thats flying off the shelves and many discs for $18.98

That's certainly my recollection. I still have the Sanyo VTC5000 I bought in 1983 which, at the time, was the cheapest VCR on the market IIRC.

My interest was in recording programmes off-air, the Sanyo replacing a Heath-Robinson combination of industrial U-Matic VCR and home-built tuner. But I certainly remember by then Betamax was NOT the format of choice if you were into renting movies....


Excellent; watch that space in your local ASDA then.....

I can't see how Blu-Ray can fail. It also surprises me that we can be discussing BD vs DVD when one is HD and the other SD.

HD is the way forward (just as we have all now embraced widescreen video) so DVD must eventually lose sales. It's nothing to be sad about, and I am sure people will still buy DVDs when they become dirt cheap (back catalogue) or are produced from material that was never actually in HD format.

But, you'll be playing those DVDs on your BD player!

Sorry to bump this thread, but as I only got my HDTV and BD player about a month ago, I thought that, having had a chance to experience it, I would add a few more thoughts.

Against a DVD played on a DVD player and displayed on a CRT, BD shows a clearly discernible improvement in picture quality.

However, against an upscaled DVD displayed on my HDTV, the improvement is not so great, and at the moment, I do not feel that the improvement in picture quality justifies the premium that is payable on BD.

Therefore, until the prices of BD come down to a the same level as DVD, I will stick to watching upscaled DVD.

Of course it won't fail. Blu-ray has won the so called format war and studios will at a point in time stop producing SD DVDs, forcing people onto Blu-ray if they still wish to own a particular movie that is released.

Nonsense

Studios are not going to stop making dvd's when they sell 100 times as many discs as Bluray.

The studios want to make money so bringing out a Bluray exclusive that 99% of the people cannot play really makes commercial sense

Perhaps in a year or two Sony will stagger a release giving BD a head start to see how it goes but they sure wont be stopping dvd's for a very long time - and thats not even taking into account all the non movie dvd's out there - most of which wont even benefit from Bluray release as an HD master cant be created

The IPhone, ITouch and the Blackberry are essentially PDAs. They have just converged with other technologies.

With BluRay as the premium format the margins are greater and the Studios make more money per disc sold - therefore they will want to promote BluRay sales at the expense of DVD sales.

Additionally, their economies of scale will give them greater profits if they only have to support production of one format rather than 2.

Those 2 factors almost inevitably mean that the ultimate game plan will be BluRay only. It's not going to happen next week, or even next year, but it will happen.

Regards,

Lt. Dang

In the next couple of years that's correct but after that BD and DVD players will cost the same which means nobody will make plain DVD players - once that happens the studios will phase out production of DVDs as they won't want to do both processes.

I think the downturn will slow the process, but things will move towards Blu-ray over the next 2-3 years. As the diffference in quality,extras etc is not as great from VHS to DVD it will take time. Widescreen look a long time to happen and is still not complete. DVDs where selling very well when the players still cost over £100, and it wont be long before you can get a fairly good big screen HDTV and BR player for under £500.

I don't see SD DVD dying out for many years yet. As we all move to digital TV on Freeview and people replace the old CRT with a new LCD/Plasma its natural that they will get a BR player too.

I don't think downloads will kill BR. Most ISPs have a cap of 40GB or less and with iPlayer and other downloads you would not get many films a month and would miss out on the extras (although I admit I harldy look at them). Personally I use most of my bandwidth downloading HD TV series. I do notice the loss in quality on highly compessed HD downloads. For TV this does not bother me but for films I want the best.

No matter how good compression gets when the screen gets busy you are going to throw away entropy at the sort of bitrate the downloads run at, and glitches often cause lipsync errors from what i have seen.

When you have a recession, people don't all stop spending any money at all - they prioritise.

So, pubs still have people drinking.
People will still buy a snazzy new mobile (it's the main thing they probably own and use every day).
People will still want to watch films and TV (and may do more at home than going out).

The cost of the chipset in a Blu-Ray player (or recorder) can't be that much higher than a normal DVD player - marketing sets the pricing. If demand falls, I think we'll see price cuts and manufacturers building more budget models. In fact, once it becomes mainstream it will be more about sub-£50 players than the high-end ones for early adopters and enthusiasts.

That's not to say it won't make sense to continue making models that cost £500 or £1000 with style as a priority and a few more features that will appeal to the people who aren't in the slightest bit affected by the current financial situation and just want to show off something nice in their Kensington/Docklands apartment.

The fact is, high-def will take off when people SEE the quality for themselves, or hear from others about how lame current TV is in comparison, and Blu-Ray is one of the ways to give people that material besides live broadcasting or downloading.

There is no doubt that BD player (& disc Prices) will fall as economy with scale will force it But remember these players are much closer to PC's than DVD players so the Chipsets are considerably more as they employ a processor in addition. Also Sony hold the rights on the Blue Laser which they developed for BD, If Sony reduce the cost of the licence I think we will then see the Chinese enter into this area with gusto which should reduce the prices.

Like you I really cant see HD Downloads making any great impact for the reasons you state.

If anything goes wrong with your sky HD box you would be much better off upgrading it yourself. A WD caviar SATA drive for server apps of say 500GB would give you increased reliability over what you have as standard is increased user capacity, quieter running and so easy to fit for anyone with a set of half decent screwdrivers that i wouldnt bother getting the sky man out. mine fell over and was back up and running better than before for only a few quid within hours !
if you are really concerned about loosing cherished recordings then you need to archive them off the box but that is another issue entirely

To add my two-pennorth, I notice a lot of films advertised on TV now say "On Blu-Ray and DVD" so it shows in what order they are pushing things