Blu-Ray may have won the format war at the beginning of the year, but the platform's biggest struggle is still ahead: convincing people to buy it.
Sony's president, Ryoji Chubachi, set the bold goal of 50 percent market share by the end of the year. Last week, the format dropped to 8-percent of the market. That marks a 13-percent drop from the week prior, according to PC World, leaving traditional DVDs with a whopping 92-percent.
Sony, naturally, has attempted to counteract the decline with a bit of pro-active marketing, including bundling the new issue of Wired with a Blu-Ray copy of the new Web series, Coma. The company will also ship titles like Men in Black with new players.
The company has also started knocking down the price on players, a move which has apparently already begun yielding results. The newly discounted BDP-S300 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player, which recently got knocked down to $199.98 (from $399.99), is currently atop Amazon's electronics sales chart.
That said, numbers don't really bode well for the format at the moment. Blu-Ray is off to a shaky start, at best. Further price discounts will certainly help nudge things along--after all, HD-DVD's major selling point was its price. Aside from PS3s, it been tough convincing consumers that they need to spend hundreds of dollars for higher definition discs--especially those without HDTVs.
The question, to my mind, is whether the format is a brief stopgap between DVDs and a more widescale adoption of TV to PC technologies. Of course, people have long been predicting the death of the format, right Lance?
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September 24, 2008 6:13 PM
Here's an idea (one that Brian's already said, but I think is the real fix here): instead of counteracting the decline with a bit of pro-active marketing, I say counter the decline with a bit of pro-active making the damned products affordable to consumers. :(
Sony's already been rewarded for their price reduction on the BDP-S300, they should have no reason to believe that by making the movies cheaper and forcing other blu-ray player manufacturers to make their players cheaper won't set a fire under the market.
We'll see how this all plays out around the holidays - as long as a Blu-Ray DVD is more expensive than a digital download that I can send to my HDTV from my HTPC that still looks awesome, there's no reason to invest in the technology, and if I don't have an HTPC and all that jazz, I'm probably just going to stick with my standard def DVD player. :(
September 24, 2008 7:31 PM
That's horrible! So many gadgets were made to support it! Well at least we still have the Motorokr this phone has crystal talk technology, a Mode-shift feature, full HTML browser, and plays music too.
September 24, 2008 8:13 PM
Lets tell the truth and keep this accurate.
Blu-ray has never had a straight 8% (or 12% etc etc) of the retail movie disc market anyways.
DVD sell over 750 million unit per year.
The BDA won't even say how many units Blu-ray has sold (and the numbers would be muddied by corporate buying - which is a whole part of this little tale yet to be explored properly).
The BDA make vague and clearly exaggerated claims but Neilson refutes these week in week out.
That's even with the skewed and cherry-picked Neilson method they use - Neilson only count the top 20 best sellers; which manages to favour Blu-ray because it inevitably sells for higher unit prices and secondly the DVD market is a mature market, few buy at release prices and most wait until the inevitable price drops in a few weeks/months.
They might care to look at what happened to HD DVD.
No-one cared until hardware prices dropped to $99 and movies went to $20 - $15.
September 25, 2008 3:17 AM
i think the blu ray will stay well at least it should once its cheaper
http://www.home-entertainment-news.co.uk
September 25, 2008 1:42 PM
DaveBG - actually DVD video discs sell 1.7 billion each year in North America alone.
http://www.dvdinformation.com/industryData/index.cfm
And about 7 billion/year worldwide.
http://www.contentdeliveryandstorage.org/stats/stat-replication_worldwide.html
So, blu-ray is actually doing even worse than you think!
September 26, 2008 12:36 AM
Let me get this straight. You're basing the future of Blu-ray on...one week of data? Seriously? Movie sales are beholden to release patterns, and any expectation of consistent gains week to week indicates a complete lack of understanding of the market.
As such, I suggest everyone here dismiss this article as nothing more than garbage. Blu-ray has its challenges ahead of it, but this article doesn't understand them at all. If you can't understand why a single week doesn't paint a long term picture, you have no business writing articles like this. Really...this is very dumb, and not an intelligent analysis of Blu-ray. Gearlog should be embarassed this type of junk is on their site.