Too Little, Too Late
- What really will really work for movies is digital download (renting movies on Xbox Live for example)

Note this presser is careful not to make a direct comparison to DVD sales. In 2007 alone, there were 1.7 Billion DVDs at retail. That means Blu-Ray represents approximately 5% of the market. That's not mass market nor "majority" no matter how you spin it. Most indicators show that average consumers have a very hard time diffferentiating the quality of Blu-Ray versus regular DVD. Sad but true. And in this economic climate, most people are not going to pay a premium for a quality difference they cannot detect. Add on to that the extreme fragility of Blu-Ray discs, and I think you'll find less people interested in investing in the format down the road.

Correction: I believe the 100 million unit sales is Life-To-Date, meaninig Blu-Ray disc sales is _significantly_ less than 5% of annual disc sales. Closer to 1%.

Ok, and just how long had dvd been at retail in 2007? The first dvds were on general sale in 1996 so a good 10/11 years. Plenty of time for the price to drop and it to become mainstream. DVD was not selling BILLIONS of disks only 5 years into its availability at retail. If you look at the life cycle of blu-ray at this point compared to dvd at a similar point the blu-ray figures don't look to shabby!

Uhhh if you guys dont remember let me give you the facts
1. the same thing happened to dvds. VHS used to be the main video format and it took dvds a long ass time to get mainstream because not every1 had dvd players or was interested in the better things dvd could offer

2. blu-ray disc has surpassed the sales for dvd in relative to the time it has been out. it took dvds almost 5 years to reach 100m, then they shot up in sales. the same will happen with blu-ray especially with everyone wanting more HD and people willing to buy blu-ray disc players. and having the ps3 doesnt hurt either.

Well I think when people say they can't see a difference between dvd and Blu-Ray they are more than likely watching a movie which has not had the investment put into it in order to achieve a high quality conversion. We all know that some Blu-Ray movies look far better than others. This was also the case during the rise of dvd. Some films looked terrible others looked great.
I myself have a number of Blu-Ray's that don't look much better than dvd, however compare any dvd to a Blu-Ray like Transformers or the Dark Knight for instance and the difference is night and day. Hopefully as time goes by the quality level of all Blu-Ray's in general will improve.

A few things to say

1. How many years from launch did it take DVDs to reach 100 million disc sales? Considering the number of years DVDs had been around before they went mainstream I don't think Blu-ray is doing too badly at all.

2. Anyone who cant tell the difference between DVD and Blu-ray on correctly set up equipment should have gone to Specsavers.

3. How long would it take to download 50GB of data, and considering you can pick up some blu-rays in 2 for £20 offers these days for a physical product, why would you want to download for a fee and risk losing your purchase?

Fragility of Blu-ray? Eh? Are you getting mixed up with the scratch if you look cross-eyed at it HD-DVDs? Blu-rays are by far the most scratch resistant and resiliant disc format ever produced (well maybe apart from the near deadly Laserdiscs... lol)

Blu-Ray has a near epidemic of cracked discs being shipped through Netflix. Just try googling crack netflix blu ray. Same thing has happened to me on the last 15 of 20 Blu Ray discs I've recieved. The discs may be more scratch resistant due to a special coating, but this coating also makes the discs less flexible and more brittle, leaving them more likely to be cracked as a result. Netflix support will tell you as much. As far as DVD sales, yes, they took a long time to eclipse VHS to become the majority, but VHS had also been around a long time. It did NOT take DVD a long time to reach 1% of sales. Blu Ray won't have long term legs either, as digital distibution (even of HD) is on pace to match Blu Ray.