Sueven wrote:I'm sure Aardor knows his shit, but that's kind of shocking to me. I didn't really pay attention to the VHS/DVD switch, but I generally recall everyone knowing about it and it being seen as inevitable. In contrast, the majority of people I know probably think that a blu-ray is a rare kind of fish. The format has been available for what, three years now, and I've never even physically seen one outside of a Best Buy or Aardor's house. If I didn't read these boards and know Aardor, I'd probably never have heard of the format.
DVD had the same format war (If I recall, Sony had some other proprietary media that required a cd carriage they wanted for dvd, and thankfully lost). DVD players initially cost as much as Blu-Ray, or at least a comparable %, when you compare vhs -> DVD and DVD -> Blu-ray (at the time). DVD's were also more than double the price of VHS in the first few years of their release. There was also the same resistance to DVD as their is to Blu-Ray (why do I want movies twice, i already have all these vhs tapes; it's more expensive for the same movie; i don't care about quality; who cares about these extra features). The fact of the matter is that they were replaced.
The Sony marketing goons have programmed Aardor well!
If you could take my dick out of your mouth for a moment, you might notice that I have pretty much only posted hate for sony on these boards. I was a supporter of HD-DVD, and anti-PS3 (miir and i have been in quite a few arguments about it). I also do not own a Blu Ray player, and have simply never bought a PS3 because their games/controllers are shit, IMO. As I said in the previous post, I would love for Sony to fail with another media (beta-max, their version of CDs, MiniDisc, their version of DVDs made me believe it was inevitable at first).
I am absolutely not saying that Blu-ray is going to overtake DVD any time soon. It took until 2004 for DVDs to actually outsell VHS tapes (and after that year, VHS sales did drop to almost non-existance). That's 8 years after DVD was widely released in America. That's also 6 more years than a HD format disc has been on the market, and 7 more years than having 1 standard of disc on the market.
What I really don't get is that you seem to have posted an article supporting what i was saying. I doubt you read anything besides the first sentence, but I ask, who's expectations did they not meet? The Studio or Sony execs, the people who got paid to make Blu-Ray win the format war. The next part goes over the cost adoption problem, but notes that "hey, it's going down every year." To quote from the article:
Analysts believe that it takes several years of "strong, unified" marketing efforts, and product development, to promote a new standard. The format war kept the competing parties busy, while consumers were not too interested. But now, with over a year of focus on Blu-ray and all film studios getting on-board, itís just a matter of time.
Just a matter of time, huh?
That article doesn't even mention the coming mega wave of digital distribution via the net. Thanks to the 360, we'll have access to that even if Sony tries to block it because they want more Blu Ray sales.
Yes, digital downloads are going to effect both the Blu-Ray and DVD market. Last I looked, the 360 digital downloads of HD content weren't even close to Blu-Ray sales numbers (don't even try to compare non-HD downloadable 360 content to blu-ray, compare that to DVD). Sure, this might take off in the next few years, and it looks like it will, but the same can be said for Blu-Ray, and there is nothing to predict how the numbers will compare (mostly because digital downloads are a new thing, and do not have years of data like format changes)
I did notice however that
Super Troopers came out on Blu-Ray recently, which is now #1 reason to change to that format.