Time to Declare the Death of Blu-Ray (Again)?
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?
Original post by Brian Heater