Nobody Wants Blu-ray

According to a new report by Harris Interactive, more people own a now-defunct HD-DVD player than they do a device capable of playing Blu-ray. While 11% of Americans have a HD-DVD drive, only 7% claim access to Blu-ray, despite Blu-ray winning the format war several years ago.

This points to what is blatantly obvious though – Blu-ray is still far too expensive for many consumers, especially those who adopted HD-DVD during the format war. Both films and players are still incredibly expensive compared to DVD. It’s not just price that is turning consumers away from the format however – many people simply think that DVD simply looks ‘good enough’.

Good enough to not want to buy their entire movie collection again in the next ‘slightly better’ format. The change from VHS to DVD was massive and was as much about technology such as scene selection and extra features than it was about the quality of the film itself. In contrast, Blu-ray isn’t nearly as revolutionary and hasn’t seen the same quick price drops in hardware that DVD enjoyed in the late nineties.

Even amongst those people that own a Blu-ray drive or a Playstation 3, only around a third are considering using Blu-ray as their only format for movie purchases and only a fifth would replace their current collection on Blu-ray.

DVD was the future of entertainment: people spent thousands of pounds on DVDs in the last decade only to be told ten years later that actually, it was rubbish. Link that with the fact we went through two long years when not even the movie industry had any idea what format we were supposed to be using in the future, and it’s no surprise there isn’t much consumer confidence in Blu-ray.

Mostly though, it’s about price. Drop the price of the films and keep the players as cheap as possible and people will buy. Until then, it’s hard to see the format making much of an impact.

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