Can Blu-Ray Survive?
Posted on Tue, Oct 05, 2010
Sony’s Blu-Ray and Toshiba’s HD-DVD fought a hard, albeit short, battle to replace standard definition DVD. Sony’s Blu-Ray system won hands down, and is the only High Definition disk player system now available. But will Blu-Ray become ubiquitous like DVD? I don’t think so….
Bill Gates in 2007 was asked whether Blu-Ray or HD-DVD would win the next gen disk war. He only smiled and said that it wouldn’t make any difference; that by the time a victor was declared, people would no longer be buying movies on plastic. Movies, he said, would be downloaded from the cloud. Most would say that he was spot on.
Consider—Netflix customers downloaded more movies than they received DVDs in the mail for the first time in March 2010. The percentage of downloaded movies now exceeds 65%. Netflix stock was just $11 in 2008; today’s price is $157. Netflix has a market capitalization of $8.5 Billion. And where is Blockbuster? From a high of about $6.50 (market cap of $2 Billion), the company is now bankrupt, and trades only on the Pink Sheets at around 3 cents. Netflix applications already run on 65 million devices, and that is increasing at a rate of 40 million per year. Blu-Ray player sales have totaled just 18 million devices worldwide since inception. I suppose we should at least mention Apple’s iTunes store.
High Definition file formats are plentiful and powerful. Hard drive prices per Gigabyte are already measured in pennies. Broadband access is ubiquitous, and prices continue to fall. Not a single name brand TV, not even Sony, introduced a new machine with a built in Blu-ray player, but virtually every brand of higher end TV includes a USB and Network Media Player. New technology, like IPTV allows users to easily access Video on Demand over a broadband connection.
Blu-ray? Don’t bet on it. Do you think it will survive?
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