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June 3, 2008
During the so-called “format wars”, you couldn’t go a single day without hearing about which movie studio had signed on to which format, or some other steamy peice of HD news that would play a part in declaring the winner of the war.
Now that the war is over, so is the press coverage. As we all know, lack of press coverage can kill just about anything. So does Blu-Ray have a future?
Currently the hardware is over-priced and the movie selection is expanding, but still limited. Worse then that though is the almost complete lack of knowledge the average HD consumer has about Blu-Ray.
Recently the NPD Group (a consumer and market research company) released a study that optimistically stated that 45% of HD consumers are now aware of what Blu-Ray is. That means that 55% of HD consumers have NO IDEA what Blu-Ray is … That is mind-blowing, and remember that this is a study of HD consumers, people who have already invested in an HD Television and are currently receiving some form of HD broadcasting.
Sony has long placed faith in the advent of the PS3 and it’s built-in Blu-Ray player, but other studies have shown that a large group of PS3 owners didn’t even realize that their console was capable of playing Blu-Ray discs.
Ultimately, Sony has much work to do with marketing, and unfortunately for the industry, they seem to have shot themselves in the foot by ending the format wars as early as they did, since they now have lost a huge amount of press that would have eventually bridged the gap of ignorance that the average consumers clings too.
As time drags on, and the world slowly conforms to what will eventually be a digital standard, the door is open for others to come in and create a cheaper, higher quality alternative to Blu-Ray and stick it to Sony before most of the world even knew that Blu-Ray existed.
read comments (1)
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:14 am
And for the record, I think that barring opposition from ISPs, downloadable hd content will kill blu-ray in the medium-long term.