Sony bigwig balks at "five year" Blu-ray demise prediction

[wraggster]

Of late, there has been quite a bit of press circulating which suggests that Blu-ray isn't faring too well. At that head of those sentiments was a Samsung UK director named Andy Griffiths, who casually predicted that BD only had about five good years of life remaining. Unsurprisingly, senior VP of corporate communications at Sony Rick Clancy has hit back with an epic tale of why the format is actually not nearing its end. In fact, he suggests that Blu-ray will eventually live harmoniously with digital downloads, and he forecast that BD has "perhaps a decade" of growth to come. He also snuck in a few plugs for his PS3 and BRAVIA HDTVs, but more on the point, he essentially stated that not enough of the world had broadband (yet) for downloadable content to pose a real threat. Right, because the vast majority of the globe definitely has a few C-notes to lay on a BD player. We're only kidding (kind of).

http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/25/sony-bigwig-balks-at-five-year-blu-ray-demise-prediction/

[F9zDark]

I don't quite understand what the deal is with people going about making rash statements such as that... Honestly, when CDs and DVDs first came out were they instant, over-night success stories?

No. They were equally expensive at launch and only a handful of people had them at first. The same can be said of any technology, really.

Once the price of players and good quality HD-TVs come down in price a great deal, will the format grow.

We're not talking about UMDs here, which was a damn near failure at the start; if Blu-Ray was doing as horribly as people make it sound, it wouldn't have won the format war hands down and once HD-DVD companies wouldn't be adopting it.

Sales have leveled off for now, but why do you think that is? Firstly there is no competition. If a piece of consumer technology has no competition, then there is nothing to:

-Drive the price down faster than simply cutting costs. Companies when competing are much more willing to drop the costs as soon as they can to get that competitive edge. When they aren't competing or have no competitors they have no reason to lower the price, in fact its quite the opposite, they have EVERY reason to keep the price high because people willing to pay that kind of money WILL pay it.

Why else do you think Microsoft has such deep pockets? Because they supplied the first IBM PC compatible OS and many companies jumped at the chance to program for it. As well many companies that chose the Apple route (specific hardware for a specific OS) went belly up the day MS released DOS...

-People have no need to show brand loyalty any longer; in that I mean, both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD had days set aside in which the masses would go out and buy handfuls of movies just to show their brand loyalty. When only one format exists, there isn't any reason to do that...

I completely disagree with the notion that Blu-Ray will die anytime soon. In the US especially, the need for a large medium for movies is necessary until companies get on the ball and give huge bandwidth internet access for next to nothing.

Digital downloads will not win out here, because although we have decently fast internet, its very costly and wont do a damn thing when it comes to downloading full HD movies that border on 50gbs...