Has it really been eight months since my last blog entry...?

Apparently so.   My last entry was on the sudden departure of Toshiba and it's HD-DVD format, something I discovered had been done without notifying their partners in the format.

A lot has happened in that time.

So firstly, was Blu-Ray's win a phrric victory ?   Hard to say for sure, but it's certainly looking like Blu-Ray's win might have been a major waste of resources for all players.   Online movie sales and rentals, most notably through Apple's iTunes, have grown significantly.   Blu-Ray players and media sales remain lackluster.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the Blu-Ray HD sales proposition really has not been made to the average consumer.   Upscaled DVD content seems to be sufficient for a significant part of the buying community, and the premium price paid for Blu-Ray players and media clearly isn't deemed sufficient.   I took a straw poll at work recently, where I asked the several PS3 owners there who'd actually bought a Blu-Ray disk.   Answer (excluding me): none.

Hmmm....

It's also notable that the Blu-Ray shelves I've recently seen, both in the US and in Australia, don't seem to be moving stock.

So what could they do to resolve this?   This is something I've been pondering for a while, so let me propose three things which could be done.

Firstly - and it's the easiest step - would be to bring price-parity between the DVD and Blu-Ray releases.   Reproduction costs are largely comparable on a per-unit basis anyway, and the increased pre-production and mastering charges aren't significant in high volumes.

Secondly, the price of Blu-Rayt Live! players need to drop below US$200.   This is not an impossible goal.   Application Specific Standard Products (ASSPs) like Broadcom's BCM7440 bring the BoM costs of a player below the US$100 mark.   Although selling a player at retail $200 (ie. $150 wholesale) with a BoM cost of $100 is tight, it is quite achievable.   Initial profits might be low, or even zero, but this is a market building exercise.

Finally, the studios have to convince everyone that HD is important.   They also have to sell the difference between HD from Blu-Ray and the appallingly bad so-called HD ATSC and DVB-T broadcasts that so rightly underwhelm many viewers.   The studios need to educate people to recognize the artifacts that upscaling 480i and 576i DVD footage to 1080p introduces.   Once people can recognize it, it's a very small step to becoming sensitive to it, and then it's pretty much guaranteed to annoy.

So, there you have it.