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Posted by The alMIGHTY N on 01/29/07 20:46
On Jan 22, 7:47 pm, Doug Jacobs <djac...@shell.rawbw.com> wrote:
> The problem is,
> does anyone care about blu-ray (or HD movies in general) in the first
> place? I think we can look at the sales numbers and conclude "No, not
> really."
Therein lies the real question, no? While HD visuals certainly are a
noticeable improvement, are they really THAT big a deal to the
"average" consumer? DVD seems to be "good enough" for most people even
now... it's a hard sell to convince a non-technophile or non-movie
fanatic to:
a) pay $500-1000 for new hardware
b) go into their home theater set-up and yank out the DVD player and
replace it with the HD player with potentially different cables
c) pay $20-35 for the HD version of a DVD they already paid $15-20 for
When you think about it, the only real improvement from DVD to one of
the HD formats is the upgrade of the visuals and, if you're an
audiophile, the audio. That's about it.
When we went from VHS to DVD, not only were we getting vastly better
visual (the change was much more noticeable in that transition because
we were going from a crappy picture to a very good picture whereas
with HD we're going from a very good picture to a very, very good
picture) and audio, we were also getting non-degrading visuals, extra
features, commentary tracks, the ability to jump to some number of
predetermined chapters, superfast rewinding and fast forwarding, etc.
It was a HUGE leap in technology.
When you consider that only a sliver of a fraction of consumers out
there even have televisions capable of going to full HD, there's just
not a lot of incentive for most people to make the jump. It's easy to
get into HDTV because it costs very little to upgrade your cable or
satellite service and 720p televisions are much more established.
I think the format wars will become more interesting when a consumer
recorder comes out that allows people to record HDTV broadcasts,
essentially being the next evolutionary step up from the VCR. Tivo and
its ilk are the half-solution... you can record HDTV broadcasts but
you have limited amounts of space and it's not portable.
Just my $0.02...
NL
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