Sony’s firm faith in the Blu-ray format corpse
A bitter reality
Blu-ray passed the 1000th release in the United Kingdom with the “Platinum Edition” of Disney’s Pinocchio, thus how could it fail in becoming the hit that consumer electronics giants and Hollywod majors always hope for? The dimension of the likely Blu-ray failure as DVD successor can be read within the same numbers with which the industry publicizes the “success” of the blue laser format. The “highly significant milestone” of the thousand titles sold in UK, for instance, was achieved in 28 months while DVD made it in less than two years.
The stink of the Blu-ray corpse exhales from the data provided by the aforementioned Digital Entertainment Group and concerning the value of USA home video market from 1999 to 2008. According to such information the DVD format value continued to fall from 2006, the higher peak year (24.1 billions of dollars), to 2008 (21.6 billions). In comparison Blu-ray grew from 270 millions in 2007 to 750 millions in 2008.
But how I already stated in previous occasions 2007 is not 1999, and if DVD was able in a year to go from a market value of 800 millions dollars to a value of 2.5 billions, ousting in a short time analog VHS videotapes, it is highly probable that Blu-ray’s growth will continue to be an extremely limited percentage of home video for the years to come.
According to a Futuresource study, the Blu-ray format should arrive to control a little more than 50% of media market within 2012, but even then DVD will remain one of the driving forces of home entertainment at more than 10 years from its introduction. The future, moreover, isn’t straightforwardly moving toward the success of the blue light standard, because other than DVD Blu-ray must and will have to face the growing offer of alternative solutions to enjoy multimedia contents, satellite or cable channels, mobile devices and digital delivery on the Internet.
While taking into consideration the latter possibilities, predictions on Blu-ray as the protagonist of the retail market within 10 years get an actual value that is much lower than the esteems currently featured by the DVD standard, with the remaining consumers’ money spent in services other than optical media and in other entertainment fields. Fields like the videogaming one, that in 2008 already surpassed the value of DVD plus Blu-ray by summing up, according to Media Control GfK International, 53% of the overall 61 billions dollars of the media industry.
Blu-ray’s fate is written, the high definition format is destined to succumb because of the wrong choices of an industry that wasted years with the useless diatribe between HD DVD and Blu-ray, allowing digital delivery to gain a space that in the end will be critical. Blu-ray will die because of the mediocrity of the design of a standard ridden by ridiculous DRM measures, a standard thought to satisfy only the paranoid impulses of the executives of failing corporations rather than the real consumers’ needs.
How Sony will manage to disentangle itself from one of its most colossal failures, if the company is now obliged to take into account an overall loss (for the first time since 1995) of 1.68 billions of dollars at the end of the fiscal year and with a devastating economic crisis that forces to make unprecedented cuts and reorganizations, is a question that deserves being observed very closely.
Related posts
- Snapshots #3: high definition, high emulation
- Export bookmarks in HTML format on Firefox 3+
- 24x DVD burners hit the market
- Console war: Microsoft & Nintendo smile. Sony lays off
- Will Blu-ray die at Christmas 2008?
- The uncertain fate of Blu-ray between hope and pessimism
- PlayStation 3 is and will be steadily at a loss
- Console war: Microsoft overruns Sony in Japan, Nintendo outstrips everyone
- Blu-ray? Nobody wants it, yet
- Hi-def TV and faith truth…
Comments
Leave a Reply
-
· Subscribe to Sir Arthur's Den ·
-
· © Some Rights Reserved ·
The exclusive contents of Sir Arthur's Den are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, and must be ascribed to Alfonso Maruccia as the sole owner of the related copyrights.
