Hot on the heels of last week’s report from ABI Research noting that many consumers may not see the picture quality difference between Blu-ray and standard DVDs comes the latest Blu-ray sales figures from NPD Group. And they’re not pretty.
from the NYT blogs
Oh really?!!!
Sorry, I’m just trying to be sacarstic. No surprise here, people know about HD but are not really aware of what it is. They still plug crappy cables even on the new consoles. They just want to have a picture, they don’t care about having a great picture. In fact for most people size matter, so they prefer a big TV with crapppy image than a medium size TV with a really nice picture quality. If you buy expenssive cables and tunes the contrast of your TV, you can be considered as a minority.
To replace a standard format by an other one, the technology is not your best choice. ogg will not replace the mp3 soon because it doesn’t bring a pratical advantage for the user. The DVD succeeded because the picture quality was better but also because you didn’t had to rewind your movies after watching them. You could even skip quickly to different chapters.
For the movie format, I think the future is more in the VOD, not a physical format. And for the file format in fact you don’t care because the user will not chose depending on the file format, he will chose because of the catalog and the price.
Nic Magnier. Previously game developer on several unreleased video games. Ironically I work now at Nintendo of Europe to help developers to release their own titles.
