Although June marks three years since the first Blu-ray discs became available, a recent survey of 11,000 consumers found that DVD is still king (read more). So why isn't Blu-ray taking the throne? I can only speculate, but maybe it's because at this stage Blu-ray is still looking like a pretender. Let me explain.
Technology security may be one big reason why consumers are still hesitant to embrace Blu-ray. Many may be waiting to see if Blu-ray will indeed become the medium of the future, or if it will go the way of Laser Disc players. Is the age of disc-less media closer than anyone thinks? Right now, eve isk it wouldn't surprise me if a large number of consumers are just taking a wait-and-see attitude, wanting to be convinced that Blu-ray is here to stay before they make the leap. The difference between VHS and DVD quality was obvious, but there are a lot of people out there who think the difference between Blu-ray and DVD is slight. VHS was going away, but it doesn't look like DVDs are going to disappear any time soon. That's going to affect how people think about Blu-rays.
Reliability has got to be another major factor. Not long ago I got a shipment of Fox Blu-rays. We made the popcorn, popped in the Blu-ray, and the family waited with excitement. But all we saw was a message saying our stand-alone unit didn't have the capabilities to play the disc; we needed a firmware upgrade. HUH? I thought. Every other disc from every other studio had been playing just fine, but then along comes Fox. And in fairness, it's not only Fox, though they've been up-front and blunt about pushing forward and not caring if others had to "follow" them on the road to enhanced Blu-ray technology. Something similar happened yesterday when I popped in a Sony disc of "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans," and the disc wouldn't load. And you know what? I never worried about discs loading when I played DVDs. You put them in and pressed play and everything was cool. But sometimes you never know with Blu-rays.
Convenience is one of the things that consumers insist upon, and right now the industry doesn't appear to be grasping the concept. How convenient is it to keep having to go through firmware upgrades, two or three times per year? Here again, the simplicity of DVDs has a big edge. You buy a player, you play the discs. End of story. No more hassles, no more work. And maybe it's not so much work for people whose Blu-ray players are connected to the Internet, but for those of us who have them in home entertainment systems with our big-screen TVs, eve isk it's a pain in the butt to get down there among all the wires and pull out the player to take it to the computer for an Ethernet hook-up and firmware upgrade, and some companies aren't all that Mac-friendly still. That means you have to rely on a disc sent by the stand-alone player manufacturer, which can take up to a month. Convenient? Not in my book. Yes, you can make the argument that a player won't become obsolete, but the industry has already shot that argument down with Profile 1.1 and Profile 2.0 players.
