Jul 7, 2008
Is Hollywood Killing Blu-Ray?
Sensationalist headline, I know, but hear me out. Unless you are Paris Hilton and you don’t know a soul who makes under a half a mil a year, you know that most people don’t have HD TVs. As a matter of fact, studies say that just under 25% of US households have HD TVs.
Now we all know about the digital switch that’s coming, but unless you have bought into the hype, you also know that it means you will still be able to watch TV on standard definition TVs until the cows come home with a cable box or a cheap converter.
So what does that have to do with my crazy headline? Well, it means that 75% of Americans can’t tell the difference between a Blu-Ray disc and a DVD, and that means they aren’t selling. Sure PS3 owners and technogeeks like me have it, but we are a small minority. So what’s the problem?
DVD: Real Progress
If you are old enough to have spent a long time with VHS, you know that DVD was a God send. Gone are the days of fast forwarding and rewinding, gone are the sucky vertical sync problems and now we have kick ass special features (although the trend is to make you pay extra for them.)
DVD was truly a step forward. Anyone who bought a DVD player got all of the benefits and were immediately sold. Add in cool services like netflix and the $1 rentals at your local grocery and department stores and you have one awesome format.
Blu-Ray: Kinda Progress, But Not For Most People
So you look at a minimum of $400 entry for a player and the movies are way overpriced versions of the same stuff you can get cheaper that in reality will look the same on the TV you already have…remember we are talking that 75%. It’s no mystery why people aren’t biting. It’s just not worth it. Sure, if you have HD, it’s cool, but I do, and I still buy the DVD version unless it’s something really special, why? Because we have DVD players in our laptops, several rooms, Xbox 360, PS2, desktop computers…we can play them anywhere. If I buy Blu-Ray it’s one room only folks. I can’t even lend it to a co-worker and say “Check this bad ass movie out!” I might has well be using damned VHS…or Betamax… YUCK!
Who to the rescue?
The idea came to me in the shower, I was preparing to watch “Vantage Point” (On DVD in my Blu-Ray Capable PS3 ironically) and I was reminded of a commercial about the Blu-Ray version that mentions being able to watch specific characters, etc. Now that’s cool, granted, but then the question came to me, “What’s holding Blu-Ray back?” I mean, it has tons of space, Internet capabilities, true interactivity features, why isn’t anyone making a kick ass choose your own adventure movie, giving the user the ability to be involved and or control the story. The answer to that is easy. The movies have to pass through the theater first and the medium just doesn’t lend itself to interactive storytelling. Sure you will get some cartoon spin-offs made with 1/10 the money and 1/20th the heart, but nobody is going to make Transformers 2 Blu-Ray only. That means that there is likely to be very little compelling reason to buy a Blu-Ray player until it just replaces DVD because the hardware is so cheap that everyone has replaced their aging and broken DVD players with them.
So my suggestion is someone with more money and brains than me, aka Stephen Spielberg and or George Lucas to take their formidable talent, character arsenal and storytelling, and send something spectacular straight to Blu-Ray, something that will break new ground and pave the way for the next bunch to try it, by the time my mom and dad have a Blu-Ray player, they might just have a reason to own it.
The important part here though is that the true, new format is streaming media. Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon and others are already fighting the true format wars. The format wars were all hype. And, the worst format won (at least in mindshare) the war this time, just like the worst format won during the Betamax/VHS debate.