Tech observer Robin Harris of ZDNet skewers Sony for sending Blu-ray into “a death spiral.” It gets better:

“12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product,” he crows. “With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it. … In a nutshell: consumers drive the market and they don’t care about Blu-ray’s theoretical advantages. Especially during a world-wide recession.”

Is Harris right? Maybe.

The prices of Blu-ray players are indeed dropping. Several models are available below $200. In fact, earlier this week, Dealnews posted bargains for a Sylvania model with four Blu-ray movies for $170 shipped and a BD-Live-capable Sony model for $193 shipped. There will be better deals as the holidays approach.

But player prices aren’t the problem; disc prices are, something Harris barely covers in his business-oriented screed. Blu-ray Discs are simply too expensive – for consumers, not producers. I don’t care if Amazon regularly has 2-for-1 sales or about other online promotional gimmicks. Those are random and tend to be title specific. The truth is that BDs generally have a retail price of $35-$40, usually the latter. That MSRP is the foundation for any sale. Until BDs are the same retail price as their DVD counterparts, which some consumer curmudgeons still think are too high, mainstream consumers will continue to view them as a niche product. I’m talking across-the-board cuts, as an industry. Only Warner Home Video seems to realize this, as it sets an MSRP for many of its new-movie BDs around $35 and catalog titles at $30.

I also have a huge problem with Harris citing the stat that Blu-ray has “only a 4% share of US movie disc sales.” That figure is horribly skewed. There are about 800 Blu-ray titles and 92,000 DVD titles, according to Nielsen Research. It’s not valid to compare a small pool of BDs with a much, much larger pool of DVDs. To be meaningful, the comparison must be made on units sold (not total sales) and only on titles available in both formats. I don’t know what that number is. BDs will surely still be a fraction of DVDs but not as small as 4 percent. (In its weekly report on the market, the Digital Bits cites a 6 percent share of U.S. DVD sales for Blu-ray. It has been as high as 12.)

Finally, Harris touts high-def downloads as something that’s killing Blu-ray. This might end up happening. Based on my experience, it won’t be anytime soon. I recently went on Xbox Live to download a high-def movie (something also available on the PlayStation Network). I picked a movie not available on Blu-ray and selected it to watch. A few hours later, the huge file still hadn’t finished downloading. Once I sat down to watch the film the next night, it looked better than I expected but nowhere near the quality I’d expect from Blu-ray. As big as the file was, it was still compressed to minimize (!) the download time. HD downloads still have a ways to go.

It’s way too early to be digging Blu-ray’s grave. This holiday season, Blu-ray’s first with sole control of the HD disc market, will be a good indicator of its future.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under DVDs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.