Because of the high prices, im sure helping Seagate's profits.

I heard the opposite. I heard that Blu ray is finally making a steak in the DVD to Blu ray movie ratio. The highest seen was Hitman, with around 15% was Blu ray. Its not 50-50 or anything like that but its still a significant change than in the old HD DVD days.

Physical media is dead. Its no wonder the sales are flat. Between OnDemand and Streaming Movies via 360 (and ps3?), that people dont want to buy into this. BetaMax here, Got ya BetaMax..

@MONSTERGOC

Agreed mate, agreed. If every new movie release was available on the Xbox Marketplace, I'd never visit Blockbuster again. Even as things are, I don't feel the need to buy a player for HD movies based on a physical medium. I can get most movies in HD over XBL, and for the rest I get DVDs upscaled to 1080i which is good enough so far as I am concerned.

@MONSTERGOC: Until more then 15% of America has some sort of stable ISP (IE: over 30Mbs) we won't be seeing a huge jump towards DD. At least thats MHO.

Ha! Great pic!

You guys have apparently been listening to our warnings about not jumping into the Blu pool just yet.

Nup. Actually, I thought you were a bunch of tools for going on and on about HD-DVD. In my book capacity was always more important than every other consideration. It's the only thing that had hard limitations, whereas everything else is controlled by software.

@MONSTERGOC: Physical media is dead.

Maybe once my countries largest ISP stops charging $150 per excess gigabyte and provides speeds above 1.5Mbit to more than 10% of their coverage area. Downloads might be viable in Korea, Japan, USA and some parts of Europe. But there are a lot of countries that just don't have the infrastructure.

The #1 problem at the moment is price. I'll start buying blu-ray movies when new releases drop below $20. Currently they're double that and even the occasional "buy 2, get 1 free" deal is still too much.

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!

The day hddvd died was the day i gave up on my eternally faulty xbox 360 and traded it for a ps3.

since then i havent bought a single BD.. my reasoning?

The range is horrible, and its not worth the extra money. unless they start selling bluray discs for the same price as dvds im probably going to buy one or two must-haves and keep the rest of my library as DVD

digital content is the only way for me. Plus didn't like the way pricing all of a sudden got higher after hd-dvd keeled over.

Price too high for me as well, I've never bought one outside of a "buy one, get one free" offer. Even "buy 2 get one free" isn't enough incentive.

Seriously, $30 for the same thing I can get (legally) for $10-15. Is the quality twice as high?

I have and will buy 0.0.

I wouldn't say physical media is dead. Just non-rewritable media that uses moving parts. I'm sick and tired of being right. Blu-Ray is just a gap filler, not a brand new media.

*COUGH*
*HIGH SPEED HIGH CAPACITY SD CARDS WE ARE WAITING*
*COUGH*

Is "stopping peeing in it and lied down to die" some sort of google translation quote or something? Engrish?

Physical media is here for a while....a long while. I just wish I could rip DVDs to my Xbox and have it upscale them on site... because im tires of downlaoding codecs every month....

CCCP here I come

Well one problem is the fact that they raised the Blu-Ray player prices after the HD-DVD exit. If they just lowered the player prices I am sure that would help sales. Then of course they could lower the disc prices and that would help sales.

They must be either too greedy, too scared or too stupid to do one or both of the above. Meaning they want too much profit, there margins are already too low or they are too f-ing stupid-respectively.

There's no way Blu-ray will ever be a mass-market format. HD DVD had everything in place to smoothly migrate Joe Public over from DVD, plus it was cheap, simple to use and the players worked well.

Blu-ray is a joke by comparison, and consumers are rightly staying the hell away.

Could also be people like me, who are just basking in discount HD-DVD for the time being.

Does the PS3 upconvert?

With loosely 70% or so of Blu-ray players being PS3's and realizing that the vast majority of those owners actually play there games on the system and have not actually been purchasing any Blu-ray disks, this concern is not a surprise. For a storage medium sure this is great but for the common consumer the thought of re-purchasing and replacing your entire collection with new media just for the sake of better image quality always seemed like flawed reasoning to me on the part of these large corporations. Most movies were great due to the story and the bump in visuals would do little to the experience while those movies like "300" etc would probably benefit the most but to the average consumer its just not worthwhile.

It's always going to be about price point for electronics consumers. Once the price of HD tv sets aligns, digital broadcasting standards are set, then consumers will expect higher quality in general and that, I would imagine, would drive higher sales of Blu-ray players. We're not talking about a total progression like VHS-DVD, only an improvement of one format.

Because Bluray is an incomplete format right now and the PS3 is the only player that is "future compatible".

And the pricing is insane too.

@TheDuckOfDeath: It did require a second reading, as it didn't flow like the pee from HD DVD into the Blue Ray Pool.

I won't bother with BD until the format becomes inexpensive enough for BD-R disks costing about the same as DL disks. That, and the players still cost $300+, and I'm not buying the same movie again for the 200+ DVD movies I already own. Same argument against buying PSP disks.

digital distribution FTW!

The issue is more simple than that.

For most people, DVD's are "Good Enough" -- particularly hooked up with an upconverting dvd player.

Its a case of the tech moving too fast for the consumer. People still consider their DVD's to be their "new, high tech movie thing."

Nobody has shown a good reason why they need to switch.

Price is still too high. DVD upscaling to 1080p works very nicely-- not worth spending the $$ on BR discs until they come down to the $20 range.

I'm one of those "good enough" people. Since I like to transfer my purchases to my iPod as well, I can't say I'm terribly interested in a format I can't trust to play nice with my computers.

I guess most people are content with their already good-enough standard DVDs and don't want to pay all the money for the new stuff? I sure as hell don't. Screw HD, screw BR, I'm sticking with Standard DVD for another couple of good years. I don't jump on the band-wagon just because you have a couple of fans on them already, it feels like they're forcing consumers to move on, which is one thing I hate.

I have to say, DVDs upscaled on my PS3 look plenty good - so good that I don't think I'll buy Cloverfield on Blu-Ray when it comes out. How's that for irony.

The fact (for me at least) is that upscaled DVDs on my 34" HDTV from 8' away look great. Couple that with the dearth of decent movies on Blu-Ray and 2008 will have a lot of red mixed in with the blue.

Also, for those in NYC - go to J&R as fast as possible. Criterion Collection DVDs are on sale for $25 a pop. And no, you don't need Blu-Ray to appreciate 1960s French New Wave cinema.

The laptop I just bought has a blu-ray player,but I won't be purchasing any disks anytime soon. I never bought that many DVDs to begin with (mostly concerts),and as everyone mentioned, the price is still way up there. It's nice to already have the player though,for when they finally do come down. I guess I would say it swayed my decision to get this particular one a little bit.

@Final: Yes, and quite nicely i must add.

Physical Media is no where near dead. Most people don't even know what Blu-ray is and you expect them to download movies? Not gunna happen for a while. For many people this will also mean getting much greater bandwith and installing some way to get internet to the TV (via router, etc...) Most people just like to buy a piece of plastic, pop it in and enjoy a movie. Also, HD movie downloads look much worse than Blu-ray, they are just too compressed (its quite evident on a 56" 1080p TV with 7.1 surrond)

@Final: Does the PS3 upconvert?

Yes. It does it quite well actually.

@FiveLiters: I never bought that many DVDs to begin with (mostly concerts),and as everyone mentioned, the price is still way up there.

I'm the same. We have maybe 100-200 DVDs, and most of those are of TV shows that were never produced in HD resolutions. The rest are the occasional documentary or concert video.

I'll buy more BDs when the price drops to something approaching reasonable. I currently own 4. 1 came with my PS3, the other 3 were older movies as part of a "buy 2, get 1 free" deal. It still cost me AU$60 for those three old movies.

I like the extras that you get with physical media. But the price difference between Blu-Ray and DVD plays a big part.
Would I pay an extra 5 bucks for HD content? Sure.
Will a allow myself to get gouged paying 15 bucks more? Not so much.

Bring the prices down and and I'll buy a few more. Until then, the most I will do is rent.

"Blu-ray sales have only jumped a meager two percent...."

Poetic justice! It just goes to show that HD DVD should have won!

-"upscaling is good enough" tards: check
-"hd dvd blah blah" tards: check
-"digital distribution" tards: check
-"pricing" tards: check
-"not 2.0" tards: check

yeah, these comments have about all the goddamn ignorant ass stupidity I can stand for one night.

@jpitsch: try going to the damn grocery store or the mall. The pricing on everything is increasing due to distribution costs. You people are idiots.

@jpitsch: Too greedy

remember we're talking about sony here so that should be self explanitory

/me points to all the smug hd-dvd owners holding "i told you so" banners

@speakafreaka: hd dvd was undercutting its prices in desperation. It wasn't cheaper in the marketplace, it was a loss leader for Toshiba. The discs DEFINITELY were not cheaper.

A larger selection of BD movies wouldn't hurt! It's time for the stragglers to jump on board.

You tards talking about pricing should learn to pre-order when you can get most coming releases at $19.99. Order a few at once, get free shipping.

Idiots.

@tutelary: ok, so you called everyone a tard for attempting to logically explain an observation (blu-ray sales are awful)... what's the *real* reason then? i desperately want to know.

I don't think that many people have TV's that can really show off that kind of resolution. I'm a college student, and I don't make nearly enough to afford an HD TV. And no HD means BD is completely irrelevant.

@oldmanstan: The "real" reason? Stupidity. Bluray adoption is faster than dvd was, and player pricing has fallen dramatically faster than dvd did. You feebs just want everything NOW! And want to complain like little bitches when you don't get it.

And yes, those are facts, look them up.
Players and Discs have BOTH fallen faster and been more widely accepted than dvd was during the same inital time frame.

I live in australia, flat price of $40-$60 for BD's

its cheaper for me to get 2 or 3 from amazon sent from the states.. but i dont want to get burned if they decide to implement regioning on some discs through firmware updates

I have a PS3 and still dont buy blu-ray movies. hmm 15 bucks or 35 for a movie with basically the same quality as far as I can tell most of the time, after upscaling?