My article this week is about Blu-Ray and its success of failure in the immediate future. Being a poor college student I do not have the money for the an HD TV or a Blu-Ray player, but I have watched numerous television programs in HD. That being said, my opinion is, once you watch HD tv you will never want to watch regular tv again.
After reading this article it appears that there are several reasons why the author belives that Blu-Ray will succeed and I agree. The majority of the reasons that critics say that it will fail is becasue of all the new downloadable movie services such as Netflix and Hulu and so on. However, the author sites several reasons why these sites will not succeed and the largest one being the poor bandwidth of local cable providers. These sites require the user to have a steady bandwidth at a very high rate in order to download the and view the movie without interuptions while streaming. The fact is that cable internet just is not fast enough yet.
In addition to the lack of bandwidth I also think that the downloadable services will fail because people still like discs and there are more and more programs out there that allow people to burn their discs to a hard drive. Additionaly many of the dvds and blu-rays now come with a digital copy which people can put on their computer to play on their digital player, essentialy eliminating the only advantage that downloadable movies had.
The author also points out that Sony (the creator) of Blu-Ray has put a Blu-Ray player in each of their PS3 gaming systems. Due to the lack of sales over the holiday season the price of these gaming systems is going down, which will make owning a blu-ray player much more affordable. Besides the gameing consules many other devices are starting to incorporate blu-ray players as part of their components such as laptops. This integration of the new technology not only strengthens the appeal of blu-ray amongst consumers but also solidifies blu-ray as a product that will be around for years to come.
Personally, I have never watched a blu-ray movie, but if it is anything like HD TV I know that I will want to watch one soon. Like everything else the price on new technology is dropping everyday. By next year blu-ray players will be under $100. Just look at HD TVs. Sets that cost $1000 a year ago are now selling for half that. For all the skeptics out there, you are probably the same people that thought HD TV, or even digital cable, was not a big deal and would not make it.... well look at it now.
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The author definitely makes a good point about the bandwidth not being good enough yet for streaming videos to completely take over. There's probably some truth that people don't understand what blu-ray has to offer that's different from a dvd (I haven't seen anything on blu-ray yet). And if you've already invested a lot of money into a dvd collection, you may not want to switch to blu-ray. It can be frustrating to have to buy the same movie multiple times (speaking as someone who went through the switch from vhs to dvd already-yes the Dark Ages) I like the idea that buying a blu-ray or a dvd will give you the right to a digital copy too.
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