There’s a report that BD isn’t selling well, specifically the players required to view the discs. From my perspective, a BD player is still a ways off. There are too many obstacles to adoption at this point:
1. Price. Manufacturers, make your money on the movies as always (DVDs have a huge markup, BD even more so), but lower the bar for entry so more people can adopt the format. Until the player is a commodity, the format will languish.
2. Feature set. BD Profile 2.0 or whatever it is just isn’t possible on the bulk of the available players, because they don’t have ethernet connectivity. There’s also too much disparity in what audio formats are supported by different players, making price shopping an experiment in whether the player will work well with your existing system. Sure, the high dollar players have all the features you probably need, but it’s unacceptable that a firmware update could conceivably bring the others up to speed, if only.
3. DRM. I would buy a BD drive for my HTPC in short order if viewing my own movies weren’t so encumbered with draconionan DRM that it becomes nearly impossible to do so on a non-blessed platform. I don’t particularly want to circumvent DRM, it’s just a boring hassle; but I would be forced to if I attempted to integrate BD into my system for the lowest cost possible.
I know the PS3 is a popular, (relatively) inexpensive solution that also plays games, but the lack of IR kills the ability to integrate it into an existing system. Sony may have won the format war, but they don’t understand or don’t care how to implement a truly compelling all-in-one STB / game machine.
Wishlist item: a Nintendo Wii with BD and a gestural interface. Not fully gestural, obviously, but imagine using the wiimote as your shuttle control, scrubbing back and forth in a scene. The possibilities…
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