Is Blu-ray Going to be “Passed By” as a Format?

When Sony successfully pushed Toshiba’s HD DVD format out of the ring a couple of years ago, things seemed to be good for the future of Blu-ray. For the most part, there has been some good success with it since then, but it’s never taken off to the point where the standard DVD format could be considered to be on a path to extinction.

There are no doubt a handful of reasons why Blu-ray hasn’t taken off to the extent that Sony would have hoped, but most likely is the fact that brand-new Blu-ray movies are still too expensive. When people like to build a nice collection of films, no one wants to pay $25 – $30 per… it’s just too expensive. Then there’s the requirement for a special player, and who knows… perhaps the uncertainty of Blu-ray’s future could have something to do with it.

According to Microsoft’s UK Xbox head, Stephen McGill, Blu-ray is a technology that’s simply going to be passed by, and the reason to him is entirely due to streaming video content. Streaming movies is huge business, and services like Netflix are thriving on it. From a convenience standpoint, pushing a couple of buttons on your remote or your mouse and immediately watching a movie is easy, but I still see some caveats.

Personally, I prefer hard media, because I like to know that if I want to watch a movie, I can. Streaming unveils a lot of potential issues, such as with reliability. If your net connection goes down while you’re watching a movie, there’s no recovery until it comes back. And streaming aside, having digital-only copies of your files doesn’t exactly give me much of a piece of mind. Digital copies of anything means that you could easily lose them with a hard drive crash, and the way I see it, there aren’t too many consumers who even know what a RAID setup is, or any other sort of redundancy.

One trend I have noticed that’s quite nice is that many Blu-ray movies are now including DVD copies as well. This would allow those who don’t yet own a Blu-ray player to pick up the movie on DVD, and then still have a Blu-ray version for down the road when they’re able to use it. Up here in Canada, many of these movies are about $10… for both Blu-ray and DVD. Of course, these aren’t just-released titles, but either way, it’s hard to beat that.

I admit that I’m a different sort of consumer than most, and if there’s any proof of that, it’s that I prefer physical media for audio CDs as well. When I buy an album in an actual store, 100 copies of the same album get bought on services like iTunes. The future actually sort of scares me, because we’re entering a period where digital is king, where we might not even truly “own” the content we purchase. It’ll be held through various services and only accessible if the content providers want it to be.

With all this speculation, the question remains as to whether we’ll ever see a Blu-ray successor. There was VHS, DVD and then Blu-ray… so what next, if anything? Are we heading into a 100% digital world sooner than later? What are your thoughts on this?

“People now recognise what a smart decision it was to keep the [Xbox 360] pricing low,” he said, referring to Microsoft’s decision to omit a next-generation high-capacity optical storage drive. The company also quietly sidelined its lame duck of an HD-DVD add-on for the console. Gill clearly believes that the beginning of the end for physical media is here.