Blu-Ray sales dropping

BLU-RAY PLAYER SALES are sucking wind as well they should. According to Cnet, sales of the DRM infected format players are dropping like rocks.

The not so bright people out there had expected sales to skyrocket once the format war was done, but it didn't. They thought was people would ignore the massive defects of Blu-ray and buy like the dumb sheep that they are, handcuffing themselves to the Sony bank account.

Surprise, it didn't happen. US consumers are still dumb sheep, but this time they are realizing what is being done to them and they aren't biting. Sony's hope of having 50% of disc sales this year be Blu-ray are more likely to happen because of falling DVD sales than rocketing Blu-ray.

The format has three problems, DRM infections, BD-J and greed. The greed part is obvious, Sony won the format war and are trying to charge people between 50 and 100% more for a product with marginally better quality. Sure, it looks better, and the 0.07% of people with 7.1 channel audio setups will be overjoyed, but for the rest, it is a small step at best over an upconverting DVD.

Are you going to buy the DVD version for $16.99 on new release sale or $29.99 for the BD? It doesn't take a genius to realize that the next iteration of Hollywood Formula #7 with Big Stars #3 and #8 isn't worth it. The movie studios have yet to convince me that The Water Horse is worth spending my money on at all, much less at twice the price for DRM'd HD versions.

That brings us to the next down side, there is no up, DRM. Every Blu-ray disc is DRM infected even if the producer doesn't want it to be, in order to get a company to manufacture it, it must be infected. Sony gets an infection kickback fee as well, so don't think it is purely for protection unless you mean it in the -racket sense.

Blu-ray DRM infections do not protect anything, Slysoft has cracked it with their excellent AnyDVD HD product, something I can't recommend enough. Basically, new DRM schemes are broken before you can buy discs with them on it, protecting nothing. It will however prevent legitimate users from using legally purchased media on legally purchased hardware. If you pirate though, no more compatibility issues, once again making Piracy the Better Choice (TM)(C)(R).

Basically the new format has DRM baked in and in your face. It costs you money, hurts only legitimate users, and is laughably insecure. Until it is abolished, just say no to Blu-ray and spend your money elsewhere, try books for example. If you must stoop to the DRM infected media, crack it and run it from your HD, it will save you immense frustration.

The last thing that makes people want to run for the hills is the badly broken BD-J abomination. Basically, when Blu-ray was 'finished', it wasn't close to done. HD-DVD on the other hand was well thought out and thorough, HD had a robust virtual machine that did all the work it needed to, and BD had none. Sony rushed a hacked BD v1.1 out, followed by 2.0, and instantly obsoleted all the money spent by the early adopters. All except those who bought Sony players of course.

There are two problems with this, other than the fact that morons spent money on a Sony format, it works like crap and it phones home, both comprise the third negative. Working like crap is the obvious one, to test it, look at one of the flagship titles, Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Disney insists on BD-J, customer be damned, and it shows. If you click on any of the options from the title menu, it pauses, you hear the disc seek, you wait, it loads, you wait more, and it decrypts, you wait a little more, and then the menu animates. It is nothing short of a disaster that you can't skip. Unless you pirate the title, once a gain making piracy the better choice (TM)(R)(C).

In any case, the BD-J support is so half-assed and broken that using it is nothing less than misery, but you also get the BD benefits as well. That is incompatibility and higher prices to soothe you while you wait and wait and wait. Whoever forced this on people should be shot.

The other down side is that to support the so called Profile 2.0, you must have internet capabilities and access. Anyone here trust Sony? Remember, these are the people who unashamedly rootkit paying customers and then tries as hard as they can to bury it, but never apologizes.

With the new BD Profile 2.0, they can run arbitrary code on your player, download and install whatever they want (You read the EULA didn't you?), and take any data they want. In return, you get the privilege of watching your legally purchased media on your legally purchased players. Fair trade, right? Once again, Piracy is the Better Choice(R)(TM)(C), it doesn't rat you out to unrepentant rootkitters even if they have a EULA behind them this time.

In the end, if you buy Blu-ray, you get a more expensive product that is likely incompatible with your hardware, DRM'd to the hilt, slow as dirt and it rats you out for good measure. All this for slightly better rez, be still my beating heart. Player sales are tanking when they should be soaring and Sony is probably wondering why. Caveat emptor.µ

Pretty good article about why people aren't buying Blu-Ray.

It's easy to see the comparisons with Crysis - just way too high initial cost to see/hear the big difference. Lowering the cost of the discs could help a little though.

The guy makes a few good points and way more errors in this poorly written article. Maybe someone should explain him the difference between a rant on a forum and an actual article in which you do not generalise people in a flock. Anyways, here's my point of view.

First off, Blu ray isn't just Sony. Using google and doing a tiny little bit of research and effort would help aid that basic principle of journalism. The amazing thing about the internet is that people start to assume things are correct if it's on a "credited" website says so without calling the actual company's involved and letting some organisation doing independent research. Then again, being lazy and insulting people is way more fun if you work for a crappy website like the Inquirer.

It's amazing how this guy relates dropping blu ray sales to the quality of BD and not the poor state of the American economy. Now lets discuss DRM, DRM sucks balls if you want to play it on a pc. So much is for sure. However, this guy blames drm on it's original format and drm is not troubling at all when played on the players they are intended for. You simply can't compare it's effect to drm on downloadable mp3's or on pc game discs, because they have very different functions. All in all, I hate DRM but you can't really complain if you own a bd player and the original medium. It's like buying a house, put in a front door with a lock and then complaining you have to open that lock with a key. The analysis is so flawed it's not even entertaining any more.

About the money you pay for a movie. Paying a lot more for something that's marginally better is something we do everyday. I have a 1.8 liter engine in my car which is marginally better then the 1.6 in the same model and makes no sense since I generally take my bike to work and prefer motorcycles to drive for the rest of the time. Still I payed 6.000 Euro more for that model and why.... Even I don't know. Most movies are piss poor and not even worth my time if they were free, but many seem to disagree with me. Even to that extent that they built a entire industry around it. The movie industry they call it I believe and it's filled with poorly acting celebrity's who earn millions. If people want to be fans of them it's fine by me and if they want to enjoy the matrix for example on 7.1 audio with hd images I wish them the best. The difference between an upsacled dvd and a blu ray disc afterall is pretty big and can only not be noticed by people who whine about the prices of everything and are apperantly are to cheap to buy proper glasses.

Then the fellow continues to trash drm again. Something I agree with, but for some reason he only seems to do this to encourage piracy on blu ray. Not for any journalistic reason. He never points people to simply upscaling dvd's which are good enough in his view, but points them to reasons to get the movie for free. Kinda dubious.

The he goes and blames Sony for making their products updatable. Something a few (absolutely not all) manufacturers neglected to do with their bd players. His reasoning makes no sense. It's like blaming the wright brothers (flying pioneers) for all airline crashes after that. Manufacturers are simply responsible for their own product and blaming another for it is just poor vision.

Also, you do have blu ray players under 300 dollars. Hell, you can get them for a 100 and put them in your pc and that little black box he is staring at, that thing called a monitor is more then able to display hd images. Again something he failed to mention or more likely didn't even know because he hardly did any research if at all. If he did do so, he probably would have also known that the biggest blu ray disc can hold up to 500 gb and will be produced soon smashing his 300 gb hdd argument into the ground.

Only good point in his article is the way he points out drm as something terrible. Too bad he points to Slysoft as an excellent company for cracking their security, because company's like Slysoft who make large scale piracy possible with simple burning programs are basicly the reason we have drm in the first place.

I just wish the HD-DVD would come back to life.

Originally Posted by Slaymate

I just wish the HD-DVD would come back to life.

You and me both. With all the players out there that people snatched up on the cheap, you would think a market would exist for the movie disks.

It would have been better if movies would stay on DVD and are being compressed with the DivX method. The better DVD players already support the DivX 6 codec, giving the possibillity to play HD DivX movies (as long as you have the "right" tv). Ok, we consumers would have been paying extra for the royalties DivX Inc. is getting, but that would be compensated with the lower costs for the disks.

When it comes to games however, for those we will need the Blue-ray disks in the near future. But that's ok as long as game publishers take the loss (generated by the initial disk costs) for the time that the disks can not be produced cheaply.

I don't think we have to have Blu-Ray for games. That's a bunch of crap. HD-DVD would work just as well. Sony may require Blu-Ray for there crap. I wish you consule gamers would just shun Sony and send them into a Tail-Spin. I hate Sony.

This reminds me of the people who said we didn't need dvd back in the day. They thought cd's had enough space, and if they didn't we'd just use multiple cd's. The same ofcourse happened when the switch was made from cartridges to cd's for games (or floppydiscs to cd's, whichever you prefer)

People are just afraid of losing the standards they grown used too and everytime we are on the verge of a new media standard about to breaktrough into common standard like dvd did, blu ray is starting to do now and downloadable media will do very soon it gets commented.

Blu ray will also be used for pc games very soon. A year or less before we see them appear. Spacewise it perhaps won't be neccesary since we install games on the HDD, but putting the media uncompressed on a bd disc will mean larger files that will take more time to download for pirates and the blanc discs are simply too expensive to allow bulk piracy.

I could spend some time wasting my breath about why hd-dvd was and still is the weaker obsolete medium, but it's not worth it. Hd-dvd is dead and it will never ever return. However, you can always buy a hybrid hd-dvd/ blu ray player and flog a dead horse with that.

Gazz seems to be a fanboi for the things that the rest of you dislike all the time! LOL!

As for his take on the "article," I think he read a bit into it. The guy was not supporting piracy, he was just saying that for getting the best out of the media, piracy was a better answer to his issues with it all.

I have a ps3 since a few months and a full hd tv and have yet to buy a single blu-ray movie. I hate how they want to charge me double, sometimes triple the price of a dvd for a blu-ray movie.

Originally Posted by BuffaloChips

Gazz seems to be a fanboi for the things that the rest of you dislike all the time! LOL!

As for his take on the "article," I think he read a bit into it. The guy was not supporting piracy, he was just saying that for getting the best out of the media, piracy was a better answer to his issues with it all.

I have been right about 95% off all the things that would happen in the war between platforms so far, and have had way bigger battles then this with absolutely everyone against me. I could care less, since I know I am right anyway most of the time and when I am wrong, I admit to it and apologize if necessary. Only thing I have been completely wrong about is the huge impact of the Wii, I honestly thought it would be a gimmick that would slow down in sales quickly. Boy, was I absolutely wrong. Nintendo did a great job selling a pimped gamecube for a higher price, excellent marketing from their side.

About this blu ray battle now. Completely uninteresting, just posting to keep the forums alive as I have done in so many topics. I am after all well known for keeping the fire in debates alive after grinding matters up. This battle has been fought and won and now we get the usual response were every piece of bad news about a medium is used to convince people they were right, when they know they lost anyway.

If you transfer something from dvd/ blu ray to a faster hdd it will always load faster. It's on the faster medium after all and can be processed faster. His argument of getting a bd disc on hdd goes for any type of slower media and holds little ground if at all. His reasoning only promotes piracy, especially since he could have suggested to switch to good old dvd he seems to love so much. The only thing he read into was the user manual of slysofts burning program so he could illegally copy bd discs.