Can't We Have a Positive Discussion About Blu-ray for Once?

[Damion Chaplin]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061207-8378.html' target='_blank'>http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061207-8378.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Blu-ray is losing the opinion war. So says Cymfony, a company that measures market influence. Its newest report, "A Blue Christmas for Blu-ray," claims that HD DVD has more positive buzz than Blu-ray, but not for the reasons you might imagine... The most common complaint (26 percent) about Blu-ray was a "general dislike" for the format, based (so says Cymfony) on two things: a long history of failed Sony formats (think MiniDisc, Beta, ATRAC) and a perceived arrogance on the part of the company. Second on the list was Sony's decision to bundle a Blu-ray player with the PlayStation 3 (21 percent). Many gamers resent being forced to pay a higher cost for a product they might not want. "Format wars" was third, with only 16 percent of the complaints."</i><br /><br />My, that <i>is</i> news. :wink: To be fair though, I don't think this was a very scientific report. Cymfony based their report on blog and discussion board postings and found HD-DVD had 46% more "positive discussions" than Blu-ray. I do hope Cymfony knows those boards are full of raving idiots like myself. :lol: I have a lot of friends and co-workers, and not one of them has an online presence on any type of discussion board. Yahoo Messenger is about as deep as it gets for them.

[Jerry Raia]

Hasn't Sony lost every format war it has been in?

[Felix Torres]

Ah, but message boards is where the early adopters congregate and were savy second-wave adopters go to research issues. Take a stroll by the golden eyeball foruns on a place like, say AVSFORUM, and you'll find a lot less good things said about BD now than even six months ago. Sony stuck a knife in the back of BD by launching it with single-layer MPEG2 content and then Samsung twisted the knife with their firmware blunder.
Net result is that the folks most likely to spend $1000 on a player got ticked off.

And this filters down.
(Try a simple test; google up Blu-Ray player and movie reviews; like a typical second waver wuld. See what you find. Lots of comparisons to Hd-DVD and not necessarily flaterring ones.)

At a minimum, Sony now faces an advertising campaign of Apple-esque proportions to appeal to the not-so-early adopters, since most of the frontliners have already jumped on HD-DVD ($500 buys a decent supply of movies, after all.) and are pretty much lost to Sony. Their best hope now is to aim directly for the affluent but less-well-informed (yuppie) crowd and try to make BD kewl with massive advertising. This is doable but not as easy as grabbing onto the golden eyeball early adopters.

That is what those folks have been measuring; the loss of the early adopters/leading influencers.

Want to run a poll?
Who here would recommend BD or HD-DVD to anybody, for immediate purchase?

They are talking about us, after all. :wink:

[Felix Torres]

For that matter, who here would recommend the purchae of a PS3 before next XMAS?

[Vincent Ferrari]

I'm one of the many who believes that by the time this war shakes out, people will be regularly downloading HD content and the winner of the format war probably won't matter that much, especially since in the end, HD and Blu Ray are both huge improvements over standard DVD's.

That being said, I think Blu Ray has an advantage in that if the PS3 succeeds (and there's no reason to think it won't right now), everyone who buys one instantly has a Blu Ray player.

Secondly, Sony is heavily advertising its new line of Blu Ray equipped laptops on XM (they even have Opie and Anthony doing live reads!) which means they're pushing the technology much harder than the HD-DVD folks.

I don't really have a dog in this fight. I don't have an HD TV simply because I don't watch enough TV for it to matter if I do or not, I don't have a PS3 and will never have one, and I don't have an HD DVD player. I think the Blu Ray folks do have a bit of an edge on Sony's back. I don't think this is going to be another Beta.

[randalllewis]

There is also the more ephemeral but important issue of the name. This is not an early adopter issue, but for the second wave and general populations: HD DVD is a brilliant combination of two tech terms that are widely understood. Blu-Ray not so much. Blu-Ray could be almost anything, it does not necessarily evoke technology. It could be a type of gas furnace for all the average citizen knows. Including the drive in Playstation might be a way to drive sales of players, assuming there are units to sell, but it doesn't spread the format to the masses. People who will buy a PS3 would buy it with an HD DVD player just as well. Sony has not done well in marketing basics for sometime. It thrives by the strength of its name and reputation and the breadth of its product line alone.

[Philip Colmer]

Here is quite a positive report on Blu-Ray, although it is mostly looking at it from a storage perspective:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36288

--Philip