The future is Blu, man

According to a German optical disc equipment maker called Singulus, Blu-Ray is being adopted faster than DVD was. They are basing this on the fact that they have gotten orders for 21 Blu-ray dual-layer machines in the last three months. According to them, this shows that Blu-Ray is being embraced much faster than DVD was over 11 years ago. The stats show that at this period in the DVD lifecycle, Singulus had only received order for 17 machines.

In the recent war-of-the-formats, Blu-Ray was declared the winner, with HD-DVD going the way of BetaMax. This was mainly due to the backing of the major Hollywood studios gradually sliding into the Blu-Ray camp, leaving HD-DVD with few friends where it mattered.

MyTake – Stretching it, I think. For a start, there are more of us about these days (well duh) and technology has become more integrated into our daily lives. As such, there are probably more early-mid adopters among us and let’s face it, we’ve had a while to get used to the idea of Blu-Ray

HD DVD feeling blu

Having been around the first time Sony fought a format war, I kind of thought that they deserved better luck this time around. After losing out with the BetaMax format over 20 years ago, it’s looking increasing likely that the company’s high definition DVD format (Blu Ray) is about to be crowned winner as the biff-up that is HD DVD Vs Blu-Ray draws to a close.

The HD DVD corner has become an increasingly lonely place as more and more of its supporters defected to Blu-Ray, the most notable being Warner Bros and most recently, Wall Mart. The only one still in the HD DVD corner is Toshiba, and it looks like they are about to call it quits with News agency Reuters quoting an unnamed Toshiba source as saying: "We have entered the final stage of planning to make our exit from the next-generation DVD business."

Blu-ray, developed by a Sony-led consortium, looks to be the future of disc-based movies, but is the future in discs? With broadband speeds increasing, movie downloads on the increase, hardware like Apple TV and software like Xbox 360’s Video Marketplace already out there, you have to wonder why we’re still talking discs.

MyTake - When I asked a good mate of mine his opinion, he’s response was: “So that makes 99 per cent of the market standard DVD and 1 per sent Blu-Ray”, he’s got a good point there. Market saturation is a long way off and the hardware is still expensive – and I don’t just mean the Blu-Ray players, you’ll need a HD LCD/Plasma to go with it. There’s still competition in the market for Blu-Ray, they need to pay attention to the life cycle of the DVD and look at the development of downloadable movies – I think it’ll be a photo finish.