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Blu-ray Wins - What does the future hold?

Blu-ray has finally come up on top as the preferred high definition format by the industry, and about time too!

This is great news for the Sony Corporation, as it failed to let history repeat itself. But how sucessfuly will the Blu-ray format be?

The history of the battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD

The eventual success of the format war must of been greatly aided by the Playstation 3. 10.5 million PS3’s have been bought since its release in late 2006, and every single one of these is a Blu-ray capable player; and this is not even counting the stand-alone players in households.
In contrast Toshiba have only managed to sell one million HD DVD players. The Xbox 360 does have a HD DVD player, but consumers are forced to pay for this separately. Sales figures indicate that 360 owners hadn’t really bothered to go to the additional expense, therefore this was a further blow to the HD DVD brand.

Will Blu-ray succeed though?

While there has been dithering relating to the next high-definition format, companies like Sky and Virgin Media have been effectively running another High Definition medium. The medium of the TV, through the satellite or cable.

Sky HD
Sky have proven that there is no really need for a physical high definition format with the advent of the Sky HD platform. There are currently around 14 HD channels on offer (dependant on your subscription), and they offer 1080i picture with 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound.
The picture quality difference between SD and HD is stunning. For example, watching football you can read the football shirts when the wide shot is shown, blades of grass can be made out, and the football looks very sharp, rather than just been a white blur. Is it worth the extra £10 subscription? Yes. Like Sky+, which carried a £10 subscription in its early days, Sky HD is almost likely to follow suit.

Virgin Media
Unfortunately, I don’t have any firsthand experience when it comes to the Virgin Media’s HD service, but I have heard some very good things. Unlike the Sky HD service, Virgin offer you on demand HD programmes, like Lost for instance. This is probably the only advantage over the Sky service, because the subscription costs to receive all of the HD services with Virgin are likely to be much higher than the similar subscription package with Sky. Also, Virgin Media customers are still without the possession of the Sky One channel, where very popular America TV shows are currently aired (Prison Break, Lost and 24). Therefore Sky customers will not only be able to watch these programmes, but they will also be able to watch it in full HD glory!

The Internet
Although many commentators are suggesting that the Blu-ray format will effectively loose out to the internet, they often overlook more of the technicalities of this approach.
For starters, the average broadband speed in the UK is around 3Mbps. Therefore if someone wished to download a 1080p HD movie, together with lossless audio and all of the special features, they would be waiting for around 30 hours or more for the download! This would cause so much internet congestion in itself if widely adopted, and ‘fair use policies’ would have to be re-thought too, that I don’t think this is a worthy option.
Secondly, the personal computer isn’t common place in many people’s living rooms, and thus many people would be without the ability to watch a high def movie on their large HD-ready TV.
Devices like Apple TV, Slimbox, and other network media streamers are too complicated to use and configure that they are very unlikely to take hold of the mass market.

Conclusion

Blu-ray does have a future, and I predict that it will become as common place as the DVD has become in the past decade. It’s simple, the prices will improve, the technology is great, and future updates could improve the Blu-ray experience as well. As long as the internet isn’t piped into everyone’s homes at 100Mbits/s and the backbones aren’t 1,000Gbit/s, the internet is not a vaiable way of ‘transporting’ large high definition content.
The price, (which is the prominent issue presently), for both the players and the discs, will bound to come down to DVD prices in the coming years. As the format becomes more popular, and as time passes, more efficient ways in production as well as economies of scale will take place.

Currently the best value Blu-ray player is the Playstation 3. Not only does this device hold a decent Blu-ray player, capable of outputting 1080p pictures, with lossless audio, it also contains the most powerful next generation console too. M