How fast consumer moves from DVD to Blu-Ray.

[Mark Suszko]

One of the selling points of BluRay players here is that many of them also function as internet streaming video devices for things like Amazon and Netflix. The players are now cheap enough, but the disks are still in my opinion overpriced here. Since the players can up-convert a DVD and make it look pretty good, there is little incentive to re-purchase DVD titles in BD, but if you don’t stream and don’t have a huge DVD collection, then you’re more likely to buy or rent bluRay discs. DVD is dirt-cheap here now.

What I wish had happened was that bluray RECORDERS had been introduced in the consumer market in the U.S. like they were in Japan; then the format would be more prevalent here than it is now. Streaming and cloud-based sharing of files is the coming things, for good or ill. There may not be another hardware-based recording format to replace BluRay, before the cloud becomes truly ubiquitous.

[Stephen Smith]

I agree with Mark, the price for Blu-ray players has dropped a lot. If I purchase a disc it will be on Blu-ray but I don’t purchase movies very often. The last movie I bought was Inception. However, with a promo code you can rent a new release blu-ray disc for a day for the price of a candy bar. In my mind that is a great value. As for what our clients want, blank blu-ray discs are still a lot of money compared to blank DVDs, so most clients only want it on a DVD…….that is if they want it on any disc at all. I would say that 95% of the videos I do only go on TV or the web. The cloud will replace discs in the United States in my opinion. I have a bunch of old tapes of films I made with my friends growing up. In stead of putting them on a disc I decided that Vimeo is a better place for them. I don’t have to worry about damaged tapes or disc once I’m done digitizing them.

Stephen Smith

Utah Video Productions

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