Despite Blu-ray succeeding in winning the format war with the help of the PS3, according to a new report from Bernstein Research, mass Blu-ray adoption is predicted to not take place until Blu-ray players fall below $200. This price barrier is not expected to be breached until the end of 2009.
Another problem is that unlike the change from VHS to DVD where the upgrade in picture quality was very noticeable on virtually every TV set, there is much less interest in consumers upgrading from DVD to Blu-ray. The first reason is that a lot of households still don't have a HDTV set and another problem is that many consumers are happy DVD quality or the cheaper HD upscaling DVD player alternatives and don't see the need to fork out on a Blu-ray player. As a result, the report predicts that only around 1% of households will have a Blu-ray player by the end of this year and that it will not be until the end of 2011 before this figure reaches 25%.
On the other hand for the movie industry, the report expects the sales of Blu-ray to grow 2.4% year after year between 2007 and 2011, compared to a decline of 2.2% had there not been Blu-ray discs. The number of ratio of Blu-ray discs to households with Blu-ray players is quite low at 3 to 1, much lower than the peak of 30 DVDs to 1 DVD player household when consumers started changing over to DVD players. The most likely reason here is that while most Americans were delighted to switch from VHS to DVD, many don't see anything wrong with their DVDs to want to upgrade to Blu-ray and those that do notice the difference may only upgrade select favourites that they are really interested in watching again in HD.
Finally, while the PS3 effectively puts a Blu-ray player in every home that gets a PS3, it turns out that not many consumers seem to care about this feature, particularly since most PS3 owners bought their console to play games on with no intention of ever playing movies on it. So the report predicts that it will not be dedicated Blu-ray players take off that Blu-ray disc sales seriously take off.
