Ryan Dillman

Long ago, before the HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats were even on the market, I predicted Blu-ray would be the eventual format winner.  It seemed like a no-brainer as the Playstation 3 was going to ship with a Blu-ray drive.  Those with long memories may recall that the Playstation 2 helped launch another disc format, the DVD.  In fact, when DVDs first came out, rental chains such as Blockbuster stocked them in the video game aisle, as very few people had stand-alone players yet.

Now that Blu-ray is the clear format winner, there are still several hurdles before the format is actually profitable for Sony and their partners.  For one thing, you need a high-definition TV to see any benefits from Blu-ray and not everyone has upgraded yet.  Secondly, not everyone feels there’s enough improvement from DVDs to Blu-rays to justify the cost of upgrading their players and movie libraries.  Third, Blu-ray is still competing with another high-def format that I think will eventually win in this new format war:  high-def digital downloads.

With cable providers and video game consoles both offering on-demands high-def movies purchases and rentals at the click of a button, is the attraction of owning a physical disc enough to make Blu-ray a success?  Will a generation trained on buying constant downloads such as ringtones and games for cell phones and other devices have a problem doing the same for their living room television?

I think in the short term, there is still a place for Blu-ray as a storage media if nothing else.  50 gigs of space on a single-layer disc and 100 gigs on a double-layer is nothing to sneeze at.  Until 100 gig flash drives are $10 a pop, Blu-ray is a much cheaper format for storing massive amounts of data.  Pioneer’s claim that they’ve created a 400GB, 16-layer, possibly Blu-ray compatible disc is even more promising.  Downloads are great but people will always want to make backups of their data, and we seem to have more and more personal data every year as cameras, camcorders, and other digital devices become more and more affordable.

I have a Playstation 3 and so far I think I’ve spent more money downloading content from the PS3 store than on actual discs, although I have rented several Blu-rays from Blockbuster.  As an old school video game collector, I never though I’d latch onto the download concept, as I love buying and trading actual physical games, and yet I’ve spent $100+ on game downloads for my Wii at $5-10 a pop.  If a child of 80′s console gaming and colleting like myself can learn to appreciate game downloads, anyone can.