Letters to the Editor
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Blu-ray's day in the sun may be a short one
The big problem for Blu-ray is that all it offers over conventional DVD is better quality. That's fine for the 25% or so of the population that gives a crap about quality and has a tee vee big enough to see the difference on, but what about the other 75%?
Seems to me that video on demand, either via the cable providers or just over the internet, offers both potentially higher quality as well as greater convenience than physical media like DVD or Blu-ray discs.
I think the same forces which have marginalized the CD over the past few years in favor of .mp3's and iPods are about to come into play for both DVD and Blu-ray, in a big way. Hard to see how a fledgling format like Blu-ray's gonna survive that kind of pressure. I don't know if it'll go the way of the SuperAudio CD and DVD-Audio, which met the iPod head on and lost, but it still might end up a lot like Laserdisc as a niche product for geeks.