It is a nice read, but misses out on some of the negatives which aren't really presented from Andy and the BDA. Keep in mind as I say this, I am one of the few staunch believers that Blu-ray from day one would be a success and I have criticized AH extensively for almost every negative statement made against HD formats...
Blu-ray is seeing increased growth but is using numbers which include PS3 consoles. It is very difficult to determine from the press release whether or not the discs sold information is strictly movies, or if it inludes PS3 games. Keep in mind, the first '2 million month' occurred in 2008, but was that for movies, or movies and games? It would be good if it was for movies only, but hard to tell.
I think that consumer adoption is nearly guaranteed, but I also believe that to expect Blu-ray to outpace DVD would be naive and it is more about spinning for bragging rights instead of actually being able to put up real numbers. Blu-ray has an audience which is mostly limited to HDTV owners, which is a smaller percentage of the US population than SDTV owners. So, first a TV owner must decide to buy a HDTV, then they must spend more to get a Blu-ray player to go along with it.
It is logical, that a HDTV owner should have a HD disc player to go along with it. It is an easy sale. But, first people have to have the money to buy.
The recession will keep BD from truly reaching its full potential in the next couple of years, but I expect that BD will still see solid growth, and we will see better and better players for less money.
This is the inevitability that I blame Audioholics for completely missing from day one. Blu-ray & HD DVD both have very similar potential for quality, but with a product which is obviously a good thing, there has never been a CE product to my knowledge with so diversified of CE support which has ever failed.
"A lot of readers blamed Audioholics at large for an HD DVD bent during the format war."
No, Audioholics had a bent against HD in general and didn't realize that HD DVD was never the actual competitor to Blu-ray. Blu-ray was always setting itself up to be the competitor to DVD, and had to work very carefully to get rid of HD DVD to ensure that the proper focus on DVD could be properly in the spotlight.
Good to see at least a bit of turn from AH on this.
Now if we can see some more of the BD players put into the hardware reviews it would be a good thing. It was ten months between Audioholics reviewing their last HD disc player and the most current review. TEN MONTHS! That's a full production cycle for most companies, and even worse, the player reviewed before the recent Memorex, was the Toshiba A35 HD DVD player.
I really hope AH will step up with reviews of the Samsungs, Panasonics, and Sony players as well as some of the lesser knowns, such as Oppo.
EDIT: Audioholics did an excellent job slamming both HD formats 2.5 years ago... Yet, this was my response to it all...
http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=187883#post187883 - Would love to know what you guys think now.
