If Blu-Ray Launched And No One Noticed, Would It Matter?

Overhype

from the just-saying dept

We’ve noted recently that we honestly couldn’t care much less about the supposed “battle” over next generation DVD formats — as the industry is doing pretty much everything in its power to make sure that no one cares. Including extra, cumbersome copy protection combined with a standards battle that will confuse and alienate customers and suppliers. On top of that, recognize that other forms of media delivery using hard drives and networks are becoming more reasonable every day, and the advantages to disc-based content continues to decrease. Still, that didn’t stop someone from submitting a story excitedly talking about how Blu-Ray players and a few movies will hit the stores soon. Of course, they’ll be coming to the stores at a price of “around $1,000” which should convince perhaps the four or five people who are excited about Blu-Ray to buy into it, but few others. Honestly, if they really want people to adopt this new format when there are so many other choices, why put up such a huge barrier? Most people are going to have no clue why they should buy this new system, and at a price many times more than existing DVD players not many are going to be convinced. Of course, the industry response is just that this is how they always price new offerings (they did the same thing with DVD players after all) and prices will drop after (a) all the suckers with too much money have bought in and (b) economies of scale kick in. The problem, though, was that when DVD players were introduced they didn’t have quite the same level of competition as exists today. So, either the industry needs to go on quite the “education” (some might say “brainwashing”) campaign about why these new DVDs are worthwhile, or it will end up in the (large) pile of over-hyped new technologies that it turns out customers never actually wanted.