back to article Blu-ray sales to overtake DVD... next year

Blu-ray Disc sales will finally surpass those of DVDs next year. So says market watcher Futuresource. Its numbers are based on revenues. Next year, BD will account for 41 per cent of home entertainment spending on content, DVD for 26 per cent. Online-sourced video content will account for 15 per cent, and video-on-demand …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Title accuracy

    Please be specific - Blu-ray sales revenue to overtake DVD sales revenue

    I'd bet the actual number of DVDs sold will outnmber the number of Blu-Rays sold.

    Have you done "Apple sales overtake Dell" yet ?

    1. Lamont Cranston

      My thoughts exactly.

      BluRays simply cost more, so higher revenue does not mean higher volumes.

  2. SteveBalmer
    FAIL

    BD of course is the ONLY medium to provide PROPER HD.

    As clearly a massively compressed digital download whilst may technically be HD in resolution, looks shit because it's compressed to hell and back and encoded at a silly bitrate to keep the filesize/streaming requirements/download time low....

    There are idiots still that truely believe that download HD is the same as Blu-Ray HD... I sorta feel sorry for them, until I realise that most of them are either Apple fanboys, or Xbox die-hards that refuse to buy a PS3, then I just laugh at them.

    1. Matthew 25
      Meh

      Call me a luddite

      I just don't get blue ray for films. Most people either cant tell the difference between SD and HD or are just too far away from their telly for it to make a difference. Why bother?

      P.S. Since you're SteveBalmer you really shouldn't diss the eggsbox in public.

      1. defiler

        @Luddite

        Blu-Ray gives a better picture even on SD screens. You might not believe it, in which case fair enough, but with the higher bitrate of the encoding things just look super-clear. And a decent Blu-Ray on an HD screen is really spectacular. So long as you're not sitting too far away, of course.

        Yes, they're still a bit expensive. I'll buy Blu-Ray if I feel the movie justifies it or if I get it dirt-cheap. I'll buy DVD otherwise.

        I am concerned that "HD" downloads will just be 1080p with crappy encoding at the lowest bitrate they can manage. The nice thing with DVD/BluRay is that the medium is a set capacity so there's no penalty in filling it - so high-quality encoding is encouraged.

        1. jason 7
          Meh

          Well you'd think.....

          ...that filling a BD to capacity to get the best video with the least compression would be the trick but it isnt.

          For some reason Hollywood etc. rarely if ever fill a disc to the max. Even back in DVDs peak you rarely found a DVD that got anywhere near 7GB on a 9GB DVD. Around 6GB was the norm (even Superbits rarely filled the DVD to the max) and unfortunatley nowadays many movies on DVD now come in around 4.5GB. I guess this is either to make the gap between DVD and BD wider or just so they can release movies on single layer DVDs.

          I wonder if they average most initial BD movie releases to say 66% of the BD capacity. That way the studios can release the "improved remastered version" a few years later using the same scan/master but just up the bit rate 20% and tweak the colour to whatever has replaced the current cyan/orange scheme to increase the quality.

    2. The Fuzzy Wotnot
      Megaphone

      @SteveBalmer

      Do your parents know you're using their PC and internet connection to join adult tech discussion forums such as The Reg?

      Now go away, grow-up and come back when you're a little more mature.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Only Medium?

      I guess you have never seen the output of BDrebuilder, that shrinks a BluRay down to 4.7 GB to fit on a DVDROM. When done on the highest setting the difference is minimal, certainly less that the difference in quality between a good BD and a not so good one.

      And what makes you think everyone is downloading low quality versions anyway?

      I know some people who will download anything, I know another who goes for 4GB 1080p files and another who downloads 50GB ISO images. (which play quite happily on a Hisense 1080p or Asus O!Play, with it even working on the latter if they are burned to a BDROM and a USB BD drive plugged in)

    4. Sooty

      @SteveBalmer

      Download HD *can* be as good as blu-ray... it just generally isn't. the space on a blu-ray is used to reduce the compression as much as possible, not to improve quality, but to keep the decoding power needed down to a minimum.

      You could easily fit a HD movie on a dvd with the codecs used, with little to no loss of quality, but the processing power to decode it in realtime would have made the players prohibitively expensive.

      I do like blu-ray, and buy them in preference to dvd on most films, but mainly because the studios can't as easily get away with the shoddy transfer jobs they occasionally do on dvd, so they tend to be a lot better quality. But dvd's can be good as well... I have a few of the old superbit dvd's (you remember, they used all the "left over" space on a dvd to increase the bitrate to the max possible instead of including a load of extras) and they are great when upscaled!

    5. DannyAston
      Thumb Down

      The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

      TrueHD.

  3. Citizen Kaned

    hmmm

    spending isnt the same as sales. BR disks sometimes cost double that of a DVD. sales to be suggests physical copies, not the money spent.

    @"Packaged media on last legs?" - not for a while. download media needs to be much cheaper to own than bought retail copies else its a false economy. you can resell physical media, you cant with downloads.

    also unless we are all on 100mb lines then we wont get streamed Blu-ray quality content for a while (this includes the dolbytrueHD and master audio as BR isnt just about HD video, the audio is vastly superior also)

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Not buying it

    I'm not buying any Blu-ray discs as long as they come with their silly DRM-ridden crap.

    Not just because I believe DRM actually hampers innovation, but also because there is not a single player that can play encrypted discs without problems under my OS (linux).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Facepalm

      Oi Vey!

      So you run an OS that's defficent in some areas and that's the hardware's fault?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Facepalm

        Deficient OS?

        No. Deficient format. Quite deliberately so.

        Oh well. BD+ is probably doing more to encourage "piracy" than anything else out there. After all, once you've gone through the hoops, fucking about with keysdb.cfg and whatever else to make that BD work with your machine, you're going to want to keep the decrypted file around and maybe even share it with your friends so they don't have to jump through hoops.

        Oh but that's not the shitty restrictions management is it? No, all Toy Unix users are evil freetards and pirates and must be executed on sight!

        Facepalm, indeed.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        seriously

        All the downvotes for stating the bleedin obvious?

        If you dislike blu-rays solely because linux can't play them very well, it's hardly the fault of blu-rays. Perhaps if someone were to licence the decoders they could create a decent player?

        Maybe you could even try a different OS, that can play them without issue... something like Windows*

        And before you start on about free software, every dvd drive i have ever bought has thrown in a copy of powerdvd or windvd, and blu-ray drives throw in blu-ray playing software too... Now if only my monitor were HDCP compliant... damn drm may be evil after all :(

        *yes this was a joke!

  5. Robert E A Harvey

    Not in my house

    Not even got a DVD player on the telly, only on my 'buntu box. When that can play Blu-rip I might consider it, but while they try to control my other purchasing decisions they can do the other thing.

  6. Wheaty73

    Triple Play

    One reason I buy BDs - I get a pre-ripped copy for convenience, a DVD and a BD. Purchased more BDs this year simply because of the convenience of multi-format distribution. Don't give a fig about HD quality - VHS is fine for me, aside from the very rare film.

    1. Anon the mouse

      I think they might have figured out what people want

      There are 2 types of triple play too....

      The first has a BD, DVD and Digital like you describe.

      The second has a 3D BD, standard BD and digital.

      I'm working under the assumption that they have figured out that if you have a BD player you generally want a copy to throw around the internal network for all your devices too :D

      1. Wheaty73
        Thumb Up

        That would be right...

        Ironically I mostly watch the digital version on the TV connected to the Bluray player via DNLA.

        You can get 3D films now? Why would you ever want to do that? Cheaper to stab yourself in the eye with a spoon!

  7. Chris Harrison
    Stop

    @SteveBalmer - Why the rage?

    Under my TV there is a sony blu-ray player sat neatly above my XBox360, and do you know what? I can leave them there all day and all night without the smallest of arguments or fights.

    Even after I turn the lights out, they manage to co-exist. Bizarre isn't it?

    I assume you feel you're fighting for Sony to win the console war. I, and many others, don't wish you luck. Have you thought about what would happen to the quality of games on your beloved console if Microsoft and Nintendo took their ball and went home?

    As a consumer of games I hope the war continues for a long time...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meh.

    When I can buy the drives region-free at reasonably cheap (read: same as any other optical drive) prices, and there's the equivalent of DeCSS commonly available, then I'll think about it.

    Until then I'll buy the DVD, and download the blu-ray rip if I really want the HD version. Don't like it? Give me my region-free drives without attached bullshit, then!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      *Paints target on back*

      I know that Region specific playback was included as part of the BluRay spec, but thought that no-one had bothered to implentent it.

      Of course could be totally wrong about that.

      1. M Gale

        /me shoots a big rubber sucker dart

        "Movie studios have different region coding policies. Among major U.S. studios, Paramount Pictures and Universal Studios have released all of their titles region-free.[115][116] Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. have released most of their titles region-free.[117][118][119] Lionsgate and Walt Disney Pictures have released a mix of region-free and region-coded titles.[120][121] 20th Century Fox and MGM have released most of their titles region-coded.[122][123]"

        Just a little wiki-quoting there. Of course Wikipedia is not an academic source.

  9. jason 7
    FAIL

    Hmmmmm.....

    ...well as far as I am concerned and most of my friends and family also most of us stopped buying DVDs some time ago. As for BDs? You must be joking. We've bought most of those movies three times already (VHS/Widescreen VHS then DVD) so we really cant be bothered to buy them again.

    Since Hollywood is just about shoddy remakes and yet more failed Jennifer Anniston romcoms (she really must have some dirt on the Hollywood elite) whats the point in buying their product? Whether SD or HD its still shit.

    Instead of paying £15+ for this crap go to your local library and rent it for £2 instead. After all 90% of your precious DVD/BD collection has only been watched once anyway (yes it has, dont lie).

    So what this is saying is that poorly selling obsolete format BD will gradually overtake an even more obsolete and poorly selling format next year. Sales of BD will still be a fraction of what DVD was doing say 8 years ago.

    Well done! Champagne all round.

  10. Ian Stephenson
    FAIL

    I will be getting a BD player

    When and only when the magic smoke escapes from my dvd player.

    Even then I will not be replacing my DVD collection with BluRay.

    Anything I don't already have on DVD - I'll weigh up the cost/benefit of BD over DVD

    Latest DVD purchase - A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum £2.99 - Amazon not available in BD.

  11. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

    You can't buy BD

    Neither hardware nor discs - the DRM on them means you can only rent them.

    Any new disc you put into a BD player may disable either the player itself or any number of discs you paid for before. Same may happen any time the player is connected to the Internet. And there is nothing you can do to prevent that from happening, nor do you have any legal recourse if "your" expensive collection of BDs will be bricked one day.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      drm

      A disc may brick a player but it won't brick an older disc itself (that would require changing the data on the disc). If what you said occurred, then I'd reflash my unit, download the 'infected' movie and wait to see if this was really happening. If my ~1500 movie collection became obsolete because the movie industry wanted me to upgrade to a newer platform, then I'd just move to piracy without feeling imoral or unethical in the slightest. BD drm has already been broken, so it's not much of stretch, other than inconvenience, to rip my BD part of my collection.

      I'm one of those that upgrades, but I also give my hand-me-downs to family/friends that can't tell the difference.

      1. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

        AACS key revocation

        "it won't brick an older disc itself (that would require changing the data on the disc)"

        It will. It's done by adding a revocation certificate invalidating the old disc's key to the new disc.

        You player will load the revocation certificate(s) and the next time you try to play the old disc it won't work.

        This "functionality" is mandatory for AACS and AACS itself is mandatory for BD.

  12. Mike Bell
    Thumb Up

    HD for Me

    I'm the lucky owner of a 50" Kuro display and HD video looks awesome on it. I don't actually have perfect vision but the difference between SD and HD is immediately obvious to me. Easily worth the few quid extra that they charge for a Blu-Ray. I sometimes wonder if people who diss HD are plain blind or using rubbish equipment.

    I'll be glad to see the end of discs, though, because apart from anything else my movie collection is something like 600-strong and takes up a lot of space. One day, future generations will look back at posts like this and have a good laugh at hardware delivering a paltry 25GB from a spinning piece of aluminized plastic!

    1. M Gale

      My eyesight is fine.

      And on a 50" screen I'll say HD does make a difference. Not a massive difference, but it is there. Mostly, tellies like this are best for computer games where on-screen text is getting ridiculously small these days and barely readable on standard def screens.

      Now try the same trick on a 25" to 27" 4:3 screen viewed from the other end of a living room (say 3.5 to 4 metres away). Not so much difference now? We don't all buy fifty inch gargantuan monsters, and believe it or not most people stuff their tellies in the corner of the room, defying all the hideous squeals of the audiophiles about speaker placement and sweet spots. It's a telly, not a way of life.

      Anyway, for broadcast telly the bandwidth makes a hell of a lot more difference than the resolution. Try getting a high-def broadcast and mixing it back down through a SCART lead or something. Then compare it with the same broadcast in standard def and, despite both pictures having the same resolution, you'll see what I mean.

    2. OldBiddie

      Definitely a noticable difference

      It's in the smaller details where you spot it most of all.

      My collection is around the same level, but I'll keep the physical media though thanks - I prefer having a tangible product in my hands. There's no way I feel that a file on my HDD has as much worth, plus those boxsets look smart on the shelves.

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