Downloading Will Be The Death of Blu-Ray

Predicting the demise of Blu-ray is a popular sport – and it has just gained another fan.

Consumer review specialist Reevoo has come out with a report saying that the high-def format is fighting a losing battle against HD download services and hard drives.

It suggest consumers continue to favor DVD players – despite the price of Blu-ray players falling significantly in the past few months.

But the Reevoo report says that when customers have to upgrade, they are happy to skip Blu-ray altogether and go straight to a combination of downloads and hard drives.






According to its data and reviews, consumes favor the "convenience" of digital downloads and digital hard drive recorders.

Whether Blu-ray’s demise will be quite as swift as Reevoo are suggesting remains to be seen.

There’s no doubt, though, that the format really needs to start making waves soon.






Reevoo summarises the three main factors it identifies as impeding the uptake of Blu-ray as:

 

 – Improved DVD players – DVD players are still outselling Blu-ray players by a factor of 10:1 according to Reevoo data. Newer high-end DVD players capable of ‘upscaling’ a standard definition image to near-HD, the gap between DVD and Blu-ray has shrunk to the point that shoppers see no reason to upgrade
 

– Blu-ray pricing and inflated disc prices

– Households are downloading – The window for Blu-ray to become the leading video format is closing rapidly. The format is also competing with downloads through services such as Apple’s iTunes store which offers HD content for rental or purchase at a lower price than Blu-ray discs.Hard-drive based personal video recorders (PVRs) sold twice as many units as Blu-ray in the UK over Christmas according to Reevoo data