The Time has come to say goodbye to Blu-ray…

[Grant Matrix]

Many of you make the very valid point that DVDs were also expensive upon initial release in the mid 90's. However at the same time that DVD came into being, online shopping was taking it's first steps to becoming something big. Amazon was still relatively young, Buy.com was just getting started and Deepdiscount.com didn't even exist back then.

Online sellers had the most incredible deals, buy 2 for $20. Spend $30 get $10 in credit, etc. Shipping prices were insanely cheap. The online retailers in a bid to establish themselves really raised the bar on sales and deals. B&M stores were very very slow to adopt DVD leaving online as the place to turn to build your movie collection. Obviously they were still making profit even while offering these deals and it wasn't until about 3-4 years into the format that B&M stores finally began to competivly match prices with etailers.

The problem is that deals are now few and far between. Last year's BOGOs were awesome, but then again Blu was trying to win a war. There were a couple awesome BOGOs earlier in 2008, but for the most part those days are gone. Now you get B2G1, where the etailers raise their prices for the sale.

The Blu-ray camps thinks that thay have won the war, but they really haven't. They won a single battle in the larger war for our entertainment dollars. VOD and digital downloads are still in it to win. While all of us here have a great appreciation for the physical media and its superior everything, there is a larger segment of society who will be happy with the quality of streaming media, somthing I am vehemently opposed to.

Price is an issue and the way the Blu-ray camp is going I can't help but feel they are pricing themselves in the same direction as the music indisutry. $18-20 CDs is one small reason the recording industry is in such disarry. Movie pirating is on the rise and the stuidos feel it is becomming a bigger and bigger issue. Prices on Blu-ray movies need to decrease and until that happens the adoption rate will remain steady and not at levels that the stuidos and hardware manufactutures would like to see.

I would love to be able to afford the best quality all the time, but given a choice of having 2-3 wants and being able to buy them all vs only being able to buy one, I am going with the more is more option.