"Blu-ray roadmap stretching out for at least the next five to ten years,"

[md99]

Blu-ray sales to top 100M in '09

Tuesday 24-Feb-2009 7:51 AM "Blu-ray is here to stay," says industry research firm

Sales of the Blu-ray format seem to be surging despite the economic downfall. It's being forecast that the format will top 100 million sales worldwide in 2009 according to industry research firm.

"Blu-ray is here to stay, with a lucrative roadmap stretching out for at least the next five to ten years," says Futurescope.

"Last year in the US alone, BD video retail sales increased by a whopping 320% to 24 million units; and we're going to see momentum continuing in 2009, with over 80 million disc sales forecast," it adds.

"BD disc sales continue to expand into all major markets and genres although to date the business has gravitated towards new release titles. In particular, the action adventure genre dominates, appealing strongly to the young male technology adopter, which also closely matches the PS3 owner profile."

And what of all the talk of Blu-ray being killed off early by downloads?

"Although movie downloads are making noises in the marketplace, mainstream adoption will be a much more gradual process, with our projections showing that 12% of US consumer expenditure on home video will originate from online in 2012, with a slightly lower proportion in Europe," reckons Futuresource.

I tend not to pay much attention to the 'forecasts' which pop up every few months but upgrading and repurchasing a large portion of my DVD collection, as nice as the BR alternative is, sure can be a pain in the ass. And costly too.

Not sure I'm too keen on going down the same route in a couple of years time again. I certainly won't be doing so if BR is eventually replaced by digital downloads but were a new optical medium to be introduced will we be expected to double (treble, quadruple, etc) dip again?

Actually, can BR/1080pTV/resolutions even be drastically improved upon to make a new format worthwhile?