Is Blu-ray just for the "In Crowd?"

[Afrobean]

Originally Posted by RiseDarthVader

The people that say digital downloads will take over are the same people that own or work for HDD/Server companies.

Actually, more likely is that they pirate all of their movies and haven't spent a cent on media lately and don't intend to in the future. They see how great their illegal copies of BD rips are and they think "screw buying discs, THIS is the future!"

Originally Posted by dolphinc

Evrytime I read a Poll about anything technology related, I can find 3 other polls that state the opposite. Sampling 2500 people out of 300mil will not give you an accurate reading, demographics, household income, level of education can change an outcome easy. The only "POLE" I care about has a stripper attached to it.

Actually, assuming a good representative sample (which is probably not the case here), 2500 is a good sample amount that gives a fair margin of error. The problem with this isn't in the amount of people polled, but rather in the way they were polled and the way the data was manipulated and the way the results were reported.

Originally Posted by dolphinc

Correct, to download Blu quality video and audio you would have to have a fiber connection to support that kind of bandwidth. Even though it is coming I think we are still at least 8-10 years away from wide availablity for that technology.

Actually illegal rips of BDs are relatively good quality and they sidestep the issue of bandwidth by the filesharing structure of torrents. The user still has to be able to download enormous files, but the real problem on the commercial end isn't explicit here: there is no server that needs to be able serve the enormous files to thousands of nodes quickly and simultaneously.

But even then, the rips are transcoded at a lower bitrate and unless I'm mistaken, probably feature downgraded audio as well. Oh, and they're illegal.

Originally Posted by dolphinc

I agree with you except that they need to standardize the format. How many times do you read a post about people who buy a new Blu player and it won't play a specific movie, everyone ask, did you get the latest firmware? I had this problem last month, I bought a Samsung BD3600 and I had a hard time getting Ironman to load. The updated firmware just came out this week. These are the kinds of things that can discourage a person from getting into a new format.

I've never updated my firmware on my Panasonic BD30 and I've not had any problem with any of my ~400 discs. Sucks if your player has issues, but it's not something plaguing all players.

By the way, I think this article was already linked to here before. They use the same flawed and TOTALLY INCORRECT survey data results from Harris not long ago. Anyone with a brain dismissed these results completely, but people with an agenda latched on and wrote up bogus blog posts about how Blu-ray was dying or dead.