Another casualty of the format war?

[JadedRaverLA]

Originally Posted by radagast

I believe that so much money has been spent by the BD side fighting this stupid format war, that there hasn't been R&D funds available to develop a relatively inexpensive Blu-ray recorder.

I disagree. The original BD format, released in Japan in 2003, was a recordable device. Although the format changed, and the cartridge was removed from the BD format, it's still designed from the ground up as a recordable format. In Japan, most of the standalone BD devices are recorders.

I DO agree, though, that part of the reason those devices have been largely limited to the Japanese marketplace, though, is because Toshiba was pushing ultra-cheap HD DVD players... and no one wanted to release a (more expensive) recorder in that market.

Even now, though, there are still a lot of problems with releasing BD recorders (except PC drives) on a wider scale. Most people in the U.S. would want PVR and digital cable support on a BD recorder... not just over the air signals. Add to that the whole issues surrounding copy protection of recorded broadcasts, etc, and we may still have to wait a bit before BD recorders are released in the rest of the world.