One has to wonder what the Blu Ray market would look like if not for the Playstation 3.
I don't own a Blu Ray player, even though I'm exactly the kind of person who would buy one. The problem right now is that Blu Ray provides a hugely inconsistent experience, depending on which player you get. Not all players currently on retail shelves can play all disc, or all content on all discs. Some players have to have firmware updates applied, which requires a computer and a flash drive, or maybe the player has an Ethernet port, or maybe you have to get a disc from the manufacturer. Some players have complex user interfaces with tons of non-Blu-Ray-related features like Web browsers and whatnot; others don't. If you want a Blu Ray player that just plays discs, in other words one that's identical to a typical DVD player except high-definition, you have to actively search for one. And you're not guaranteed to find it.
Right now, Blu Ray is struggling because people dislike the impression that they're paying for something they don't need. HD itself was a bit of a struggle; people saw it as the invention of some shadowy conglomerate who wanted the public to buy their TVs and assorted products all over again. That's mostly over now, and generally people agree that HD really is worth having, but most people (I'm talking average adults here, not nerds) don't care about watching Internet videos on their televisions. They see Blu Ray players that have all these additional bells and whistles, and resent the fact that they're being "forced" to pay for features they won't use, because players without those features are harder to find.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have the Playstation 3, which people who play video games bought because they wanted to play video games. The fact that it had a Blu Ray player in it was no big deal; that's just the format Sony chose to package games for that system.
Long story short, now there's this small but significant installed base of Playstation 3s out there, and people who probably neither needed nor wanted a Blu Ray player find that they have one. So they start buying discs.
I've been asking around, among the people I know who are into this kind of thing, to find out what the consensus is for the best Blu Ray player on the market today. You know what the answer is? The Playstation 3. It's almost universal; that's the one to buy.
I knew what I thought about that, but to see if it was just me I asked other people who also don't own Blu Ray players yet. They all said the same thing: "Of course I wouldn't buy a Playstation 3 to watch movies on. I don't play video games, why would I spend money on something I don't want just to use only a part of it?"
Which is exactly how I felt. So while this is all anecdotal and totally non-scientific, it looks to me like the Blu Ray market is in an ugly place right now. Nobody actually wants to buy what they're being sold. People who want to replace DVD players with Blu Ray players want DVD-only-in-high-def. That's hard to find, because these devices have all this other junk attached, junk you have to pay for. It raises the question: If a Blu Ray player with Netflix and Youtube and a USB port and Netcast and Cinemanow and TrueHD sound and BD Live and Media Host and Express Reaction Startup (whatever that is) costs $250, shouldn't a Blu Ray player without all that junk cost about
$11.50? Screw it, they say. I'll stick with DVD.
