Gadgetman: The uphill struggle of Blu-ray

Having purchased a PS3 late last year I have been looking forward to the purchase of my first Blu-ray disk, however as of yet I haven’t brought any.  Why not?  Well, for me price would be the biggest turnoff with product selection a some-what second reason.
Lets look a product selection first – I admit I am a fan of big budget Hollywood action flicks.  The more explosions the better.  And of course these kind of movies are the ones that often look best on a high-definition format.  The Blu-ray format has been around since 2002 and Blu-ray movies since mid-2006, but here in New Zealand the availability of disks has been very poor and most stores very slow in getting in on the action.  Only recently has the range expanded and now The Warehouse have a reasonable selection, and video rental stores are finally getting in on the act, but they are both still far short of the 890 titles available in Ausi, or the 1,140 available in the UK (Wikipedia Feb 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc ).  This was the same when DVD was released over here, and having brought an imported player the week they where released, I spent the next year buying discs from Amazon until the local market improved.
As for price, this is my biggest bugbear.  I was looking at Hellboy 2 yesterday on Blu-ray and DVD.  $46 for Blu-ray and $28 for DVD.  Until prices drop it is hard to justify spending this much on a movie.  Sure, there are some older titles that are less than $30 but the are not probably ones I would buy or watch anyway.  I would have thought that now Sony has ‘won’ the HD disc format war things would have improved.  But there are still problems which only add to the delays and price.
As for the argument I hear time and time again that eventually disc-based storage will be replaced by downloads over super-quick broadband connections, I call horse-shit on that.  With a fully loaded Blu-ray disc offering a full 50GB, downloading it would blow my monthly cap and cost me $40 in excess data charges and take days if not weeks to download, and that’s without using my Internet connection for anything else.  And of course that ignores the whole infrastructure requirements of 1000′s of people downloading multi-gigabyte files and the fact the movie (and music of course) industries hating P2P solutions (warning:PDF).  Until all that is resolved I don’t see discs disappearing from our living rooms and manifesting themselves in the ‘cloud’ of the Internet for many years, and therefore the requirement to buy discs.And if you argue ‘well I wouldn’t download a 50GB disc because the movie would be compressed and you wouldn’t download all the extras..’ then fine, I agree, but just watch 5 movies in a month at 7GB each and you still use more data than most plans in NZ offer, resulting in either excess charges or bandwidth speeds being capped.

How would I fix the problem and increase uptake?  Drop disc prices to the same as DVD movies, even if it is just for a limited time and try to saturate the market.  Plus get marketing with big screen TV manufacturers so people can really enjoy their new toys rather than watching sub-standard broadcast TV on a 50″ LCD or plasma.
Then again both studios and movie makers face a far bigger hurdle and one of their own creating: DVD.  The DVD format has seen the quickest uptake of any CE technology ever.  The uncle Joes and aunt Mary’s of the world with their $50 supermarket DVD players and 28″ CRT TVs who have no desire to buy a new HD format, and probably no desire to buy a new player and new TV, potentially costing $1000′s all for movies they are happy to watch on their current sets or at the local multiplex if they wants a ‘big screen’ experience.  DVD’s are everywhere and cheap with 1000′s titles and ‘specials’ often available for under $10 and this will take a long time for Blu-ray to catch-up with, let alone surpass.
Oh well, in the end I am happy and and did buy that Hellboy Blu-ray and grabbed Wanted as well (hey, it was on special!); perhaps it will be the incentive I need to buy more and do my bit to bring prices down.