Blu-ray: Who really knows?

I was recently trawling through the vast amounts of news on N4G when I came across this story. Basically, the article was claiming that, as the title says, Consumers find Blu-ray a turn off. Now let me start by saying that I honestly don’t know how well Blu-ray is doing or how well it will do, but this article was making this claim with no evidence of facts to back up their argument. Once you read through this, you could quite fairly make the same remark. However, I am not actually making any sort of claim at all. I would like Blu-ray to do well as anyone who owned and purchased a product would, but just like your letter to Santa as a child, wanting it doesn’t mean that you will get it.

What I found interesting about this story was nothing to do with it’s content, it was actually that just a few articles above it was this story. This article states (for those of you who can’t be bothered to read it) that “Blu-ray had its best month of sales ever in October” and that “Blu-ray disc sales have crossed the 20 million mark since the format was introduced”. All of this got me thinking. Who actually really knows?
We all know we’re in an economic recession and really, no-one knows how long it will last. Whether it be six months, a year, or several years; right now, no-one knows. This will definitely have an impact on not just Blu-ray sales, but just sales, which is not unexpected. So why is it that people feel it necessary to headline their article, “Is Blu-Ray dead?” or “Will The Dark Knight save Blu-Ray?”, which if you are reading this, I feel I could safely assume you have also seen many of these types of articles.

But since when was Blu-Ray dead? Who knows whether it will last? If so, for how long? Being a format that only really became a regular member to instore shelve space as of this year, there is no pre-recession trend to go on. If we were to look at DVD sales pre-2008 and as of this year, we may see a decrease in sales. If so we can make a reasonable estimate as to why this is and how many may sell next year. This just can’t be done with a format as new as Blu-Ray.

Ultimately this was not an article to discuss the life and death of Blu-Ray, just simply a place to vent that I just find the constant barrage of people making such bold comments without any real knowledge of how things will pan out, a tad annoying. If we were not in a recession, then you could probably predict with a reasonable amount of acceptance, but with the changing climate at the moment, people are just wildly guessing to make a story and no-one really knows.

Tags: blog, Blu-ray