The Quickening: What happened to the Blu-Ray? · 1:14pm Apr 30th, 2018
Several years ago I remember a joke in an episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer visited a garbage dump, and in one corner lay a cemetery for VHS and another for laser discs (it was around the time that the DVD format came with much strength), and next to such space, there was another with a sign that read "reserved for DVDs", mocking about how a modern technology becomes obsolete in a short time.
The Blu-Ray is the successor format of the DVD, and the logic would indicate that it would be burying its predecessor completely like the DVD did with the videotapes, right?
Well... that hasn't happened, at least not with the expected speed, making the punchline of the joke in the animated series not that impactful...
Films in the format are already seen in all kinds of stores and distributors, and yet, I know few people who seem to acquire films in Blu-Ray. It's more than casual evidence and anecdotes, when Fox News, a monolith of the old guard and the status quo of the media recognizes that Blu-Ray has failed to "hit" you know that things have changed.
"Why?" It is the question, since we know the fact.
The Blu-Ray faced another similar format, the HD-DVD, in a commercial war that seemed to be a tracing of the old battle "VHS against BETAMAX" that happened in the 80's, and like finally there had to be a winner , the Blu-Ray was supported by the industry to be the standard in the storage of home data: this happened already in 2008... ten years ago.
It doesn't seem much difference, but I remember that in those ten years the DVD went from being a luxury item to a device that suddenly all seemed to have, and how not to show excitement? It was a huge step forward: more capacity, more "bonus" in each unit, and small details that may not seem relevant today but that completed the "sale" in the mind of the consumer (such as the fact of not having to rewind like in the old-times)
And that's just one of the problems: the jump from VHS to DVD was revolutionary, while the jump from DVD to Blu-Ray is more than anything "evolutionary". Does the image look better? Yes... but not with a notable and enormous difference, and none of the extras seems to differentiate the new format from the previous one, at least not enough to encourage your purchase.
It also doesn't help that it was launched in the midst of a great recession: at the end of the day, Blu-Ray is a luxury, and those are the first things to be cut in a home budget in times of difficulty. It doesn't help much the fact that many users don't know that in a Blu-Ray can see their old DVDs, so a large part of consumers believe that they will have to replace their entire collections once again (not to mention Blu Rays are fucking expensive).
But finally, perhaps the most powerful reason for this "failure" is a simple rule of capitalism, and I mean, GOOD capitalism: there is a better product at better prices.
I'm talking about streaming services, or broadcasting movies and series over the Internet.
Services such as Netflix, i-Tunes or Hulu have changed the playing field: instead of paying a high price for a disc with only one movie, you can pay a fixed rent per month, or in the case of Hulu to broadcast free series with the detail of seeing commercial announcements in the broadcast. The quality is not that good? Maybe, but for the ordinary audience it doesn't seem to matter, just as we know that a song in stereo won't be heard the same as in a PC speaker, but it doesn't prevent us all from having our songs there to listen from time to time.
Of course, it's not necessarily late for the Blu-Ray: eventually the prices will fall to the point where the consumer thinks it's worthy to be acquired, but the industry has changed forever, and it's likely that many will skip the new disk in turn to launch completely in the stream: it's already happening, and I'm not talking about false sites, but real companies that have Hollywood breaking their heads because they don't make the money they used to do.
Only time will tell.
I used to collect Blu rays. Now for movies and shows I want I just buy them online at Amazon.
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Same here. Because of the prices, I only buy them if I really liked the movie (Shawshank Redemption, Life of Pi, Wall-E) or if it's the only format currently available (Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes series, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). I don't buy online because I want to make sure the product I'm getting is authentic or complete.