The European Chairman of the Blu-ray Association stood up at the Cebit conference in Germany this week and said that the war for ownership of the next generation DVD format is already over and predicted that Blu-ray would replace DVDs within three years.
While we have been preaching for about 3 years now that Blu-ray was a slam dunk, given its consumer electronics manufacturing support, and content deals, we’re not so sure about the second prediction, three years is a very short time in which to oust DVD players.
We understand that pricing on the Blu-ray players will fall in that time frame to around the same pricing as DVD players now, a few tens of dollars, but it has taken some 7 to 8 years to build the head of steam behind DVD players, and many people would derive no benefit from the new type of player until they have a better TV, either HD ready or at least HDMI compatible.
The rate of installation of better TV screens suggests that while HD DVD may fall by the wayside pretty rapidly, conventional DVD will still be with us by 2014 and dominant until at least something like 2011.
Frank Simonis, European chairman of the Blu-ray Association told the Cebit audience that Blu-ray had taken 96% market share in HD in Japan already, implying the US was in the bag and Europe would automatically follow.
Globally there are well in excess of 200 million DVD players, and this market was expected to rival the penetration of VHS players before it began to fall, somewhere around the 475 million DVD player mark by the end of 2009. In contrast Blu-ray has sold just 2 million players in 6 months, with many of these being built into PS3 games consoles.
But if that move has won the war for production of the majority of High Definition disks then price reduction has a long way to go before Blu-ray starts supplanting DVD players.
Simonis added that now 1.8 million PS3s have been shipped in the US and Japan, and that 1 million devices are ready for the European launch which happens this week.
Most of the big Hollywood studios only support Blu-ray with Universal studios being the only one that solely supports HD DVD.
This week the HD DVD camp launched its own European initiative, probably far too late, signing up Studio Canal, Universal, Toshiba and Microsoft to the European HD DVD Promotional Group, which said it would promote the standard in the region.