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Have you heard of Blu-ray? My mum thinks it’s a fish. My friend thinks it’s something to do with Wi-fi. Only the more clued up readers will know that Blu-ray is basically a high definition DVD format - allowing you to watch films in higher quality, provided you’ve shelled out for a Blu-ray player.

In fact after slow sales over Christmas for Blu-ray, the HD disc format may be in trouble according to our research. We expected sales of Blu-ray players to increase rapidly after Blu-ray killed off HD DVD in February 2008 in the biggest format war since VHS killed Betamax.

But over Christmas demand for DVD players actually outstripped Blu-ray players by a factor of 10. That’s despite some Blu-Ray players selling for less than £100. It looks like shoppers are turning to more convenient digital downloads and digital hard drive recorders instead. Looking at the customer reviews confirms that Blu-ray is waning in popularity as shoppers jump from DVD to downloads.

Here at Reevoo we think this could be partly a convenience choice. The death of the VCR and the cassette meant we saw the end of the chore of rewinding tapes.  The convenience of downloads and wider availability of flexible digital content suggests impatience with the eject button which may be partly why Blu-Ray isn’t capturing the imagination.

When you look back to when DVD replaced VHS, it didn’t take us long to realise how much better DVD players were and DVD quickly took over: you could almost see the video shelving shrink before your eyes in Blockbuster and HMV.  In comparision Blu-ray’s growth has been really slow.

Some of the top brands seem to be admitting the Blu-ray isn’t winning shoppers hearts. In November 2008, Sony announced that worldwide Blu-Ray player sales would fall short of expectations for the year.  They cited the high price of discs as one factor that had curtailed early adoption of Blu-Ray. Unlike previous format changes (e.g. audio tape to compact disc, VHS videotape to DVD), there is no indication that manufacturers will stop producing DVDs. 

Here are our top 3 reasons from customer feedback that explain why Blu-ray isn’t taking off:

1. Improved DVD players
A basic DVD player now costs just £20 (equivalent to the cost of a new release Blu-Ray disc alone), and you can also get high-end DVD players capable of ‘upscaling’ a standard definition image to near-HD, so the gap between DVD and Blu-ray has shrunk a lot.
Customer reviews of DVD players:
“The DVD upscaling is OMG look at that! Smooth, super smooth.”
“Excellent SD picture [and] great upscaling of my old DVD player made it hard to justify a [Blu-Ray player] to the missus.”
“[I] watch DVDs through a up scaling DVD player and the picture is to die for”

2. Blu-ray pricing and inflated disc prices
Blu-ray prices remain high. Over 6 months, the average price of a Blu-ray player was £239, more than four times the average DVD player at £53, and has remained largely flat, while average DVD player prices have dropped by 20% from July to January.

Blu-ray disc prices are also high, costing £16-18 for a new release, compared to £10-12 for a new release on DVD and an extensive back catalogue priced very cheaply.
Many reviews of Blu-ray players also mention frustrations with slow loading times and an inability to play certain file formats.
Here are some of the comments we’ve recieved about Blu ray players:
“Slow to read the BluRay discs but is this a feature of BluRay?”
“Still a bit slow to load discs.”
“Slow to read disks.”
“Takes a long time to load (compared to DVD).”

3. Households are downloading
The final reason we’re not sure Blu-ray will ever fully replace DVD is that there are other popular technologies that are competing for space in your living room. For example, you can download films and TV through services like Apple’s iTunes store which offers HD content for rental or purchase at a lower price than Blu-ray discs. Additionally, there other services such as Sky+ and Sky Movies that let you watch HD films virtually on-demand.  We’ve seen that hard-drive based personal video recorders (PVRs) sold twice as many units as Blu-ray in the UK over Christmas.

Reviews collected by Reevoo.com show that many of us are happy to skip Blu-ray altogether when they upgrade, instead going straight to a combination of downloads and hard drives:
“[My PVR] gives a fantastic picture, when in the HD channels the picture is as good if not better than my Blu ray player.”
“Easy set up. Seems to work well. Great Picture in HD. Good value […] Not just Great Picture quality, but Dolby Digital surround sound as well.”
“Excellent, cheap upgrade to HD television, especially if you have a Sky dish already installed - just plug it in, in place of your Sky box and use. Upscales SD tv to 576p/720i/720p/1080i.”

We’ve been talking about saving money and budget buys recently so we had to share the ultimate triple-use product. Save even more money by buying one product that works as three - like this HDTV which houses a Blu-ray player and a PC!

Named Allio, it has just launched in the US and comes in 32 and 42 inch models. The PC doesn’t have a bad spec at all - Intel Core Duo E8400 processor, 1TB hard drive and 4GB of RAM. It also comes with Windows Vista Home Premium and there are plenty of USB ports and wired / wireless network options.

The HDTV isn’t terrible either. It’s a 1080p panel with 2,000:1 contrast ratio, 400 cd/m2 brightness and twin 12-watt speakers. You can even watch your Blu-ray content as Picture-in-Picture or split-screen.

It’s not available in the UK yet but we’ll keep you posted. In the US, the current prices are:

32″ - £950

42″ - £1800

Low-cost versions are also on the way - even better!

More info here

Rumors, rumours. They’ve been flying around the last few days. Here are two that should interest you:

Last week, at the Future of Web Apps expo in London, Kevin Rose, Digg founder extraordinaire, predicted that Apple will unveil their MacBooks packing Blu-ray drives tomorrow at their special event which focuses on notebooks. Exciting stuff? So could this be the beginning of a beautiful relationship that will see all MacBooks with Blu-ray as standard? If you have any thoughts, let us know. In the meantime, if you’re still trying to decide on a MacBook, check out the MacBook reviews.

The other juicy rumor that seems to have come around faster that we’d thought is the release of the Firefox mobile. Firefox’s first mobile outing will be on the Linux-running Nokia N810.

It will be a little like the iPhone, with the N810’s touchscreen but we’re promised that the software will be pretty nifty with tabs, smart URLs and browser extensions. As it’s still early days, this release is intended for testing but check out the video below for a sneak peak.

If you’re heart’s still in the eighties with jelly shoes and hypercolour t-shirts, then you might be a little disappointed by this announcement.

Classics like The Goonies, Gremlins and Beetlejuice are about to be Blu-rayed up and re-released. It all sounds great until you think about it. Some of the best bits about those films are the grey and fuzziness. So we’ll either be able to see just how badly they were filmed in the first place or it’ll ruin the fuzzy magic.

But I do like the fact that it’s made me want to dig out all my old video tapes and watch them again. Who knew that Mikey Walsh would turn out to be a tiny hairy man a few years later…

If you are actually really excited about seeing your old faves in high-definition, get yourself a Blu-ray player but read all the Blu-ray player reviews before you do.

News just in that those clever chaps over at Pioneer have managed to produce the first 16-layer optical disk with a whopping 400GB capacity. Each layer adds 25GB to this spectacular plastic sandwich. Unfortunately they’re are read-only at the moment but they’ve all got their heads down to develop recordable versions.

If you’re wondering whether these disks will be compatible with existing Blu-ray gear, Pioneer insist they will. These prototypes will be on show on 13th July at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008 in Hawaii, so we’ll hopefully know more then. We’ll keep you posted.

[CrunchGear]