Analysis: Is a 15 percent penetration good, bad, or indifferent?
Retail research company is out with a new report on Blu-Ray, and among the tidbits in its press release is the fact that 15 percent of consumers surveyed by NPD report having used a Blu-Ray player in the past six months. Analyst Russ Krupnick provides a sound bite in the press release that sounds, well, lukewarm:
While Blu-Ray may not be the replacement for DVD that many once hoped for, it is certainly adding strength to the physical video-disc market. This added stability is helping to extend the life of discs, even as digital options gain in popularity.So is 15 percent penetration good, bad, or indifferent? Well, Blu-Ray was launched in June of 2006, so it’s now a half-decade old. By way of (imprecise) comparison, DVD turned five in 2002 — and that year, the CEA reported that DVD players were in 35 percent of U.S. households that year. Sounds like Blu-Ray is off to a far more sluggish start than its predecessor. Of course, we live in a way different world than we did when DVD arrived. Its advantages over VHS as a movie-watching medium were huge and obvious: far better quality and random access in a muchsmaller, less fragile package. And DVD faced no competition as a new-and-improved way to watch movies. Blu-Ray is a better way to watch movies than DVD, but it’s more subtle — the big draw is really, reallygood quality rather than really good quality. It faces competition galore: a far-flung, overlapping mishmosh of choices including Apple TV, Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Instant Video, TiVo, Roku, Boxee, Google TV, and lots more. You can consume vast quantities of high-quality video without ever getting near an optical disc. When Blu-Ray was under development early in this century, it was obviously meant to be a DVD replacement: a new box that everyone would buy to replace their old box. That’s not going to happen. Some early-adopter types (like my friend Louis Gray) are just skipping Blu-Ray and moving directly to movies that don’t involve physical media. Extremely late adopters will stick with DVD for now — and Blu-Ray may have come and gone before they’re ready to retire their DVD players. That leaves everybody who’s neither a bleeding-edge type nor a lollygagger as potential Blu-Ray buyers. And it seems to me that if a lot of them end up buying a DVD player, it won’t be because they’re all that excited over Blu-Ray. They’ll get it because players are now availableunder a hundred bucks, rendering it a very low-cost upgrade over DVD if you’re buying an optical player at all. They’ll get it because so many Blu-Ray players come with Amazon, Netflix, Vudu, and other streaming services, making a Blu-Ray player one of the most logical ways to connect an HDTV to the Internet. They’ll get it (as I did) because they buy a PlayStation 3. They might get it because they (gulp) buy a 3D-capable TV and need a source of 3D content. Maybe there’s still a window for Blu-Ray to do okay — not as the next big thing, but because…well, because it’s just there. ______________________________________________________________________________ Written by Harry McCracken, the founder and editor of Technologizer. For more smart takes on technology, visit Technologizer.com.]]>
