Sunday, December 28, 2008
Become the only benchmark for high-definition discs, the Blu-ray, the successor of DVD, has failed to become the star of this Christmas gift, slowed by the crisis and its price still very high.
On February 18, Toshiba threw in the towel in the battle that he faced from months ago to impose a Sony format of high-definition discs, abandoning its HD-DVD, with the Blu-ray from Sony went as single format throughout the world.
But nearly a year after the invasion of Blu-ray that presaged some, has not taken place.
"It is still a small market," he said Michael Mathieu, analyst GfK research institute, who added that the conversion to this format will be "longer than what we met in 1995-1997 with the passage of the VHS video cassette disc DVD ".
Sales of readers living room Blu-ray, excluding the PlayStation 3 video game consoles, yet off: they expect sales of four million in 2008, according to figures from Strategy Analytics, far from the traditional readers (111 million ). The sale of Blu-ray only account for 2% of the securities market.
"The public is not the same" when it appeared on DVD, according to Mathieu: "Then we were going to homes with TV. Now we need to have a high definition screen to access, which reduces the public (potential) to a third. "
Moreover, according to recent scientific research, the technological leap from DVD to Blu-ray is less perceptible to the public that it marked the transition from video to DVD.
Another factor that hampers the development of this technology is the current economic crisis. "We believe that the economic climate will slow the transition to Blu-ray," said Helen Davis, in charge of the department's video cabinet British Screen DIGESA.
"People will delay the purchase unless the DVD were damaged, and even in that case, prefer to spend 50 euros in a classic reader," he explained.
Blu-ray readers, who are also capable of reading the "old" DVD, are still very expensive: cost Europe at an average of 300 euros, more than double what they cost in the United States.
According to analysts, by 2009, the first since the supremacy of the Blu-ray, should be decisive for the future of this technology.
"The market should more than double," predicted the secretary general of the association Blu-ray Partners France, Arnaud Brunet: "Already we see an acceleration, especially in the U.S.," where titles like 'Iron Man' and 'The dark knight 'And recorded record sales.
As for the new means of distributing movies, such as video pre-payment, do not, according to Brunet, an immediate threat. "Consumers are still very attached to hardware," he said.
However, according to Toshiba, big loser of the war of the formats for high definition and, therefore, compelled to make a radical turn in its strategy, this "dematerialization" is an inevitable trend.
"My impression (of the Blu-ray) is just a phase," predicted the general manager of Toshiba in France, François Séguineau, convinced that the boxes and DVD players will soon be relics of the past.
