Predictions About Future Success of Blu-Ray Technology

With the apparent victory of Blu-ray in the high definition DVD format war imminent, Blu-ray supporters have gone so far as to predict the future success of the format. Some Blu-ray backers have claimed that Blu-ray discs could become the standard- replacing standard definition DVD's- in as little as three years. With the apparent victory of Blu-ray in the high definition DVD format war imminent, Blu-ray supporters have gone so far as to predict the future success of the format. Some Blu-ray backers have claimed that Blu-ray discs could become the standard- replacing standard definition DVD's- in as little as three years.

The Blu-ray High Definition DVD format which was created by Sony is able to store enough information on an optical disc the same size as a normal CD or DVD to display an entire full length movie in HDTV format. The Blu-ray format relies on blue laser technology to more finely encode and decode data than the red laser technology that's used on standard definition DVD's and compact discs. As a result of this difference in technology, a single Blu-ray disc can store up to twenty five gigabytes of data on each side, or fifty gigabytes total.

This ability to store large amounts of information on a relatively small disc provides some huge possibilities for computing as well as entertainment. That's because, Blu-ray discs represent the possibility of being able to archive huge amounts of data in the form of digital photos, videos, music, and software. In fact, the ability to put up to fifty gigabytes of software on a single disc can make for some huge software packages.

Data storage capacity is one of the ways in which Blu-ray has its rival format- HD-DVD which was created by Toshiba- beat. HD-DVD's can only store about thirty gigabytes per disc, utilizing both sides of a disc.

Despite Blu-ray's greater capacity to store data than HD-DVD's, there are some serious barriers to Blu-ray supplanting standard definition DVD's in the next three years. For one thing, there are only a little more than five million Blu-ray discs that have been sold, but there are uncounted billions of standard definition DVD's all over the world. While this in itself isn't a huge barrier- after all, all of those billions of standard definition DVD's have been sold over the course of less than ten years- but the bigger problem is the equipment that can read and display the content of Blu-ray discs.

One of the reasons why the original DVD format was such a success was because, though like the Blu-ray format it requires a special player, standard definition DVD's and the players for them were and are compatible with standard definition television sets. Implicit in the assumption that Blu-ray discs will supplant standard definition DVD's in the next few years is the assumption that the world will be willing to replace all of its standard definition TV sets and existing DVD players with HDTV sets and Blu-ray players. Given the expense of both HDTV sets and Blu-ray players, this simply isn't a realistic expectation.

Besides the problem of replacing all of that equipment, there is the question of apathy among consumers. For example, only a small fraction of homes in the United States have HDTV sets, and the United States is one of the countries with people best able to afford them. Of Americans who are interested in HDTV sets, only a relatively small number of them understand the difference between HDTV and standard definition TV. There are also people out there who still think that standard definition DVD's display movies in HDTV format. All of these obstacles represent a lot of problems that need to be overcome for Blu-ray to ever supplant the standard DVD format, let alone in the next few years.