Video Asylum

Posted by David Aiken (A) on May 21, 2008 at 16:01:14

In Reply to: RE: Great response and interesting analysis of the data. posted by Audiophilander on May 21, 2008 at 01:25:52

I can appreciate the holiday season factor. As for the economy, it may simply prevent things from taking off or alternatively simply delay uptake until there's a bit of a recovery.

I think there's a danger in being too US-centric here. I'm in Australia and the economy is not quite as rough as that in the US at the moment. BD take-up here during the format war stage was better than in the US relative to HD-DVD because the HD-DVD people didn't release anything here until 2 months after BD released their first players and discs, so they were the latecomers. They kept a low profile and HD-DVD player prices remained high with the cheapest player usually staying around $100 Australian less than the PS3 and the other players priced similarly to some of the BD stand-alone players. HD-DVD probably lost the war here they day they decided not to release their wares within a month or two of the US release and to let BD get in first because that seemed to set the standard for the rest of their decisions in this market: stupid. There's also Japan and Europe. The US is a big market but a bit less than half the world market if I remember from the last lot of figures I saw so a slow take-up or even a bit of a stall there probably won't be critical if things elsewhere in the world proceed more favourably.

In the end it will catch on or it won't. SACD didn't catch on but discs are still being released so not catching on may not kill the format and we could be left with a niche market as you suggest, but then good quality audio and video have always been niche markets. The majority of the population are happy with less than that. The high end continues to survive in both fields and that's an indication that there is a reasonable sized market there.

I wouldn't be getting overly negative yet, and I do think that there is some scope for cautious optimism if you look at things from a world perspective rather than simply the local US perspective.



David Aiken