Report: Blu-Ray Still Facing Adoption Issues

Despite the fact that the HD-DVD high-definition standard collapsed, and the new HD movie titles are only available in the Blu-Ray format, Sony's standard seems to have significant adoption issues among consumers.

According to a report released by Market analyst ABI Research, the Blu-Ray format has to carry another battle with the plain, old DVD standard. The company's principal analyst, Steve Wilson, claims that people are still watching DVD movies and refuse to make the transition to the high-definition standard.

"We are starting to see an increase in the number of DVD players with built-in upconverters, and the video processing is getting better with each new generation," he says. "Today about 35% of all DVD players sold include upconversion. ABI Research expects that figure to climb to about 60% by 2013."

More than that, the Blu-Ray players existing on the market are still too expensive to encourage users into switching to higher video quality. It's true that there are millions of Blu-ray players already shipping, but most of these units are geared towards Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console.

"The studios better hope that people are playing movies on their Playstations. Otherwise there's very little installed base," claimed Wilson. "In 2008 about 85 percent of the Blu-ray players in the market will be found in PS3s; the dedicated consumer electronics and PC-based types of Blu-ray players won?t catch up in terms of market share until about 2013," he continued.

The slow adoption forced optical disk manufacturers to lower pricing per unit, while system integrators include Blu-ray players in ultra-low-cost configurations. For instance, many system builders are introducing Blu-Ray players in bare-bone configurations, and Shuttle is one of them. Still this is not enough, given the fact that the cost of a Blu-Ray player often reaches 30 to 50 percent of the whole computer's price.

"But, if you're only going to spend $500-600 on a PC, are you really going to spend 40% more for a built-in Blu-ray player?" Wilson concluded.