Digital Home Thoughts: Blu-ray: Victor in the HD DVD Wars, But Ultimately Doomed?

"CNET's Crave on Friday reported on Nielsen's latest VideoScan figures, showing that Blu-ray Disc's market share in the video disc market has slumped in the past week. According to Nielsen, Blu-ray's market share dropped to just 8 percent of the overall market, giving DVDs a whopping 92 percent ownership. Granted, those figures show only one week's performance, and Blu-ray may have a huge week soon and capture more of the market, but let's be honest with ourselves: do we really think that will happen? According to a study released in August by ABI Research, more than half the people it surveyed had no plans to buy a standalone Blu-ray player in the near future, and 23 percent are considering it, but not until 2009. When your format is limping along with just 8 percent of the market, the last thing you want to hear is that only 23 percent of the population actually wants a Blu-ray player."

Don Reisinger has put together an interesting piece on the future of Blu-ray, and it confirms what I've felt since last year: neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray offer enough advantages over upscaled DVD to win over the hearts and minds of consumers. Blu-ray won the battle with HD-DVD (much to my dismay), but it faces a long, drawn-out war with regular DVD. I firmly believe that Blu-ray is only going to oust DVD through a long, slow war of attrition - and it's going to take a full decade before DVD is really gone from the store shelves. What's your take on the future of Blu-ray?