Digital Home Thoughts: Wal-mart Offering Low-End Magnavox Blu-ray Player for $128

"With Thanksgiving this Thursday, shoppers will be lining up at the doors to stores on Friday for Black Friday deals. One of the best Black Friday deals I have seen so far comes from Walmart. Walmart is offering a full 1080p Blu-ray player from Magnavox for only $128. You aren't getting high-end features at that price so forget about DTS HD Master or Dolby TruHD sound like you would get from the PS3 or a higher-end dedicated Blu-ray player. Honestly though, the average consumer doesn't have the hardware needed to decode these HD sound formats, so it's not that big a deal that the player doesn't support it."

It's been said that this is the year that Blu-ray will "take off" - and by "take off" I mean actually start to gain some traction in the market, because by most accounts Blu-ray has been a sputtering, stuttering failure. Yes, it won the war against HD-DVD, but it's still getting throughly trounced by plain old DVD. Driving down the cost of the player is one important factor - I believe $99 will be the tipping point there - but the cost of Blu-ray media is by far the biggest factor keeping consumers away in my opinion.

When you go shopping and you see a new movie in DVD format, and the super-deluxe version at that, you'll probably see a price tag of around $24.99. That same movie in Blu-ray format? Likely $35 to $40. So which, as a general consumer that probably doesn't know the difference between 720p and 1080i, are you going to percieve as being the much more expensive platform? With the world economy as it is now, Blu-ray has no hope of gaining real consumer traction in the marketplace - it will "win", eventually, by simply being there when regular DVD is eventually phased out - but that will take eight to ten years.