The real barriers to Bluray adoption

One of the little talked about but significant barriers to bluray adoption (or any new disc format) is ubiquity. Articles often gloss over this and focus on success as being a player in every household.

I moved to bluray well over a year ago but my big issue has been that I only have a player in one room in my house. In my other rooms I have DVD players, in my van I have a DVD, I convert DVDs for use on my ipod and psp, etc.

I have found I have to buy kids movies on DVD or even twice in the case of great hidef releases like Cars and Ratatouille. I want the Hi-def experience in my home theater but my kids cannot understand if they canot watch it in the car or the living room.

This is similarly true for downloads. We get over fixated on these settop box solutions that are not portable.

So what are the studios doing to help? Well not much right now as they benefit from duplicate purchases.

Some blurays will come with portable copies, iTunes is a better solution with Apple TV support, and I can also watch on my ipod in my van, but I still need to buy multiple copies in some cases.

Until we have cheap players so that folks can afford to buy several this will be an issue. DVD did not have this issue in the same magnitude when replacing VHS. CDs are probably a better analogy but the key difference is you could copy your CD onto a cassette and listen in the car. I cannot copy my bluray to DVD.

Also, today I can copy my DVDs so that when the van inevitably eats it, or the kids scratch it, or the heat damages it, I can juts cut another copy.

So for now I am sticking with netflix for bluray and only buying those big cinematic movies in hidef that I will only watch in my home theater.