Rekall IncorporatedMajor releases still coming out, and enthusiasts collecting discs.
cabbageAm I wrong to feel like Blu-ray was always something for the enthusiasts?
DVDs were good enough for most people, Blu-ray was more expensive and it didn’t feel like it ever dominated the market before streaming took over. I often see impressive DVD collections, I rarely see more than a handful of Blu-rays anywhere.
ChaoticNeutralCzechYup, in my country it’s basically just in specialist shops. Thanks to SCART (universal European RGB A/V cable) and PAL (576p for movies), DVDs look better here than in the US, quite good up to about 40".
JestzerYou’re also forgetting the precursor to streaming: digital movie downloads, like on iTunes. I’m sure that also helped Blu-rays never really take over.
Which, in some way, is a shame, because I distinctly remember watching a movie on a plain DVD on my parents’ HD TV in very early 2006 and thinking, “Wow, this somehow looks like shit!” and I know I would’ve felt differently if we had a Blu-ray or HD-DVD, but since this was very early 2006, they didn’t even exist yet.
Most people didn’t have tvs with 1080p resolutions when blurays came out. It was all SD, and so dvds ruled the market.
Once HD tvs were common, streaming was now the common medium. And streaming looked better than the standard def dvds.
Blurays will stay niche on comparison for sure, but I can’t imagine anyone who is watching a dvd on a large HD (let alone 4k) TV is going to think the DVD looks good.
It was all SD, and so dvds ruled the market.
BDs had a licence premium porn makers didn’t want to pay.
For enthusiasts? No. But they were significantly more expensive and it just about took one to justify the price difference. Today there’s obviously a price difference but nowhere near as significant - uhd bd took that place. They never became the default like DVD did - where every PC has a player and things beyond movies (ignoring PS3 games) shipped on BD… So usage was obviously contingent on ownership of a player - outside of the PS3, that was a specialty device… And expensive. In its early years, <=720p tvs, fuzzy plasma, and dlp projectors were still commonplace. IMO it’s biggest failure was being ahead of its time. Today I have no idea why one would buy a DVD over a BD… But both have or are losing to streaming and soon we’ll own nothing.
e0qdkToday I have no idea why one would buy a DVD over a BD
Having bought multiple DVDs (in combo packs with Blu-Ray) in the past year, it’s because, unlike Blu-Ray, they actually fucking play reliably on my computer. Blu-Ray is about 50/50 IME. (Entirely the fault of the DRM – not the physical material.)
Understandable… I’ve not found a good way to play on PC. But yar a solution for thar.
it didn’t feel like it ever dominated the market before streaming took over
HD-DVD was better error-correction (thus longevity) but Blu-ray (ugh. The name) had payola. Payola makes leaders.
I suspect the switching of horses from what’s better to what’s more popular derailed the adoption back then when we resisted shallow popularity better.
That was before 4k streaming. One of those “you don’t know better” things.
I owned 1600 DVDs at my peak. And literally just watched one a few hours ago and the picture quality is a bit shit to be honest. Especially the subtitles look janky as fuck because they’re not text but images, pixelated images.
I’m currently slowly upgrading The Good Ones to Blu-ray and the Really Good Ones to 4k BD
But only the ones I know I want to watch in 10, 20 or 30 years. As long as I have the media and a compatible player no company can tell me I can’t watch it.