Deathlizard's Journal: How the PS3 will kill off Bluray.

I though of something when Sony was taking about how cheap the PS3 was since Bluray was implemented, and it's doesn't look good for Bluray. Basically, the PS3 is going to kill off Bluray, and I'll tell you why.

Lets say you're a manufacture of equipment and are choosing which player to make. The HD-DVD player is easier to build and cheaper, while the Bluray player is more expensive but has more storage and possibly better quality video. Now, when you look at your bottom line you can sell an HD-DVD player for $500-$700 but your Bluray player will sell around $800-$1000.

Now, here comes Sony with their BluRay equipped $500-$600 PS3. You know that you'll be selling your Bluray player at a loss if you sell it any less than $800 and you know anyone that wants a Bluray player will just get a PS3 since it's cheaper. You also know you can't compete against it with Bluray but can easily compete with an HD-DVD player and even the XBOX 360 plus HD-DVD will be in that $500-$700 competitive range your player will be in.

As a manufacture looking out for your Shareholders, what are you going to build?

Basically, the PS3 will be the only Bluray player in the market because it will drive the market away from it and toward the cheaper HD-DVD. That is until Bluray drops in price, and by then, the format war will be over and HD-DVD will be the winner.

BTW Yes, There will be a ton of PS3's out there. But First off, on the day the PS3 launches, your going to have an already established base of HD-DVD players out there at a cheaper price, and the 360 HD drive out there for $200 if you really want High Def movie viewing through your 360 for whatever reason. If you want Bluray, it's either a Sony PS3 at $500-600 or a Sony Bluray player at $1000 since no other company will dare make a bluray player and try to compete against the PS3 at a price $200-$400 cheaper than they can physically build their own player at, meanwhile, you'll have HD-DVD players out there from multiple manufactures competing against each other driving the price down on HD-DVD players way below the PS3 price point. the same thing happened with a majority of their other formats; Betamax, UMD, MiniDisc, Memorystick and even 8MM Video cassettes to a point (they took off in cameras but not in the VCR dept.)

A lot of people point out as a counter argument to the above the huge support for Bluray in the Movie industry. First off, none of the movie companies (except Sony Pictures. Duh.) said they were exclusively supporting Bluray. They're all supporting it because they think the PS3 is going to take off and build a userbase. Kinda like what they thought the PSP was going to do for UMD, Which so far has shown disastrous results in the movie sales department. As soon as these companies sense trouble (and Sony's not helping with Delays, Prices, and the like) they'll start supporting both formats, if not dump Bluray for HD-DVD. The same goes if HD-DVD flops, the HD-DVD supporters will drop it in a heartbeat and go both formats or all Bluray. So at this point, I would just assume that every movie company will support the format that wins, instead of them supporting either Bluray or HD-DVD

The other Argument I constantly hear is the Storage Difference Between Bluray and HD-DVD. Sony did one hell of a job promoting space as the big reason for Bluray, but in reality, it doesn't mean anything other than you have the option to run longer length movies at higher bitrates. Why is it a moot point? Because the new formats support much higher compression movie files than DVD. look at the UMD movie format. (another Sony Format) It had 1.8GB of space but can supposedly equal a 480i DVD (4-8GB) in video size, length and quality. How does it do this? it supports MPEG4 which has much higher compression than MPEG2 at the same quality level. Bitrate wise, you can only go so high before you can't tell the difference, so the only real advantage bluray brings to the table is less disk swapping when you watch Titanic or LOTR, and the jury is out if you would even need to swap disks on the HD-DVD medium for any of these movies considering the new compression schemes both these players use. Simply put, Bluray may be great for storing computer files, but the size difference isn't going to make a huge difference quality wise to your movie viewing experience.