Well, that's a little bit of an overstatement I'd say, and hey if ZDNet says it, i must be right .. right ? Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product predicts this ZNET Blog. With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won't save it. According to Digital Content Producer Blu-ray doesn't cut it for business:
- Recordable discs don't play reliably across the range of Blu-ray players - so you can't do low-volume runs yourself.
- Service bureau reproduction runs $20 per single layer disc in quantities of 300 or less.
- Hollywood style printed/replicated Blu-ray discs are considerably cheaper once you reach the thousand unit quantity: just $3.50 per disc.
- High-quality authoring programs like Sony Blu-print or Sonic Solutions Scenarist cost $40,000.
- The Advanced Access Content System - the already hacked DRM - has a one-time fee of $3000 plus a per project cost of almost $1600 plus $.04 per disk. And who defines project?
- Then the Blu-ray disc Association charges another $3000 annually to use their very exclusive - on 4% of all video disks! - logo.
More here.