Isaiah's Tech

My first press conference of the day will be Blu-ray and this may or may not be my last press conference, since i am still debating on whether or not to watch Intel's and Palm's press conferences. Anyways, let's start it up.

The chairman of Blu-ray is the first to take the stage. He talks about first looking back on the history of Blu-ray and then he will talk about the future. The hardware sales in the US are 10.7 million since June 2006 and this is including the PS3. This fact alone tells us that Blu-ray is actually doing better than DVD when it started out. Blu-ray's adoption rate is picking up rapidly, it grew about 300% from 2007 - 2008. Blu-ray's growth in it's first 2.5 year's actually tops both DVD's and the TV's growth in it's early 3 years. There are nearly 1100 Blu-ray titles available. Blu-ray, during the holiday season, grew "significantly." There have been 30 million Blu-ray discs sold in the US market to date. Blu-ray is beyond just the HD experience because BD-Live also takes advantage of bringing the Internet and that media to your home. He mentions that BD-Live is the new and, current, killer application for Blu-ray hardware. The future is 3D. They think that Blu-ray is the package media platform for the 3D market. Blu-ray, as a company, is trying to combine the best HD with the best 3D for the ultimate experience.

Someone new comes to stage and he introduces 3 professional panel members to talk all about Blu-ray. I will just refer to all the 3 panels members as 'they,' since i don't know any of their names. The mention that 2008 was a critical year for Blu-ray and that there will be a steady and stable increase in the Blu-ray demand over the year 2009. The remain optimistic for Blu-ray to succeed, just like it has been doing. They feel that the PS3 was affected by crisis, but also that everyone has been affected in some way. They announce that Blu-ray is around to stay and that it will take over DVD's. One of the panel members mentions that, even amidst the economic crisis, he expects to see a 500% - 600% increase in Blu-ray output in 2009. They mention that Blu-ray will continue to outperform DVD's first year's in growth. They touch up on the subject that Digital downloading will surpass all other techonlogy, such as Blu-ray and DVD. They say that HD quality digital downloads are not near the quality of Blu-ray because Blu-ray is the future, due to it's many, many features.

The chairman comes back and he shows a slideshow of the 18 new Blu-ray players at CES and mentions that 11 of them have BD-Live. The slide doesn't contain any pictures, just their model numbers. He mentions that Blu-ray will be more successful than Digital downloading, just like paper has been more successful in the office. He make the comparison between Blu-ray and Digital downloading, to Paper and the 'Paperless Office.' He mentions that although many people years ago believed that the paperless office would soon take over, it never actually ended up happening. This is due to the satisfactory of physically owning the Blu-ray disc. He throws in another reason, that if your Hard drive fails and you don't back up your software correctly, you would've just lost huge money. After that, a question and answer takes place. There was a good question based on what they are using Blu-ray's 50GB capacity on the discs for. I thought this was interesting because i, too, wanted to know why the Blu-ray discs have such a huge capacity. Bigger is better though. Most of the questions that were asked never actually related to Blu-ray because a lot of questions that were asked were regarding the studio's decisions and not Blu-ray's.

Blu-ray Press Conference video here: http://www.g4tv.com/ces2009/press_conf_detail.aspx?video_key=35874
Blu-ray Logo: http://www.ridgelabs.com/
Samsung Blu-ray Player picture: http://i.gizmodo.com/5124091/samsung-bd+p3600p4600-super+slim-wall+friendly-blu+ray-decks
Dark Knight Blu-ray picture: http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8824255&publicUserId=5556675