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EngadgetHD: While Futuresource may still be sticking to its 2012 predictions of Blu-ray software dominance, In-Stat has taken a break from the tea leaves to mention it expects Blu-ray player sales to near 80 million by 2013.

In its vision of the near-future that’s not enough to overtake DVD player sales of 90 million, but with a higher average selling price Blu-ray players will own most of the dollars being spent.

Naturally, Blu-ray recorders (and, we’d expect Blu-ray/VHS combos) are most popular in Japan, while Europe produces the most revenue for players. We’re not ready to lay down $3,495 to find out more detailed forecasts, but we’ll put a pin in the calendar and ask Jeremy Toeman to save the date for our 2013 podcast about whether or not Blu-ray sales have lived up to expectations.

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DigitalSpy: The British Video Association has revealed that 3.1 million Blu-ray discs have been sold in the UK since the start of 2009.

Using data from the Official Charts Company, the BVA calculated that the figure represents a 231% growth in sales figures from the same period last year. However, the growing interesting in Blu-ray has contributed to a 9.5% drop in year-on-year sales of DVDs.

BVA marketing manager Hannah Conduct said: “The continuing success of Blu-ray is testament to the growth of consumer confidence in the high definition format. There are now almost 1,500 Blu-ray releases in the market covering a breadth of titles. Seeing is believing with Blu-ray and the figures show that once consumers have experienced the format, they continue to spend their money on the product.

BVA director general Lavinia Carey said that the home entertainment industry has largely been able to weather the recession so far, despite it struggling on the high street. Around 900 entertainment retail stores have now closed since the start of the year, including the Woolworths and Zavvi chains going into administration. “This changing retail landscape has had a huge impact on our half year result. We hope as the year progresses that new retailers will fill the gap by stocking home entertainment products to give consumers a wider choice,” she explained.

On the subject of online piracy, Carey said that combating the problem is all about persuading consumers to opt for legitimate download services instead. “People must also be increasingly tempted to search out methods of downloading illicit content for free on the Internet,” she added. “With an increasing number of new internet services coming on stream, the industry is aiming to encourage greater consumer up-take of legitimate downloads.”

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TechDigest: Denon has announced the latest addition to their Blu-ray line-up: The €DBP-2010. I want to call it a high-end Blu-ray player but it isn’t really. Not compared to some of Denon’s other Blu-ray machines. Mind you, this one costs £599 (€697) and not £3,300 (€3,842) like the VD-A1UD.

That’s not to say that the DBP-2010 isn’t a good bit of kit because, a quick look at the spec, will show you that it is. It has Profile 2.0 capability with built in BD-Live and Bonus View via the ethernet port.

It can play multiple formats – pretty much any shiny circular disc you can imagine – and it has 10-bit video processing for both HD and SD viewing. It also offers upconversion and IP scaling up to 1080p.

Sound wise it features 7.1 analogue outputs with full decoding of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. For music via CD it has a dedicated two-channel analogue audio output.

The DBP-2010 also supports DivxHD and AVCHD playback from HD camcorders. It’s out this month and, as mentioned, it’s going to set you back £599. You can get it in either black or silver. Interested? If so, check availability via Denon.

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EngadgetHD: Always good for an optimistic Blu-ray outlook, analyst Futuresource this week continued to peg 2012 as the year Blu-ray breaks into the mainstream, while reducing its prediction of discs sold this year in the format from 95 to 75 million.

The expectation is that within the next couple of years hardware could drop to as cheap as $50 (€35) for an “entry-level” Blu-ray player, with dedicated set-top box owners snapping up high definition discs at a much quicker rate than the currently PS3-dominated (6% to 3%) audience.

Check Video Business for the full recap, but just in case you hadn’t heard, rumors of Blu-ray’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated.

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EngadgetHD: Promising the finest picture and sound, Paramount is launching its Sapphire Series, two disc high definition releases of some of its greatest films, starting with Gladiator and Braveheart September 1 followed by Forrest Gump in November.

That means a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio track for Braveheart and DTS-HD MA for Gladiator, while both will have a slew of exclusive new extras. For Gladiator that includes the ability to tag elements while watching the main disc, which will then automatically queue up more information once the second supplemental disc is loaded into the player, while Braveheart’s extras focus mostly on the history of the Scottish Rebellion with 3D models and interactive timelines.

Paramount didn’t mention how much viewers would be paying for these new feature packed editions but they both show a $39.99 (€28,34)MSRP / $27.99 (€19,83) preorder price on Amazon. The press release runs down the extras, though we suspect you’ll have to be a pretty big fan (of which there should be plenty for these multiple Oscar winning flicks) to pay the premium over typical catalog releases instead of waiting for them to hit the bargain bin.

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EngadgetHD: As frequently predicted, Blu-ray hasn’t been enough to make up for sagging DVD sales, as a new Screen Digest report indicates a 4.8 percent slide worldwide last year, falling more than $2.6 billion.

After plateauing approaching 2007, disc sales have been falling ever since and even Blu-ray’s $482 million contribution can’t hold up the slack.

Still, it’s looking at online rentals like Lovefilm and Quickflix to make up for some of the rental losses internationally, but don’t expect Blu-ray to help grow the market at all until at least 2010.

Of course, the company did also predict the format war would remain stalemated just weeks before Warner ended the whole thing, so we’d keep a grain of salt handy while reading.

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EngadgetHD: The UK is getting its own taste of Sharp provided BD-Live Blu-ray playing tech with the BD-HP22H, complete with DTS-HD MA, Dolby TrueHD and 1080p24 support.

Still, to get buyers to come up with the £199.99 (€233) pricetag, its touting a 0.7W/standby 20W/playing energy rating.

Buyers should be able to decide if that’s worth a few quid later on this month.

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Electronista: Researchers NPD Group said that 88% of the money consumers spend on home entertainment goes towards purchasing and renting movies on DVD and Blu-ray discs.

Of the $25 each US consumer spends on average in a given month, 63 percent was found to be spent on DVD purchases, 7 percent on Blu-ray discs, and 18% went towards renting DVD and Blu-ray movies.

The remaining 12 percent was split between video on-demand (VOD) services (9 percent) and digital downloads and online streaming (3 percent). Still, watching full-length streaming movies is a growing trend.

In 2009, 9 percent of those with Internet connections at home streamed movies online, which is an improvement from the 5 percent last year. Online rentals accounted for 8 percent of users polled, while less than 5 percent watched movies they downloaded via a game console.

Downloaders were also found to purchase or rent more movies than the average poll-taker, at 80 percent versus 50 percent.

To a lesser extend, the same holds true for buying and renting Blu-ray discs, at 25 percent versus 5 percent overall.

“While many in the home video industry worry that digital consumers might walk away from packaged media, that hasn’t happened yet,” said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD.”

Direct-download movie purchases and rentals have nonetheless contributed to growth in the past year in part through the rapid expansion of Netflix’s Internet streaming service, which can now be accessed on the Xbox 360 as well as Roku’s Internet Player, TiVo DVRs and multiple Blu-ray movie players. Rentals through iTunes and other services like Amazon VOD and VUDU have also contributed to the increase.

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NPD Group: According to the latest point-of-sale (POS) tracking data from The NPD Group, a leading market research company, Blu-ray Disc (BD) video technology is moving further into the mainstream.

First quarter (Q1) sales of stand-alone Blu-ray players in the U.S. grew to more than 400,000 units, an increase of 72 percent over Q1 2008. Dollar sales increased 14 percent, to reach $107.2 million according to NPD’s retail tracking service.

“The rising penetration of high-definition televisions and lower Blu-ray player prices are broadening the format’s market opportunity,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD. “Even as options expand for accessing movies digitally, Blu-ray is carrying forward the widespread appeal of DVD into the high-definition marketplace.”

NPD’s “Blu-ray Report” March 2009 update revealed that overall consumer awareness of the BD format in the United States has reached 90 percent awareness in the past six months.

Purchase intent for Blu-ray set-top boxes also rose slightly in NPD’s most recent tracking surveys, with 6 percent of respondents saying they would be “extremely or very likely” to buy in the next six months, compared with 5 percent who responded similarly in the August report. Despite these high awareness levels, more than half of adults (58 percent) continue to report that they were still “not very familiar” with BD.

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EngadgetHD: Adams Media Research hasn’t always had the most positive outlook on Blu-ray numbers, but its latest report indicates that despite the current state of the economy and the still-high price of Blu-ray discs the format is continuing to grow, with year to date numbers that nearly double those from last year at around 9 million compared to 4.8 million at this point in 2008.

As usual, Andy Parsons of the BDA had a positive quote to give Video Business, since he was “delighted” by the figures, which also included an estimated total of 10.5 million Blu-ray households (including dedicated players and PS3s, no word if laptops played into that figure.)

It’s another year later, and there’ve been many more Blu-ray players sold so the growth isn’t surprising, but there’s also a lot more competition looking for the 1080p crown,but it looks like most are still hopping on the Blu bandwagon.

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Crave: It’s been a couple of years now since Blu-ray launched and it’s been over a year since it beat HD DVD to become the high-definition format of choice. So with the format rushing into puberty, we thought we’d examine its puss-filled pimples and try not to laugh at its erratic voice.

First of all, if you’re a fanboy, don’t take this the wrong way. Blu-ray is a terrific format, with plenty going for it. We’re just sure it could be good deal better, and we’d appreciate it if those involved could have a little think, and make some tweaks to make it more accessible and consumer-friendly.

As always, you should feel free to let us know via the comments section or our forums if you have a point to make on this subject.

Price
This is a simple one, and the least controversial. Blu-ray discs are very expensive, and even with the rapid price reductions we’ve seen in the last six months, the players are still far too costly.

While we agree Blu-ray is a premium format, that doesn’t excuse costs of more than twice that of DVD.

Solution: Reduce the cost of films, and if that means removing some bonus features or extras such as a digital copy or DVD version, so be it.

Load times
In tests, we’ve found that Blu-ray players can load an interactive, Java-enabled Blu-ray in between 45 seconds and 1 minute 30 seconds.

Even the cheapest DVD player loads a standard DVD in no time at all, and plays it straight away. The problem with Blu-ray is there’s an awful lot happening during the disc load. When you turn your player on, it needs to load its operating system.

After that, when you insert the disc, it has to load Java interactivity and do boring things such as encryption-key exchange. The reasons don’t matter. It’s a bad user experience, and something needs to be done about it.

Solution: As hardware gets faster, load times will naturally decrease. We’re now at the point where the quickest standalone player can load a disc and begin playback in around 45 seconds. But that’s still not quick enough. Because a decent percentage of this load time is tied up in the interactive menu loading, we propose that a button is added to new players. When the user presses this button, the player will ignore the interactive features and simply start playing the movie. Obviously, movie studios will hate the idea of their expensively designed interactivity not being loaded — but Blu-ray is a premium movie experience. Users should not have to load features they aren’t interested in. We’re sure people will still use the interactivity — but giving them a choice means they can just watch the film.

There’s another possible solution here too. AACS allows for ‘managed copy’. This process allows a copy of the movie to be stored on a computer, with DRM. If movie studios used this, load times wouldn’t be such an issue. The presence of DRM is a fail, but even so there are solutions — such as Windows Media Centre — that can make use of these copies.

Physical media might not be dead — but it should be
Buying a piece of plastic, taking it home and putting it in a Blu-ray player is fine for some people, but it’s an outdated way of doing things. It suits movie studios because they believe — incorrectly — that they can better protect their movies from copyright theft if they stop electronic distribution.

The truth is, they couldn’t be more wrong. Take a look through any torrent site or newsgroup and you won’t find any shortage of illegally downloadable Blu-ray rips in exceptionally high quality (sometimes even bit-for-bit copies of the original). Locking down the hardware with AACS and BD+ doesn’t stop illegal downloading. DRM doesn’t stop illegal downloading. So why not stop worrying, and learn to love online distribution?

Solution: Allow people access to legal downloads. The main movie studios should get together and set up a torrent site that offers HD movies for £10 or so. No DRM, no usage restrictions and no extras. People who want added value can buy the Blu-ray.

The convenience of being able to decide to watch a movie one minute and be downloading it the next shouldn’t be underestimated. It took the music industry ten years to realise that trying to stop piracy with DRM was futile. The process cost the music studios dearly, and there’s no need for movie companies to fall foul of the same problem.

Oh — one more idea. Why not offer an honesty pot for people who downloaded a movie, enjoyed it, and would like to legitimise their ownership of it with a payment? We’re sure movie studios think this would legitimise copyright theft, but the fact is, illegal downloading is happening, and they might as well make some money out of it.

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Techradar: Yes, you read the title right, Pioneer has indicated that it is currently developing a 1TB Blu-ray Disc.

According to DigiTimes, the company hinted that it was working on the capacious 1TB Blu-ray disc, but won’t be releasing it until a 400GB version and 500GB version hits the shops.

The news was delivered at the IT Month Fair in Taipei, where Pioneer showcased its much-anticipated 400GB Blu-ray Disc.

Not only did they have a lovely lady to show off the 16-layer BD, the company also released come interesting specifications. Firstly, you will be glad to hear that the 400GB disc WILL be compatible with existing players, so when it does eventually hit shelves, your current machine of choice will be able to spin it.

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