News came yesterday that Blu-ray players are now selling for under $200, but the price milestone is failing to excite the industry. Here’s why.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

Robert Silva over at About.com reminds us that, since its introduction in 1997, DVD is the most successful home entertainment product in history, with 142M units sold in 2007 alone. (Think of it — with no DVDs prior to that time, what did we watch in 1996? Why VHS, of course, along with some Laserdisc fans out there.) Compare this to the 5M Blu-ray players predicted to sell in 2008, and we are still orders of magnitude off, in challenging the entrenched technology (click here for the electronics.ca study details.)

In the ten or so years since DVD supplanted VHS, the majority of consumers have created a rather large DVD library of favorites and do not look forward to repurchasing these titles in yet another format - particularly when an up-scaled image on the new flat screen looks pretty darn good. Most reviewers agree that DVD up-scaling is an excellent way to preserve existing titles for viewing on new flat screen HD sets. Prices are reasonable, even for name brands like Sony (NS700H) and Toshiba (XD-E500), selling for sub-$80 and $149, respectively.

So while Blu-ray prices are moving in the right direction, the standard has a ways to go before it can claim the title of king of the formats. With the quality and price of upscalers continually improving, don’t expect the entrenched DVD libraries to go away any time soon.

One thing that may jump-start Blu-ray in the US is for manufacturers to go the way of Japan, and introduce Blu-ray recorders, not just players. Hollywood doesn’t like the idea and despite a plethora of new BR-recorder products introduced earlier this month at CEATEC in Japan, none (zip, zero) are yet slated for the US. A recent report by Chris Boylan on Bigpicturebigsound.com cited news of Sony, Sharp, Panasonic and others with new BR-recorder products that include 250GB to 1TB hard drives for editing and clean up before burning to the disc. Some offer LAN connectivity to download films directly to the player for storage and later recording/viewing. All are outside the reach of non-Japanese markets for now. Matthew Moskovciak at CNET.com concurs, reporting that his meeting with Panasonic engineers gave no news on US entry of such products, click here, here, and here for details.

Most folks don’t like the idea of being denied technology options (or any option for that matter). particularly under the pretense that we would use it to steal content. Who knows what back room dealings are behind the BR-disc recorder blockade? But one thing is for certain, if consumers hold back long enough on BR player purchases, CE makers may just get tired of doing the Hollywood bow and bring the real deal, full-blown BR-disc recorder technology to our shores. To quote Will Smith, "That’s what I’m talking about…"