Projected adoption rate of
only 16.3% by 2013
Despite the
gradually accelerated adoption of Blu-ray players from consumers in the home
theater market and the increasing amount of these 1080p HD titles, adoption
rates of the format in the PC industry seem to be inevitably lacking for the
next few years to come.
According to a recent report from iSuppli, Blu-ray ROM
drives for the PC, Mac, netbooks, notebooks and the PC industry at large will
suffer from a low 16.3% total adoption rate by the year 2013.
"BDs won't be replacing DVDs as the primary optical
drive in PC systems through at least the year 2013," said Michael Yang,
senior analyst for storage and mobile memory at iSuppli. "They eventually
will find success, but during the next five years, that success will be limited
in the PC segment."
There are two obvious and largely discussed reasons for this
projected statement, primarily because consumers are not willing to pay extra
costs for the High Definition format with a still underdeveloped library of
movie titles. There is also a third reason, being the difficulty in replacing DVDs
as a very mature storage medium that has received well over ten years of strong
adoption behind it.
As a result of being the third globally anticipated optical
successor after the CD-ROM and the DVD, the Blu-ray movie format will have a
harder time finding balance between reasonable costs and variety of movie
titles. As a data solution, it will have to battle against the ever-decreasing
costs of small and affordable external hard drives and flash disks that are advancing
in data capacity every six months.