PhantomStranger

Yeah, Walmart has always carried a larger DVD than Blu-ray selection. Once Walmart more or less eliminated BDs from their $5 bins, overall BD sales outside of new releases seemingly fell off there.

d2cheer

I have not popped into this thread in years but seeing DVD STILL outselling BD is baffling to me now even though I probably stated in this thread multiple times BD would not overtake DVD.

Yeah I am a hypocrite.

Josh-da-man

I don't have any stats and this is purely anecdotal, but very few people I know own blu-ray (or UHD) players that aren't gaming consoles. Most people, if they even still have a disc player, have an old DVD player.

So this shouldn't be surprising.

Also, how many blu-ray players are currently available? I think the only companies still making players are Panasonic, LG, and Sony, which is pretty wild. And even then, they're still selling the same models they were years ago.

Coral

A few years ago I gave my POS brother my BD player when his broke as I haven't used it for a long time and figured that I could just use my XBOX One X for BD and 4K discs.
Not only have I not used it yet, I gave my XBOX away to my cousin as I haven't been in the mood to game for quite a while.

I don't know anyone who has a regular BD player, and the ones with consoles have never used it to play movies on discs.

I was curious last week about the price of 4K players and saw only 1 model that was under $300 CAD ($250). That's just too expensive for the average consumer.
Some BD players are under $100, but I doubt many are buying them anyway.

Josh-da-man

I suppose it's kind of telling about the popularity of blu-ray when they're still making and selling DVD players.

At this point in time, a DVD player that upscales to HD retails for about $45, while a cheap blu-ray player sells for about $65 or $70. By now, with the prices what they are, I would think they would just discontinue the DVD players and only sell blu-ray players (which also play DVDs) instead of keeping separate product categories.

I'm guessing they're still selling a lot of DVD players since they could just discontinue them and upsell the blu-ray players for an extra twenty or thirty bucks.

Eventually, I would think they would just start selling nothing but 4K UHD players -- which will play any DVD/blu-ray/4K -- once the prices for those fall down to the $70 mark. But since DVD players are still hanging around...

morriscroy

If I had to guess, that $20 differential between standalone dvd and bluray players, might have to do with the fact that bluray is still patent encumbered.

In most of the world, a standalone dvd player is already patent free. The last remaining standalone dvd player patents will expire this August 2024 in the European Union + South Korea and January 2025 in Japan + Taiwan. For a standalone dvd player without any bluray functionality, the last American patent will expire in a few months in June 2024.

The earliest this $20 differential might disappear entirely, could be in 2033 when all the standalone bluray player patents expire in america.

orangerunner

I suppose the license to use DTS HD Master and DOLBY TrueHD audio codecs is also an extra expense the DVD format didn't have to account for. Early WiFi-enabled Blu-ray players probably had to incur the expense of licensing youtube, Netflix, hulu, CinemaNow etc.

Alan Smithee

Went thrifting yesterday and saw TONS of Blu-Ray players for $25 or less. When Blu-Ray players show up at Goodwill in mass quantities, they aren’t “new” technology anymore.