Well, it's now June 20th across all of America, so it's time to wish Blu-ray a happy first birthday! It was one year ago, today, that Sony Pictures released the first seven Blu-ray movie titles. Those historic first titles were:
- 50 First Dates
- The Fifth Element
- Hitch
- House of Flying Daggers
- The Terminator
- Underworld: Evolution
- xXx
These titles, along with the original Samsung BD-P1000, took the video world by... well, truth be told, it was a BAD start. All the titles were MPEG-2, with some pretty mediocre transfers (The Fifth Element is even being released already with a proper transfer), and the Samsung player had a firmware bug that softened the picture even more. Given that start, it's amazing how far the format has come.
It took quite awhile for the media and the public to get the bad taste of that launch out of their mouths (many members of AVSForum still haven't done it yet), and far too long before new players were launched. Toshiba, Universal, and Microsoft--the primary supporters of the rival HD DVD format, were declaring victory, and seemingly had the sales numbers to back that statement up.
Then, all of a sudden, on November 17, Sony dropped it's long-awaited PS3 gaming system into U.S. stores, pushing thousands of Blu-ray players into homes overnight. Immediately, the sales numbers of Blu-ray movie discs took off. Within weeks, stores were selling more Blu-ray discs in a week than HD DVD ones. In early December, Blu-ray players from Sony, Pioneer, Panasonic, and Philips joined the Samsung player and the PS3 in retail stores... and the future for Blu-ray suddenly looked much brighter.
In just a couple of months after Blu-ray's "second" launch, Blu-ray overtook HD DVDs 9-month sales lead, and has been widening the gap ever since. So far, in 2007, there have been over 2 times as many Blu-ray movies sold as HD DVD movies -- not a bad come-back!
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Perhaps in celebration of the anniversary, a number of company's have made some big Blu-ray announcements this week.
First was Blockbuster's news that they would be rolling out 170 Blu-ray titles into over 1400 of their rental stores nationwide next month. And, as for HD DVD... not expanding into any new stores.
Right on the heels of that announcement a pair of smaller studios who had previously been noncommital toward HD discs announced that they would be Blu-ray exclusive. The two studios are Starz (formerly Anchor Bay) and Exoptron Limited (an HD documentary studio). It had been widely advertised by the HD DVD group that while the big studios may favor Blu-ray the smaller studios could never afford to enter the market, and would instead support HD DVD. Well, that doesn't appear to be the case.
And what may be the best news so far this week, BD+ (the enhanced Blu-ray movie copy protection that has delayed Fox titles for month's now) appears to be ready for wide release. The specs appear to be finalized and control of the system has been transferred to the new BD+ Technologies, LLC. Hopefully, Fox will release a statement announcing new titles to be released in the U.S. any time now.
Supposedly, a BIG announcement is due later today to mark the anniversary. I won't bother speculating here what it might be, but it's shaping up to be an awesome week!
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