In case you’ve been living under a rock all year (or just recently became interested in the Blu-ray format), Electronic House has put up a Blu-ray Year-in-Review featuring their top Blu-ray moments from the past year. Some are obvious… some are questionable… but, hey, its that time of year and you’ve got to admit it’s been quite the year. Follow the link above to see their slideshow; below are their bullet points with my comments added.
1/4/08 - Warner Brothers Goes Blu
Tough to argue with that – definitely the moment that changed the consumer landscape forever and made the next few points inevitable.
1/7/08 – HD DVD Cancels CES Press Conference
Again, it was inevitable given Warner’s earth-shattering news on days before, but still… fun to watch the tearful announcement. This may have been the first time in history that a significant number of the press attended a press conference to announce the cancellation of another press conference.
2/18/08 – Toshiba Throws in the Towel
V-T Day at last! And the long. hard forum battle ends with… oh, wait… I guess its still going on. See, not all HD DVD fans were paid marketing consultants for Toshiba. Some of them are just delusional. anti-social freaks who think Sony wants to steal their first born. If only Toshiba had shipped tin-foil hats in their HD DVD player packaging, they may just have pulled this off.
2/19/08 – Universal Announces Support for Blu-ray
With HD DVDs demise now official, Universal’s contract to support the format came to an abrupt end. The company that had made a point of bashing Blu-ray at every possible turn was suddenly working as fast as possible at getting their titles released on the format. The lesson: be careful what you say… it might just cost you your job later.
3/11/08 – Fox’s Hitman is First to Offer Digital Copy
How quickly we forget. It’s become so common so quickly for new releases to sport digital copies of the film on a second disc that we often fail to remember that just 10 months ago such a feature was still nowhere to be found.
3/24/08 – Sony Adds BD-Live Support to PS3
Yeah! Now I can not only watch the half-dozen trailers that come up before the movie’s menu, but I can download even more! The real breakout of BD-Live was still quite a ways off, but at least it took away the final talking point of HD DVD fans who found it unbearable to sit through a movie without a live internet connection.
4/8/08 – First BD-Live-enabled Titles Arrive
With the release of Walk Hard and The Sixth Day Sony became the first studio to inundate paying consumers with additional on-line marketing… er, great BD-Live features. Thanks… really. I don’t know how I could have watched Walk Hard and NOT gotten a Dewey Cox ringtone.
9/30/08 – 500,000 Copies of Iron Man Fly Off Shelves
Literally. Or, is that just how many they sold in the first week. I’ll never tell.
10/10/08 – LG Ships Netflix-Streaming BD300 Player
And Electronic House is apparently sponsored by…. Not sure how the release of a Blu-ray player by a second-tier manufacturer warrants mention, but I guess Netflix cares.
11/21/08 – Black Friday Brings Players Under $200
BD-Live players by real manufacturers (Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, etc) selling for under $200…can we all stop talking about how Blu-ray players are overpriced now?
11/28/08 – Blockbuster OnDemand Announced for Blu-ray
See, it’s like the Netflix downloads only by Blockbuster! Does Electronic House know that Blu-ray is a disc-based format?
12/09/08 – The Dark Knight Debuts After 1,000,000 Copies Ship to Stores
1080p. IMAX-framed shots. The Joker. It was destined that The Dark Knight would do for Blu-ray what The Matrix did for DVD… but nearly EVERYONE was shocked by just how well it did. 600,000 copies sold on day 1, and over 1.7 million sold in the few weeks since its release – Gotham seems to be immune from the global recession.
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