Blu-Ray
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"Without Blu-Ray, your HDTV is just a TV."
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Blu-ray is a common optical media format. Introduced by the Blu-ray Disc Association, an industry consortium which includes Sony, Philips, Apple, Panasonic and many others. It is now the standard format by default for high-definition digital media.
History
Blu-Ray hit the market in 2006. The players were expensive when they were first released, especially given how cheap DVD players had gotten, so most people had only one, if they have any. By the mid-2010s, they had reduced down in price to the point where they were competitive with DVD players.
Unlike DVD where there were only two movies on launch day for the format, Blu-ray launched with seven films [1] that can all lay claim to being the "first Blu-ray title.
Why didn’t Blu-Ray take off?
Blu-rays were expected to replace DVDs as the standard home video format, but takeover isn't really panning out.
Early problems
Blu-Ray hit the market just around the time of the Great Recession. A cheap Blu-Ray player in 2006 was the then new PlayStation 3, at around $500 for the base model. Couple that with around $1000 for a HDTV needed to that was needed to actually enjoy Blu-Ray over Blu-Ray, and far fewer households were capable of buying a setup during those tough times. After all, many were perfectly content with the DVD format, which had only been around for a decade at that point.
It didn’t help that many people also feel that Blu-rays are not a significant upgrade from DVDs, as much as optical discs were an upgrade from cassettes (many DVDs hold up remarkably well when "upconverted" to high-definition—most Blu-ray players should be able to play a standard DVD and in turn "upgrade" the picture quality—but this can be subjective).
Another problem was education, some people would buy an HDTV, and assume whatever you fed it was now HD, when this was not the case. How Stuff Works has an article that mentions this phenomenon.
Ironically, Sony fought against LG in a patent war regarding Blu-ray technology, starting when LG tried to get the Play Station 3 banned outside of Japan. This dispute could be part of LG's Xanatos Gambit to hold an illegal monopoly on the Blu-ray industry, as evidenced by LG dodging a Blu-ray licensing consortium just because it still wants to litigate.
Streaming
In addition, the rise in popularity of online video sales and video streaming websites such as Hulu has also curtailed some of Blu-ray's growth to begin with. In response to this Blu-ray players have at least some internet television capability and can access content providers like YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Blip, Crackle and others without a dedicated piece of equipment like a Roku Player or Apple TV. However, Blu-ray discs themselves still hover around the $15–$25 range (as opposed to $8–$15 for DVDs), which is often a turn-off for those who plan on switching to the new format. Some film company are responding by putting the bulk of the extra features on the Blu-ray versions, even basic ones like Audio Commentary.
By The New Twenties, the commonality of a streaming service removing or loosing shows has lead to a new appreciation for physical media. Some customers have noticed how older or less-popular shows disappear from streaming media platforms (just try to find a collective set of Looney Tunes cartoon on any streaming service in 2024), and buy Blu-Ray or DVD copies of their favorite shows so that they can be assured of being able to watch them whenever they want.
DRM and the Computer market
The DRM employed by Blu-Ray is much stronger than that used by DVD. Software support for Blu-Ray drives on computers is often hit or miss, and many gamers went straight from DVDs to digital distribution thanks to platforms such as Steam. By the mid to late 2010s, many gamers were omitting optical drives from their computers, and laptop manufacturers were eager to reclaim the internal space occupied by the drive.
Technology
The format's name comes from the blue-colored laser used to read the disc. A blue laser has a shorter wavelength than the red ones used for DVD players (and infrared for CDs), and thus can pick out the much smaller physical data tracks on the disc, allowing one to pack more data on a given area.
The discs are the same physical size as a DVD, but have a capacity of 25 gigabytes per layer (discs are often at one or two layers), large enough for a feature-length film stored at 1080p resolution with significant leftover space. The Ultra HD Blu-ray format doubles that to 50 gigabytes on the first layer, and 100 gigabytes total by the third layer.
The Blu-ray format is used by the Play Station 3; in fact, for a time this game console was the only Blu-ray player on the market, a factor that helped overcome some of the objections to its high price point. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 would use Blu-Ray primarily, and the Wii U would use similar, but incompatible optical discs. The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 would include blu-ray drives only on the high end models, forcing lower end systems to use digital downloads.
All that space comes with a drawback. The read and seek speeds of the new disc are only marginally faster, while the capacity is much higher, leading to long load times for games released on this format. The problem is not as noticeable during movies, which are of course strictly linear. On newer consoles like the PlayStation 5, the problem is solved by simply requiring that the game be installed to SSD, though this causes other problems, such as not being able to play immediately, or quickly using storage space. This problem becomes even more noticeable when burning, although those wishing to back up hard drives would need a lot of time anyway.
There are few portable devices that support it. One solution to this problem is to copy the tactic from HD-DVD: package a DVD version of any given movie with the Blu-ray disc, so parents don't need to either buy the film twice, or try to explain disc formats to a six year old who's upset he can't watch Up in the minivan.
Currently, a variant of the format, The Blu-Ray hybrid (a movie and a game in one disk) has just started being available to the public, but as of this writing, only 5 (Macross Frontier the Movie: The False Songstress being the 1st, the hybrid versions of Top Gun and Days Of Thunder, the Play Station 3 version of the Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension video game having 4 bonus P&F episodes on the same Blu-Ray (accessible on the XMB instead of the game menu) and the upcoming Macross Frontier: The Wings Of Goodbye) exist and are available in both the west and the east.