First, people like to have libraries of movies they can just put in whenever. That seems to be more convenient for the masses right now when it’s a physical DVD as opposed to a huge hard drive. Plus DVDs are more portable, easier to share, easier to play in your car on a long road trip.

Second, there’s a huge segment of the market that doesn’t have access to on-demand video yet, cannot afford the level of service that brings HD on demand to their TVs instantly or they are uncomfortable with using it.

Third, services like Netflix have shown how people like to have DVDs coming into their homes that they can view whenever in the 21 seconds it takes to put the disc in and get it going. When the delivery system becomes very reliable and ultra easy to use — think netflix where you click on a movie and it zaps down to your TV in stunning HD quality.

There is still mongo cash to be made of the Blu-ray format even if it’s big-profit lifespan is only 5 to 10 years.

They are substantially better in quality! I mean they rock!! The first thing you will notice is that everything is way sharper, and because of the sharpness the picture has great depth, almost like your are looking into the picture rather than just looking at the picture. HD on demand will succeed purely because of convenience, provided they get the pricing right. But for those that want quality, Blue ray will succeed also. I think your blog is inaccurate about the success of VHS. The success of VHS was not mainly because of pornography, In the beginning, I believe VHS was developed by Matsushita, division of Panasonic. (I could be wrong) Then Sony had there betamax technology already working in the commercial field for a few years. Movie Studios liked the idea of selling there movies after the box office run, So, they approached both Sony and Matsushita on marketing under both formats. However, (here in lies Sony’s mistake and Matsushita’s smart marketing, Sony refused to license their Betamax technology to other electronic Mfg’s. Matsushita however sold the hell out of there licensed VHS technology to anyone who wanted it, and at a very attractive price I’m sure. Because in a very short time the market was flooded with VHS Recorders and players many portables also, I know I had a camera, portable recorder/player and a separate VHS recorder in my family. It was so much better that 8mm movies. So with the proliferation and price crashing do to competitiveness, Sony lost big time.

So to some up the VHS thing: It was the ability of Home Made Family Videos, plus being able to record your favorite movies and TV shows (Unheard of at the time), Commercial Market (Corporate Training, Duplicators and Marketing tapes), then, the movie studios stepped in big time. Everyone wanted a VHS tape recorder/player. Soon afterwards the movie rental market was born, Rental is why and when pornography on VHS was born! There was no internet back then, so distribution was difficult, once Mom & Pop video rental stores exploded in growth, and this happened fast, that’s when the Pornography market started to proliferate. So they were a small player in the big picture of things. How do I know that? I had my own company Microright back then and I marketed our software to video rental and retail stores. I worked all the VSDA (Video Software Dealers Association) shows in Vegas for 4 years. 90 percent or better of the people marketing to the existing rental and retail stores were from the Commercial and Movie Studios. With only a few booths from the pornography market. As the years went on you began to see more and more pornography at the show. So I really doubt that pornography had anything to do with driving the adoption of VHS, just the opposite.

Here’s my take on Blue-Ray: Blue-Ray will only succeed if the pricing and technology of players will be both attractive (under $200.00) and available from a plethora of Electronic MFG’s. I just found this out, Sony does not own or did not design Blue-Ray, it was Panasonic. So Sony wanted that technology in there Playstation 3 player. They are the ones spending the money to push the blue-ray market. Not sure how the Blue-Ray market or how Sony’s cards are in the mix of things in regards to Panasonic selling the Blue-Ray technology to other mfg’s., that is critical to success in my opinion. Then you have the computer market which is a whole other market unto it’s self.

In addition, easy access to the media room. There is Apple TV, XBox is making waves, Tivo is even making an aggressive move to put downloaded content right to your TV easily. Home theaters are becoming more and more popular, if digital media is going to win you have to give easy access, to non restrictive, high quality (HD) content. There are a lot of problems with this we face. Mainly the ISP’s restricting downloading, and wanting to prioritize traffic. It’s not going to work if this behavior is allowed. No one wants to wait 5 hours for a download, then face DRM restrictions, when putting in a disk is less painful.

We will get there, but it will be painful.