Monday October 4, 2010 – Stewart Wolpin
In the Isaac Asimov novella, The Bicentennial Man (and not the treacly Robin Williams movie version), the protagonist, Andrew Martin, is a robot who believes he can become legally human by replacing his robotic components with organic ones. Once the replacement process is complete, the question remains: is Andrew really "human" or something else?
Blu-ray players are undergoing the same bizarre "What is it becoming?" self-transformation.
Back in the good old days – last year – Blu-ray deck manufacturers had a hard time differentiating their wares from those of competitors. All Blu-ray decks pretty much did the same thing – they played Blu-ray, DVDs and CDs, and let you connect to exciting (he said sarcastically) BD Live content. Maybe one manufacturer could conjure up some obscure video processing bit rate improvement or faster boot-up time or specialized DAC or high-end construction materials, and maybe there'd be an add-on compatibility such as DivX or DLNA thrown in or, of late, 3D, to differentiate their decks.
By-and-large, though, consumers just bought a Blu-ray deck from the same manufacturer who made their HDTV to gain unified remote control functions. Folks figured, rightly, one Blu-ray deck was pretty much the same as another.
Not any more.
Online land rush
In the last few months, manufacturers have been rushing to build-in "connected" features – internet widgets, often by Yahoo!, and a plethora of content-on-demand services from such brand names as Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, Amazon, Pandora, et al. Blu-ray decks makers suddenly have lots of points of differentiations.
But can these new connected boxes truly be called "Blu-ray players" anymore?
Each manufacturer seems to be taking different connected approaches: which widget platform is used, which and how many content services are included, the number of widgets (while there are a total of 67 Yahoo! widgets with 100 more in the development pipeline, each manufacturer has to test each widget on their connected HDTVs and Blu-ray players before making them available for download on that device), putting one grouping of widgets/content services on their HDTVs and another set on their BD players, and especially the user interface – and none of them are exactly Apple-like in the latter regard.
For instance, Sony segregates widgets and video content in separate areas within its UI, expecting the consumer to have no trouble knowing, identifying and locating a particular "widget" or a content source. Another supplier, LG, limits widget updates to just the model year, after which the device is "locked." Why? Presumably they want you to buy new gear every year. This may not be a problem as consumers will be reluctant to buy a set with such limitations, or that they'll have to deal with a poked hornet's nest when the previously unadvised consumer discovers this state of affairs.
Then there are the varying connectivity options. All connected BD decks have a physical Ethernet jack and some wireless option – either the dongle is an optional extra (dumb), includes a dongle (not as dumb) or, thankfully, a growing number of sensible suppliers are just building in Wi-Fi.
While all these connected capabilities create obvious advantages to the $69 play-only, not-connected Blu-ray players expected to pop up on Black Friday, BD makers have gone from not enough differentiation to way too much.
What are Blu-ray decks becoming?
More to the point, Blu-ray players aren't exactly Blu-ray players any more. They're morphing into media streamers with Blu-ray drives, or something else entirely – and for good reason: people are buying BD decks, but aren't necessarily buying Blu-ray discs.
But sales of Blu-ray software are moving in the opposite direction. Nielsen VideoScan says BD sales revenue is down 26.11%from 2009; last week, disc renter Blockbuster entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and Blockbuster's nemesis, disc renter-by-mail Netflix, is swiveling 180 to compete with the new streaming content threats.
Now given the opportunity to reduce or cut their expensive cable monopoly, consumers are buying and connecting their BD players to view online content and, periodically, play a Blu-ray disc. It's only a matter of time before a manufacturer adds an ATSC tuner and a hard drive for DVR and local storage to complete the transformation from BD player to a…?
So at what point do Blu-ray disc player makers consider changing the name of their content boxes to better reflect both what these decks do and how people are increasingly using them?
