Quand la sagesse l'emporte sur la duperie...

It’s sometimes a challenge to understand how arguably better
technologies often lose out to things that are inferior. We’ve seen it
time and time again. The problem is that consumers are often not
interested in the “best” technology but are more than satisfied with
that which is “good enough”. These days, a good example would be to
look at Blu-Ray and how it’s being adopted by consumers.

We’re now well past the point where HD-DVD was vanquished by Blu-Ray,
and this year at CES we’re finally seeing lower cost devices and
content that’s flowing on a regular basis. Yet, in the long run it may
well be Blu-Ray has won a Pyrrhic victory and it may well turn out
once again that the best is the enemy of the good. I’m not suggesting
Blu-Ray has failed or will fail, but it’s the type of technology that
faces exactly this type of challenge from the “good enough”

Let’s go back in time for a bit. At the end of the 2001, there was a
major effort to drive consumers beyond the ubiquitous compact disk and
drive them to one of two new formats, SACD and DVD Audio. Both were
optical disk formats designed to replace the existing CD standard and,
at the same time, drive replacement cycles for both hardware and
software. In the end, neither format prevailed and despite strong
efforts from both sides, consumers remained with the CD as a standard
while at the same time embracing the MP3 format for music (along with
the iPod and other MP3 players), a format of lesser quality than the
CD.

So how does a technology shift and cross the threshold for adoption?
The ability to drive consumers to new technology is a difficult task
requiring several key things to happen at the same time.

First, there requires broad unified hardware support. In the case of
Blu-Ray this didn’t happen soon enough. Vendors were split with no
unified standard, and instead created a format war that caused
confusion among consumers. This initially held back adoption for
consumers who waited for the market to sort itself out.

Second, deep content support is required. Even as Blu-Ray content now
flows in some numbers at last, there’s far more new content available
on DVD than on Blu-Ray, which also sells at higher price points for
the same titles.

Finally, there needs to be a clear and visible consumer value
proposition. CDs and DVDs both offered a clear value proposition to
consumers. There was a visible difference in the experience that was
easily grasped. Both were marked by a shift from analog tape format to
disk, which was more reliable and offered novel features such as
random access to content. Both offered clear quality differences than
what came before and the quality was well above the threshold for just
noticeable differences. Consumers still do not see the same value
proposition with Blu-Ray, especially when cheap, up-scaling DVD
players make their existing content look “good enough”.

Even as consumers still embrace their DVDs, the growth and penetration
of broadband is facilitating content to be delivered directly to
consumers without the need for any optical disk. Combined with
portability and the ability to move content from room to room as well
as onto portable devices, the market for downloaded video content
continues to grow each day and more of that content is in Hi-Def
format.

With pressure coming from DVD on one side and the growth in connected
TVs and streaming content, consumers may opt once again for the “good
enough” experience and never make the mass market leap to high
definition optical disks.

http://www.slashgear.com/blu-ray-th...d-1369785/



Pipolin n'a pas fini de chialer :-))))