Beta to the Max

Was it only a couple of years ago I was supposed to buy a Blu-Ray DVD player so I could see the absolute top quality available in movies on my home TV? I mean, after I bought an HDTV that showed all the high quality the Blu-Ray disc had to offer, of course.

Apparently, I'm glad I didn't. It seems that even though the combined sales of regular DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are up, the share of Blu-Ray sales overall, compared with streamed movie offerings, is not rising nearly as fast as it has been. People don't care about picture quality and such nearly as much as the disc manufacturers thought they would, so they're OK with the much crappier picture and sound they get watching a movie streamed to whatever they're using to see it.

I can understand that; I'm not an obsessive movie rewatcher so I can usually get my fill with what Netflix sends me via their regular DVD subscription service, what's on TCM or the half-dozen or so movies I actually own. For example, I love the movie Silverado, but I've never bought a DVD to replace the VHS version that's gone to the used book and video store. Why should I? It's on about every six weeks to two months, so I can see it pretty regularly. I can say the same thing about Open Range, except I found a copy of that at the used book and video store for $3, so I did buy it.

The thing that strikes me as funny if Blu-Ray really does fall by the wayside is that it's the format that won. Toshiba competed against Sony's Blu-Ray with the HD DVD format when high-definition video discs began to be available starting in 2005. But Toshiba stopped making the HD DVD format in 2008 after several studios went with Blu-Ray only, which means that Blu-Ray was the VHS of its time, beating out the "Betamax" of HD DVD. When VHS finally beat out Betamax in the early 1980s, it established itself as the dominant home-video viewing format until DVDs were widely available, finally finished off when studios stopped releasing new movies in VHS format in 2006. But Blu-Ray's win has lasted less than three years.

I'm not sure what kind of technology will show up next as the preferred way to watch a movie at home. So I'll probably take my time waiting to see what's the best choice.

Unless they could offer a format that guaranteed a movie that didn't suck. I'd be on that in a heartbeat.