Blu-ray Can't Succeed With HD Video Alone

It was just over a year ago that Blu-ray vanquished its long-time rival HD-DVD. Uptake for Blu-ray has been promising: A significant 7% of US households can play Blu-ray discs at home either on a PlayStation3 or a standalone Blu-ray player. This certainly pleases the Blu-ray manufacturers as well as the movie studios that fought hard to establish the high-quality, well-protected disc format. Yet the living-room environment that Blu-ray was designed to serve has disappeared for ever — viewers now have more ways to get a wider variety of video into their homes, and Blu-ray owners are among the most aggressive multiplatform viewers. Applying Forrester's Convenience Quotient methodology to some of the newest connected Blu-ray players, we conclude that only the most advanced connected Blu-ray players have a chance of shaping the consumer viewing habits of the future.