Blu-Ray Is A Part Of 17% Of U.S. Households

While I haven’t made the jump to Blu-ray yet, it looks like more and more people are making this leap.

According to Home Media Magazine, a new report has discovered that the number of US households with at least one Blu-ray player has doubled from two years ago, to a total of 17%.

The report also stated that Netflix penetration is up to 15%, with DVD penetration hitting 95%, which is still the biggest production launch in history.   Apple computers have 12% penetration, with Windows based computers hitting 85%, which is shockingly high when you think only 10% more have DVD players.   Only 10%.

This past year has seen a considerable percentage of Criterion Collection releases being made available on both Blu-ray and DVD. We’ve only had a handful of discs that aren’t on Blu-ray, and we still don’t have a release that is Blu-ray exclusive. They’ve experimented with it in the Howard’s End release, that was only Blu-ray at first, then they caved and released the DVD this past year. We’ll also see a delay in the DVD set of the BBC box set this fall, with the Blu-rays available in November, and the DVDs in December. It doesn’t seem like Criterion is taking a side in this shift, which is probably for the better. It seems unlikely they’ll shift formats completely again, as they did from Laserdisc to DVD.

The interesting thing to note is that 20 million US households have both a Blu-ray and DVD player, which is quite an interesting statistic.   Personally, this is far from a shocking number, as it’s far and away becoming the go to format for many people.   With prices seeming to bottom out at anywhere from 50-100$ for a player and 10-15$ for discs, Blu-ray appears to some life now that the prices have become more manageable.   Don’t expect this rate to slow down either.

What do you think?

Source: Home Media Magazine