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Blu-ray 'to bloom', now HD DVD's dead

Expect demand for Blu-ray Disc technology to explode this year, with 29.4m homes around the globe owning a BD player by the end of the year, it has been claimed.

The forecast comes from market watcher Strategy Analytics (SA), which admits that the vast majority of those machines will be PS3 games consoles. Some 13m BD-compatible consoles will be purchased worldwide this year, compared to 4m standalone players and 2m computers with BD drives.

In 2012, the company predicted, some 57.4m BD devices will be sold, taking the format's installed base to 132m homes. By then, the PS3 will have lost out to standalone devices, almost certainly a result of falling player prices.

That said, SA also said 256m homes will have at least one HD TV in 2012, so there'll still be plenty of folk out there who won't be getting their HD content from optical discs.

Maybe by that time we'll all have sufficient broadband capacity for the realisation of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' vision of World+Dog downloading HD movies from iTunes to have come about. ®

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