Recent studies from ABI Research showed that Blu-ray still faces a few challenges. Of course Blu-ray is the official high-definition format, but people didn't gave up on their good old DVD player yet. Especially when their player is upconverted, many aren't interested in a Blu-ray player. "We are starting to see an increase in the number of DVD players with built-in upconverters, and the video processing is getting better with each new generation," says principal analyst Steve Wilson.
Besides the rising popularity of upconverted DVD players, Blu-ray still hasn't established a strong Blu-ray market. Many say that Blu-ray survives because of the Playstation 3 since 85% of the Blu-ray players can be found in Sony's console. ABI's study found that dedicated Blu-ray players and PC-based Blu-ray players won't catch up in terms of market share until about 2013.
Now that the prices of dedicated players are still high, studios will notice that the end of the war didn't turn out the way they thought it would. Wilson concludes his research by saying that the studios will be disappointed when they don't see the volumes of players going up.
