I love movies and I have a pretty good collection of DVDs. With the end of HD DVD you'd think we'd see an increase in Blu-Ray adoption. Sales of stand alone players though were so low that they won't publish the numbers. I'm not too surprised at this because the players are still really expensive and the movies are a ripoff. It doesn't help that the economy sucks. Having two HD TVs at home, I'm left with one player and that's the PS3 in the living room. I'm not going to pay $300+ to get a player to watch $30 movies when a $12.99 up converted picture is still pretty damn good on the set. 

I thought I'd go out and snatch up some Blu-Ray movies to watch especially those heavy on special effects. I usually pick up DVDs on release day of movies I want. I mean I picked up a pretty nice TV a few months ago so I can get the best picture quality possible. But having the movies in hand, I was left with a conundrum. If I pick this up instead of the DVD version I can only watch it in one place in my house. If I want to curl up in bed and watch it in my bedroom, I'm SOL. DVD on the other hand is readily accessible in all the rooms of my house via a dedicated player or streamed through Media Center. I can't do that with a Blu-Ray movie and that's where I stopped. Even with regular DVDs, the picture quality is still pretty impressive so it's hard to justify spending almost double the price on a movie where I am limited in my current household on where I want to watch it.

I guess my other option would be to pick up a Blu-Ray drive, stick it in my server Media Center, and stream it through there but the 360 has trouble sometimes even streaming regular standard definition TV on an Ethernet connection so I can't see it doing too well with a HD stream.  

So, if an avid movie collector and owner of several HD televisions is hesitant to jump into purchasing Blu-Ray products, I can see why the numbers are low. I'm enjoying watching HD broadcasts of local and cable programs so at least the TVs are being used to some of its potential. The companies though need to drop the prices on both the players and movies if they want to see mass adoption and I would hope they do it sooner rather than later.