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you are what the industry call "late adopters", and no offense but you dont matter as much

Gft77 is an "early adopter" and quite frankly he is much more valuable to the tech industry than you, his (collective) purchasing power and opinion dictates what you will buy down the road, when you get round to it

there are lots of early and late adopters on this site and i think both are important, but as a middle of the road guy the industry doesnt care what i think either

I have no idea how much it cost in the late 70s, but it would not have been an issue at the time. He was impressed by the fact that it got him to JFK before the time he left Europe. (due to the time zones, of course)

I disagree. They care about all and change their marketing efforts to cater to each during a product's specific life cycle. Every dollar counts. There are more classifications than Early, Middle, and Late, but of course, it is the middle that the most money is at, and where companies want to stay at for the maximum amount of time. During the early phase, they are not making money, and instead trying to "push" it into the middle, and during the late stages, they are trying to refresh it back into the middle or milk it for whatever can be gotten out of it.

The early adopters, as they are, aren't very valuable to them. They only care about early adopters as they are a mechanism for capturing the people in the middle (through reviews and such). In that sense, they are valuable, which is what you might be saying.

but both are more valuable than late adopters because the product lifecycle is waning, prices and profits have dropped and they are looking to the next iteration of their product

Sure, I have nothing wrong with that description, though I think it can be misconstrued.

My point here is that early adopters do not necessarily make every product mainstream. Because of how entrenched DVD's are, it will be hard for anything to replace them. Nobody has stopped making DVD's in exchange for making HD/BD, and it may be a long, long time before they do. DVD's are not at all in the decline stage. They are sitting nicely in maturity, and could be there for a long time. Just look at Coke and Pepsi. They are continuously revamping their brand, the look of the bottle, the methods of distribution, the variations of flavor... anything to keep their product in the maturity stage and hold market share (just like DVD has done by creating upscaling DVD players for standard DVD's). There is no reason to think that DVD will just hand the crown off to the next format. There will be resistance to change at a level we haven't seen in the home video market, both from consumers and producers.

oh i know early adopters dont decide anything, i mean otherwise we would all be watching laserdiscs

but they are important in that their influence as tastemakers can make the next big thing

Further to value my point that nobody, in general, has stared at a DVD movie and said "Oh jesus this is unbearable!"

Did you guys know that Microsoft would make a Blu-Ray addon in a heartbeat?

Source

Microsoft actually stands to loose quite a bit of cash within the area of development because they were the ones along with Toshiba who created HD DVD. In the long run though, Microsoft is all about making cash, and their good at it, so they won't hang onto a dead format (if that happens) even if they did help to develop it.

update....

HBO Confirms Switch to Blu-ray Exclusivity

source

As I said before in many threads, I'm a huge movie fan and I plan(ed) on getting a 360 mid summer but all this news is making me think twice. I don't want to have to go out and buy a separate Blu Ray player to play all the new movies when I could just get the PS3 and have both. Decisions, decisions, decisions...

and sony knows this so score for sony,

i remember the ps2 being a dvd player also but it was a crappy dvd player so...

still think i will wait for a sub-$200 blu ray player before taking the plunge

The nice thing about the PS3 is not only the price, but it is already set up to work with Blu Ray profile 2.0, where as other player that are set to 1.0 or 1.1 probably can't.  It's all about how much storage is on the system.  According to wikipedia.org:

[attachment=1210]

and this extra storage (aside from the 64KB persistent memory) is to allow newer features enabled on Blu Ray disc.  No matter what player you buy you'll still be to watch the movie.

seems a little confusing so i think i will take a wait and see approach

seems a little confusing so i think i will take a wait and see approach

HD DVD players can network by default right? And so can get firmware updates. I heard Blu-ray players couldn't, but that doesn't seem logical right? Someone tell me I'm wrong. NOW.

And PS3 can network, see?

Yes, alot of people (like me) are upset about Sony's implementation of Blu Ray. It was more expensive (over double) the cost of my HD DVD player and cannot update through a network, and now they are saying I might not even be able to watch some movies that are released later! Yet another reason to hate Sony. Maybe I'll just start collecting all of my new movies in digital format. I don't care to lose the storage space anyway.

I guess I don't understand what everyone means by cannot be updated through a network.  Blu Ray players have the same ethernet jacks and/or WIFI chips that HD DVD has to update firmware and even profiles if they have the requirements.


edit--------

profile 1.0 and 1.1 players are not required to have online connectivity, so when buying a player you should watch for that. Profile 2.0 players make it mandatory for online connectivity. I just checked Cnet.com and looked over a number of players I'd consider (other than the PS3) and they all had ethernet and could update via the internet.

From what I understand, the PS3 is the only current Blu Ray player that will support 2.0. The rest of us will be left out in the cold with our overpriced players that can't support the newest features and possibly can't play newer discs. All of this because Blu Ray was rushed to the market a year early to compete against HD-DVD... now that the PS3 has given them the momentum, they are beginning to fix their buggy crap and implement features that HD-DVD had from the start.

In true Sony style, here is their response to the concerns over the loyal early adopters being left without:
"They knew what they were getting into."

In regards to why Blu Ray players up til now have been buggy and lacking features:

"When BetaNews asked why these manufacturers rushed out players that were not fully capable and potentially buggy due to their BD-J implementation, the Blu-ray partner pointed blame across the room to HD DVD. "We should have waited another year to introduce Blu-ray to the public, but the format war changed the situation," he said. HD DVD was already coming and the BDA had no choice but to launch Blu-ray."

This is exactly why I cannot stand Sony. Even supporters of Blu Ray should at least acknowledge that is this is not the way a company should treat its consumers.

Why don't you do a google search and look up HD-DVD issues, and I think the rosy picture you've painted and the dismal one you've described about Blu Ray will be proven not accurate.

Perhaps if you want to be upset at anyone, it should be Toshiba and Microsoft, because if they can't sell a format player that at one time was 1/2 the price and at one time had better audio feature (blu ray now has these features), then there's something really wrong.