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Originally Posted by AnemicOak
Looks to me (from the link) like you're looking at sales of hardware not media/movies. From a time when Blu-Ray was still more of a niche product for early adopters and player costs were high. If anything hurt Blu-Ray at that time it was folks not feeling the need to upgrade from their current DVD tech.
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Blu-ray launched mid 2006 with PS3 being released in November 2006. Happy 10th birthday, PS3
. I have a hard time swallowing the idea that a world-wide, mainstream consumer console, which Sony also positioned as their flagship Blu-ray player, was a niche product for early adopters. Sony certainly did not see it that way and they didn't market PS3 and Blu-ray that way.
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Netflix wasn't that big of a name for streaming in early 2008. As I said they didn't even start offering unlimited streaming until January of 2008 (and HD-DVD was all but dead already then) before that subscribers only got an hour of content per dollar spent on their Netflix DVD subscription. Most people didn't even know what streaming was yet at that time. Hulu didn't even launch until March of 2008.
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You are correct and I am mistaken about Hulu's timing. And Apple introduced rentals in January 2008. These make Netflix the
only name in video streaming during HD-DVD's downfall and Blu-ray's failure to gain significant traction.
The timing also closely follows the breakup of the LCD price fixing conspiracy. The resultant drop in HDTV prices combined with the US conversion from NTSC to ATSC (and cable companies converting to QAM) made HDTVs and HD video desirable things among US consumers. While DVD rentals were still Netflix's core business, they started pushing the conversion to streaming, and they pushed that conversion very hard. Within 2.5-3 years? Streaming became the core business and they started looking to sell or spin off the DVD rental service.