The success of Blu-ray

The Blu-ray format hasn't exactly seen the success the big publishers hoped for. They were adopted as the standard format of the PS3 and the upcoming PS4 and likely will be the disc format of whatever the next Xbox is called but when it comes to movies it hasn't worked out too well.

Looking in stores that sell DVDs and Blu-ray there is generally still a lot more shelf space dedicated to DVDs than for Blu-ray.

Personally I've kind of wanted to switch to Blu-ray, problem being that I can't just buy a Blu-ray drive, put in my PC and play a movie, no, I would have to also buy some expensive (and without doubt shitty, with the amount of competition they have) software to be able to play back a movie as you need a license to play Blu-rays. Why this license isn't simply part of the drive allowing any software to play it or why there even has to be a license I'm not quite sure, how about just letting me watch the movie I bought huh?

In any case, it seems like I'll have to get myself some form of Blu-ray player now. Why? Well, it seems the movie industry figured that if we aren't going to simply move to Blu-ray on our own they should probably start pushing us in that direction by other means. The latest of these tricks I've seen is that the commentary track that pretty much became standard for the DVD release of any big budget movie is no longer present on the DVD version of many recent movie, it's being held hostage on the Blu-ray version.

Doubt that specific trick will have much of an impact as far as Blu-ray adoption goes but they got me... Wonder what they'll do next?