Sony is forcing people to upgrade their PS3 firmware. Without the firmware upgrade they are not allowing access to the PlayStation Network.

Since access to the Playstation Network was given to the user at the time of buying the product they cannot just snatch it away later

I was talking about the price of Blu-ray players when HD-DVD died, not the cost of HD-DVD players themselves.

If the conspiracy theory is to be believed, once format competition ended prices of Blu-ray players should have gone up, or at least stayed the same. Instead they have fallen by about half in ~21 months.

At that rate you'll be able to get a cheap player for about $75 in mid 2011, and for less than $40 by 2013, which will likely end DVD player sales.

What are you talking about? Toshiba was dumping HD DVD players for $99 at places like Wal-Mart. $300 is a load of bull.

The fact is that Blu-ray players are still too expensive for mass market adoption. I bought a PS3 in January because I couldn't wait any longer (and knew it was future proof enough).

And that is why I will not buy Blu-Ray. This HDMI nonsense is nothing but an excuse to put DRM in everything in order to try and keep me from doing what I please in my own house. An RJ45 would have been quite enough, but Sony couldn't stand using that.
It's a concept called freedom. Sony has no right to decide what I can do in my place.
And Sony has done everything it can, pathetic or not, to try and do just that.
I am not advocating piracy. I just want my freedom to be respected.
I don't need to show my drivers license every time I start up my car, I fail to see why Sony (and others) thinks it should check my entire installation and every film I want to watch every time I want to watch one.
It's my house, my property, my TV and my films. I should not have to ask permission to use the stuff I have already paid for.
The mere thought of this iniquity enrages me.

You can buy a new Blu-ray player for $150 at Walmart ora Costco, among other places. That's a far cry from the ~$300 it cost to buy a player when HD-DVD went belly up in January last year.

And since the death of HD-DVD, Blu-ray has been selling quite well, despite the recession and the fact that only 1/2 the homes out there have an HDTV.

Honestly, I don't.

I live in the real world and cannot afford £9 per hour to watch movies, which is the lowest cost of a blueray movie.

According to HMV website many of their movies are £18. Sorry for my error saying movies are £50, they have come down in price.

I'm sick of the Sony exploitation, a typical example is with Sony Memorystick memory cards. You know the memory cards in psp's, cameras etc. Where the memory costs 2x as much, has no advantage over regular common memory cards. In fact it's a disadvantage because most non-sony laptops don't accept the sony memory cards.

And they can't even spell blue ray properly ;-)

Anyway, I find SKY ok. I hear that Virgin Cable is even better than SKY, but Virgin/Cable is not in my area.

For £25/month with SKT I get:

+All the SKY mixes (entertainment, music, knowledge, sports, news etc) but not the premium movie or sports packages.
+Free calls to landlines across the whole of Europe.
+2MB broadband connection.

*SKY+ - the recordable SKY box. Record all my favourite programmes and series easily.

For the same money I could buy 1.5 blueray movies each month.

The logic is blindingly obvious. SKY Blueray.

Why do we need about 8 different audio formats (all with a licence fee) and two new video formats that do the same thing. Why are small studios required to buy an expensive key (for a lock that can be opened with a paper clip) even if they don't care about the crap copy protection.

All the big boys got together with Sony to set things up so that get paid no mater what, and any upstart company has a hard time since every time they sell something they have to pay for the rights to all the mandatory crap built into the standard.

How much do you get paid working for SKY?

Your conversion is right but the assertion of interested_party that Blu-Rays cost £50 is a tad out of whack. Most are ~£15 (~US$25). Only the overpriced TV series boxsets approach £50, which is exactly the same as what happens in the case of DVD's.

man i miss hd dvd sooo much, over here in AUS I bought the xbox hd dvd player for $150AU (roughly $120US) and I have a hd dvd drive in my laptop, the movies were as cheap as regular dvd's too from ezydvd :( I'm still blown away that blu ray won out. Not legitimately won out either, surely there's laws in place to stop the paying out of companies like what sony did. Because as consumers we've just been blown about a decade behind in productivity. I'm referring to pricing on the HD standard as being Sony it will take a good 10 years before we see 1080p as cheap as regular dvds.

"A quick google puts that at $81 by current conversion! Are you serious? That's 2-4 times the cost of blurays here in the states. Why would anyone pay that much for a film?"

Correct, on both counts. The simple and plain fact is, Blu-Ray and DVD region restrictions exist for the simple reason of keeping competition from certain regions (like the USA) from keeping prices low in others (like Europe.)

You'd think such an abomination of competition law and free trade would be illegal, but it's not. Worse, it IS illegal to try and circumvent it (your own Digital Millennium Copyright Act covers that.) Why do you think that might be? Answers on a postcard, please...

A quick google puts that at $81 by current conversion! Are you serious? That's 2-4 times the cost of blurays here in the states. Why would anyone pay that much for a film?

wrt to the buying of movies, £50 a movie is a lot to watch it 2, 3 or 4 times? Do you really watch them more than this?

When DVD's first came out I thought I might watch them a few times, but I didn't. Like I don't read the same book twice, however I can watch the same episode of South Park a couple of times!

SKY - well I don't bother with the paid for movies, I just watch the 10+ channels of free movies, plus all the other channels that come on the mixes.

Sky Mixes packs cost £1 a month. All are recordable and series linkable using a SKY+ box.

The content is huge, sometimes it might be 400 channels of rubbish, but then I have the recorded programs that "I Haven't Seen It Yet" to watch.

And it's that "I Haven't Seen It Yet" feature that keeps SKY trumping DVD's, imho.

Also I have Sky+. That's the one with the recordable hard drive and it can record 2 programs at once while playing another one back. And it can do Series Link, so it will record all the episodes for any programme I set it to.

I can watch Comedy, Drama, News, etc at anytime, all with a lot new content.

SKY also gives me broadband as part of the deal that I took with the £5/month for unlimited landline calls across Europe. All for £25/month.

SKY+ costs half the price of 1 BluRay movie per month.

If I got all the bells and whistles sky(HD, all movies and sports) then SKY would cost the same as 1 + 1/2 Blueray movies per month.

So yes you do have a point, you get exact control over your choice, but it's extremely expensive per hour of programme watched.

I think most content will move to the "Internet Delivered" model within the next 10 years. A bit like Steam for PC Games, or another example is that of the PS3 with its downloadable and buyable games online.

Sorry for going on so long, and I don't work for sky. I'm just an ordinary joe looking for the best bang for my buck that suits me. ymmv.

i wholeheartedly agree with interested_party

sony used to be a name synonymous with quality and finesse

this 'goodwill' is now being traded for a fast buck but it is at the expense of the goodwill

soon sony will be known as a firm that used to be good but then sh*t on its customers for fast cash until they shopped elsewhere

for this reason bluray will die a death - affordability has a BIG part to play in standardisation and successful rollout fo new technology

While I agree with a lot of what you are saying I don't only watch films once. Well, not if they are any good. So I buy Blu-Rays for films I think will benefit from it and when I think I'll watch them lots.

The whole SKY thing is a waste of money in that it was great for a few months but then you see the same stuff being repeated and you look at the time available for watching and think, "Hmmmm, I'd be better off buying the occasional film and using Freesat".

That's what I found anyway :-)

What took so long, Sony has a history of price fixing, stifling competition. After paying off hundreds of millions to the different film companies such as Warner Bro, Universal etc to abandon the opposing format, which created a monopoly, Sony had to recoup what they would call an investment, illegal or not. If Obama would really like to put a dent in the corruption that goes on, then he has to change the IRS rules allowing Companies to deduct fines and penalties as a tax deduction.

I bought a few DVD movies when DVD's first came out, but after watching them once I didn't really want to see them again. I'd rather watch something new, but after buying about 15 DVD's I decided it was a waste of money because I'd usually only watch them once.

Once I got SKY I had even less reason to buy a DVD movie.

BluRay is like DVD but it's 5x the price. But you still only get 1 movie. And that's the problem, at least for me.

Why spend so much for so little?

Get SKY HD and at least you have a variety of content. With many of the sports and entertainment channels launching HD variants in the next 2 years I can see Blu Ray being a very lame duck indeed.

Sure you can get even better resolution with Blue Ray, but it's still the same movie except it cost you 400% more.

The whole pricing of Blu Ray has CARTEL written all over it.

Sony used to be a sign of product reliability and quality. But in the past 5 years Sony has become more famous for:
+ exploding laptop batteries,
+ exploiting of prices (proprietry RAM etc in PSP etc)
+ poorer reliability.

Sony's strategy and execution needs some questioning. I'd like to see how they were 25 years ago compared to now in terms of market dominance, growth, profitability, product range and success, reputation etc.

Sony are the GM of electronics, and we all know what just happened to GM.