A piece of multimedia technology that has been developed recently is the Blu-ray disc. The Blu-ray disc was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high definition video, as well as storing large amounts of data. A substantial amount more data can be stored on a Blu-ray disc than on the DVD format.
Blu-ray is currently supported by about 200 of the world’s leading consumer electronics, personal computer, recording media, video game and music companies. As of October 2008 more than 970 Blu-ray disc titles have been released in the United States and 540 released in Japan.
The Blu-ray disc had a heavy impact upon its competitors. Early in 2008 Blu-ray competed with HD DVD format for the market but Toshiba which was the main company supporting HD DVD – announced it would no longer market HD DVD players and recorders. Leading almost all other HD DVD companies to follow them. However, there is still competition for Blu-ray as other alternatives have been introduced, such as HD movies from satellite operators and people can download HD films through the Internet.
As with all new technology there are always more companies trying to compete with a better product, For example recently Hitachi showcased a 100GB Blu-ray disc which they claim is readable on standard Blu-ray disc drives and it is believed that a firmware update is the only requirement to make it readable to current players and drives.
The impact that I think the Blu-ray disc is having upon society is that as the prices for the discs are sufficiently higher than DVD’s, more people will stick to buying the DVD’s. Also in order to play the Blu-ray disc’s people would have to own a player that is compatible with them, which again will cost more money.
