Well i got my first DVD player in 1999 and that cost me £250. was the only person that i knew that had one and its wasn't until late 2001 when i got married that one other person had one. Now onto the present day and i have a Blu-Ray player in the form of a PS3. But after 2.5 years of Bluray most of the people i know has a blu-ray player. Many of the first DVD players were unable to play both DL DVD's when they arrived or and DVD-R discs,plus some of the newer discs were unplayable or caused major problems. So what is the difference with having some Blu-ray players only having the 1.1 or 1.0 profile? Well for one even if blu-ray player doesn't have the 2.0 standard you are still able to view the disc. A lot of the blu-ray players can be upgraded to the 2.0 standard by a simple firmware upgrade.
Argos, here in the UK, have a Blu-ray player for £97 which works out to about $145. I know someone who works in management in Argos and they had just over 60 of the players at both local sores here. they ALL sold out in the run up to Xmas and were unavailable to order because the warehouse stocks ran dry due to demand. I can remember this happening when the cheaper DVD players began appearing and then DVD caught on.
HD on demand via the internet will fail here in the UK due to sever bandwidth limitations set by the ISP's. People are now being offered the choice of buying extra bandwidth because the limits are so bad that even online channels like BBCiPLayer takes up too much of your bandwidth to be viable. So imagine trying to stream or download HD movies.
itunes has only succeeded because an ipod or the iphone is the in thing to have and with today's society the way it is your seen as a joke and a loser if you don't own one amongst the younger generation.
HDTV's are now owned by everyone i know. Hell, even my parents have one and they're in their 70's. It really makes me laugh when i hear people say that blu-ray won't take off because an upscalling DVD player can make a standard DVD look comparable to a 1080p HD movie. They either need to get a better TV because there's is crap or go to specsavers to get their eye tested. Maybe on a 720p tv the results would be closer because of both the upscaling of the DVD but also that either the player or the TV has to downscale the 1080p source to 720p, so not a very good test.
The gadget show, here in the UK, did a test between what is considered the best upscaling DVD player and a Blu-ray player. They got 2 identical 1080p TV's and played the DVD & Blu-Ray of Iron man side by side. Their conclusions were that there was a huge step up in clarity and detail and everything looked so much better on the HD version.
I wonder how much sales of Blu-Ray players would escalate if a certian Saga got a blu-ray release?