Analyst: Blu-ray still has a long road ahead despite winning the war

Despite winning the recent HD video format war, Sony still faces many challenges in the future. According to new market data from ABI Research, the Blu-ray format still has a lot of rebuilding on its hands before it can safely establish itself into a comfortable market. For more details regarding this, read our full article after the jump.

The war may be over, but it seems that Sony still has a lot of rebuilding on its hands before it can safely establish the Blu-ray player into a comfortable market. New market data from ABI Research pointed out that Blu-ray still faces many challenges ahead.

According to principal analyst Steve Wilson, a lot of people are generally satisfied with the quality of their conventional DVD players when “upconverted” to play on HD TVs. There has also been an increase in DVD players with built-in upconverters lately to reflect this fact.

While future projections see the increase of more DVDs with upconversion, the current state of the Blu-ray player market isn’t very encouraging. Aside from PlayStation 3, the installed user base for Blu-ray players is quite weak. Wilson mentioned that “the dedicated consumer electronics and PC-based types of Blu-ray players wonÂ’t catch up in terms of market share until about 2013”.

Prices for both PCs with Blu-ray players have been lowered across the board lately in an effort to spur the market. However, Wilson explained that this sort of configuration was rather skewed considering the Blu-ray player costs nearly half the price of the actual PC.

He concluded that many studios were rather disappointed that the volume of Blu-ray players still hasn’t increased ever since it won the format wars. While consumer electronics manufacturers maintain the high prices for their dedicated players, it may take quite a while before this may actually happen.