The first ever Blu-Ray player to ship was the Samsung DB-P1000. Back in June 2006 there were only a few titles available but the market grew fast – in June 2008 there were more than 2,500 titles available in Australia and the UK, 3,500 in the USA and Canada. In Japan, as of July 2010, more than 3,300 titles have been released.
Blu-Ray was a growing category, the standard got the movie studios behind the specs and forced the HD-DVD competition to quit.
Fast forward to February 2019 and the same company, Samsung, the leading OEM simply quits the production of future Blu-Ray players. No more new players mean no incentives to produce content, which of course means that Blu-Ray is dead.
Streaming has taken over and will do so for any other physical medium. The DVD market will follow and so will finally the CD market.
The brand lesson? This is what we wrote in The Only Book You Will Ever Need on Branding “Brands and product categories are locked. Category relevance drives brand relevance. When the product category is new and growing, your brand grows with it. When your brand is associated with a category that has evolved into something else or your product category is simply no longer relevant, then your brand will die with it.”
I am curious to see if we will see in the future a revival of the format – similar to what we see in the Turntable – record business with currently over 3000 turntables on Amazon.