At the launch of the new Apple Notebooks yesterday Steve Jobs called Blu Ray a bag of hurt.

His actual quote goes

“Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.”

The licensing hasn’t stopped HP, Dell and Sony amongst others for including Blu Ray drives in their laptops.

Blu Ray’s market share is still very low at about 5% of the home video market so Steve has one point about market penetration.

However this is really about protecting his digital distribution business aka The iTunes Music Store that also sells HD TV shows and movies for download.

The truth of the matter is if you compare iTunes HD content with Blu Ray content there is a very significant quality gap in Blu Ray’s favour.

Apple should have got on the HD bandwagon and let the consumer decide.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 8:28 am and is filed under Apple, Hi-Definition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.