Despite a rapid rise in the sales of consumer Blu-ray players, a fall in their prices and an increase in the number of high-definition movie titles, Blu-ray Drives (BDs) in PC systems have been left singing the blues, according to iSuppli Corp. By 2013, BDs will be found in only 16.3 percent of PCs shipped, up from 3.6 percent in 2009.

“BDs won’t be replacing DVDs as the primary optical drive in PC systems through at least the year 2013,” said Michael Yang, senior analyst for storage and mobile memory at iSuppli. “They eventually will find success, but during the next five years, that success will be limited in the PC segment. According to Yang, the two main reasons hampering the adoption of Blu-ray drives in PCs include costs as well as the lack of a library of movies that justifies the need for consumers to move to a different drive in their PCs.

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Roxio®, a division of Sonic Solutions® today launched Roxio Creator® 2010, a comprehensive upgrade focused on streamlining and accelerating the process of capturing, editing and enjoying personal video, including high-definition content. Building on Creator’s already extensive feature set for editing and sharing digital video, Roxio Creator 2010 now offers automatic smart encoding to dramatically decrease rendering times while maintaining optimum video quality, and leverages ATI Stream and NVIDIA® CUDA™ technologies to make project encoding up to five times faster. Creator 2010 also adds a range of Blu-ray Disc™ (BD) features including AVCHD Archiving, BD-RE on-disc editing, and complements its comprehensive Blu-ray Disc authoring capabilities with a new array of high-definition motion menus.

Roxio Creator 2010 also makes it easier to enjoy video on a range of mobile devices with a newly simplified and reorganized output display that enables users to quickly transfer videos that are automatically optimized for the display characteristics and playback features of their particular device. Adding to Creator 2010’s versatile video capabilities is a Web video capture feature that allows consumers to grab streaming video, such as user-generated content on YouTube®, for viewing offline on portable devices and DVD players.

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Elecom Japan sent out a press release today, announcing its new ESD-IDSAA series of solid state drives. What makes this "nanoSSD" unique is that instead of taking up a drive bay, it plugs directly into one of the SATA ports on your motherboard. Elecom's new drive also gets its power directly from the SATA port. However, an auxiliary power cable is included in case it cannot get enough juice. The ESD-IDSAA series is available in 8GB (ESD-ID008SAA) and 16GB (ESD-ID016SAA) capacities and is capable of 75MB/s read and 30MB/s write speeds. No word on pricing or availability at this time.

In 2009, Blu-ray title prices have declined rapidly and the pricing gap is narrowing, according to Futuresource Consulting’s price tracking service. The service shows that in February the average Blu-ray price for new release movies in the UK was £27.29. By the beginning of August this had dropped to £16.74 – a sizeable decline of 40%.

Catalogue pricing has also fallen, but not by such a significant amount. From an average price of £16.87 in February, this dropped to £14.25 in August; representing a decline of 15%. When looking at the average catalogue price across the three largest etailers, (Amazon, Play and HMV), the price drop is far more significant, with the average catalogue price hitting £11.22.

Back in Q4 2008, both in the USA and the UK the premium for purchasing a new release title on Blu-ray compared to DVD was between 30% and 80%. However, for catalogue BD titles this premium was considerably higher, and in some instances was as much as 300%. Although it has never been disputed that consumers will pay more for Blu-ray, the premium in the market in 2008 was clearly not sustainable.

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