Now, when I say “doomed”, I don’t mean Blu-ray DVDs will be gone by 2010. I’m just predicting that by the time next January rolls around, it will be completely clear to everyone that Blu-ray DVDs are not going to achieve anything close to the success of their standard-definition brethren. In short, Blu-ray DVD’s are not a successor to normal DVDs, and 2010 is going to be the year of the movie download.

In The New York Times article, Blu-ray supporters are optimistic that the falling price of Blu-ray players (i.e. sub-$200) will finally prompt their widespread adoption. Unfortunately, said supporters don’t seem to understand that 2009 is also the year of a giant global recession, and back when we weren’t in the giant recession (like last holiday season), Blu-ray player’s still sold for $400 dollars. Even worse, up until one year ago, Blu-ray was still in the midst of an absurdly drawn out format war with HD DVDs (RIP), which further encouraged sharp-eyed buyers to hold off.

According to Nielsen, about 25% percent of households have a high-definition TV (I got me a big one!), but last November the Wall Street Journal reported that less than 2% of households have a standalone Blu-ray player. Since Playstation 3 also plays Blu-ray DVDs, the percentage of households with Blu-ray buyability is actually closer to 7%, but many of those don’t necessarily HDTVs. Finally, even though it looks like holiday Blu-ray sales were stronger than expected, the number of households with blu-ray players doesn’t appear to have increased by more than 1%.

Now consider the competition: Currently (and while you’re reading this even) you can go to itunes or amazon, download an HD movie, and proceed to watch that movie, in high-definition, on your already high-definition computer screen. You can also connect your computer to your (HD)TV for $25-$50. If you don’t much care for dealing with computers (and really who does), Netflix is more than happy to stream HD directly to your TV, as is vudu, or even the good folks at apple.

All this brings me to my real point: Blu-ray deserves to fail. Besides that irritating format war mentioned up above, Blu-ray is set on pushing antiquated technology. DVDs scratch, and they take up a lot of space, and are slow to start up, and in the case of Blu-ray, you can’t even play them on most computers (to quote Steve Jobs, “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt”). Remarkably, all of these problems would fade away except for the absolute worst, most absurd, totally and completely shortsighted thing about DVDs: it’s ILLEGAL to copy your own DVDs onto your computer. This isn’t to say it can’t be done, you can easily find software that rips DVDs, but because it’s illegal, this extremely desirable feature can’t be built into easy-to-use, super-popular programs like iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Shortly after MP3’s appeared in the mid-90’s, computer hard drives smashed the 10 GB barrier. All of a sudden it became viable for people to keep music collections on their computers. For years, a digitally-inclined individual could continue to buy CDs, copy the songs to their computer, and not worry about investing in a dead format. CD sales, of course, continued to plummet, but at least their decline was graceful. Now that HDs are breaking the 1TB = 1000GB barrier, it would be completely reasonable to rip your newly purchased (Blu-ray) DVDs to a $100 hard drive, and then transfer those movies to your laptop/ipod/tv-media-thingy as needed. Regrettably, the DVD-gods will have none of it, so by 2011, they’ll be finished.

When I agreed to cancel cable, it was only partially an attempt to watch less TV. As a bona fide P2P researcher, and general internet enthusiast, I had a sense that this was the year for internet television. After all, there’s iTunes, BitTorrent, more and more networks putting their shows online, and countless apps and websites trying out new ways of putting TV stations online. At the moment, most of these options are much less convenient than cable, but many are cheaper, and I remain optimistic. Also in the near future I hope to have a better computer hooked up to our TV.

I’ll probably write more soon about which of the above options work best. For now, I’m simply announcing that the future of internet-based television is well underway. Plus with the writer’s strike upon us, maybe we’ll soon be able to enjoy shows written specifically for the internet (maybe I can even higher some professional writers to help out with this blog). For now, we can just pass the time by watching both television networks and DVD manufactures fail to provide consumers with a steady flow of newly produced high-quality entertainment.