As other people pointed out, most people don't care about the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray, even when they have HD displays. It would be interesting

As other people pointed out, most people don't care about the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray, even when they have HD displays. It would be interesting to know exactly why, but nobody wants to survey the users, prefering instead to pretend that this isn't true. My interpretation is that when you're 3 meters from a display with the size regular people buy (between 32 and 42 inches), the quality difference between HD content and a decently encoded DVD is barely noticeable. Some say that sound quality is more important than picture quality. That may be true, but that's not the reason people ignore the quality difference between DVDs and Blu-ray. When you live in an apartment, you tend to watch movies with a low volume anyway, so sound is always crap. Then, there's the mistake that people moved to DVDs from VHS because of picture quality. This is false, people moved from VHS to DVDs because DVDs have are random-access media. No more rewinds, no more fast-forwards and searching for parts of the movie. DVDs hit the sweet spot of price/quality and convenience. Blu-ray offers little more. If the successor to the DVD had been a flash-memory card, it may have been a hit. The same movies in 1/10th the space. Now it is too late. People will keep their DVDs until online distribution is mature. And this doesn't necessarily mean internet distributed content. Here in Portugal, the two major cable providers have a video-on-demand service (in old-school parlance) that was the final nail in the video rental shops 'coffin, and that all but removes the need for the average consumer to buy physical media.