Otomo
Thousand Master
Nicely put, better than I did.I think there are a few reasons why DVD never died. First, they're cheaper, and that's all some people care about. The visible difference between a good quality DVD and a blu-ray depends on a combination of screen size and viewing distance. For people watching on a not-massive TV at living room distances, the flaws in DVDs can be well hidden (aside from PAL speedup, but I only started being bothered by that once I acclimatised to 24p). This is even more the case for people with poor eyesight who don't bother wearing glasses (which makes no sense to me, but they exist in droves).
Then there's the audio situation. I know people with blu-ray players who have gone back to only buying DVDs because they hate having to constantly adjust the volume in movies, or having to turn subtitles on to hear what people are saying in Christopher Nolan movies. I get around these issues by having a soundbar with a dynamic compression option, but Joe Consumer doesn't know that technology exists. This would have been less of an issue if Dolby TrueHD had become the standard audio format, since that supports automated compression, but the prevalence of DTS HD Master Audio killed off that possibility. Even then, it would have relied on Joe Consumer knowing that option was buried somewhere in their player's settings menu.
The broad dynamics on blu-rays used to drive me up the wall before I bought that soundbar. I still think it's dumb that only a handful of discs have optional audio tracks with compressed dynamics.
The only thing I'd add is when Blu-ray was introduced, the extra space on the disc was talked about. Lots of content.
Obviously, the extra's didn't exist.
Or Hollywood wanted to sell us a more expensive disc with the same content.
Hang on??!