Blu-ray a no-show on computers

While it amounts to just 3.5 percent of the packaged video market, Blu-ray media is on a serious growth spike, with prepackaged Blu-ray movie sales up 250 percent since 2007.

But that modest success story hasn't translated to the PC, where Blu-ray was originally positioned for its ability to store enormous amounts of data on a disc -- 50GB on a dual-layer disc.

Today, only 3.6 percent of PCs shipped include Blu-ray drives. Those numbers aren't set to skyrocket anytime soon, either. According to iSuppli, even by 2013 only 16.3 percent of PCs will have Blu-ray preinstalled at the factory.

Why the lack of interest? Money is the big issue. Burnable Blu-ray drives cost more than $200, while the typical DVD-RW drive runs about $30. Unless you have a need to burn high-definition video and/or store many gigs worth of data on a disc, they simply don't make a lot of financial sense for many users.

Playing high-def movies on your computer is also another potential selling point of Blu-ray, but again this makes little economic sense for would-be adopters of the technology. Why? Even large desktop PC monitors aren't big enough to make much of a difference in quality when watching a movie at your desk in Blu-ray resolution vs. a regular DVD. It's an even sillier issue for laptop users. No one trying to watch a movie in their cramped airplane seat with jet engines roaring and babies screaming is worried about a little pixilation on the screen.

Blu-ray's next challenge is to try to reach critical mass before it's too late: That is, before media abandons physical media completely and before cloud- and internet-based storage options become the standard vs. the old strategy of burning files to an optical disc. Will Blu-ray manage to become a major force on the PC in the next five years before all physical media is rendered obsolete? Sounds like a tough sell to me.