Ritz, when you state that Blu-ray is in a "dead man walking state", I think that this is your anecdotal impression of where the market presently stands. But I don't believe it's supported by any solid evidence.

Here is an interesting news article from Reuters that contradicts some of your claims: Hollywood hopes rise as Blu-ray, digital offset DVD decline.

The article indicates that in 2011:

"Sales of Blu-ray discs surged by 23 percent, the group said. That growth was spurred by strong Christmas sales of Blu-ray players".

"Blu-ray growth partially offset the continued decline in DVD sales. Packaged good sales, which include both formats, fell by 0.6 percent from a year earlier, to $2.1 billion."

"Home sales of film and tv shows reversed that decline, and increased by 0.5 percent if sales through electronic outlets such as Apple's iTunes service are included. Consumers purchased $165 million of those so-called electronic sell-through products."

"The industry's largest growth engine continues to be online subscriptions, such as those offered by Netflix, which grew five-fold in the quarter, to $548.6 million."

I hardly call an industry generating $2.1 billions a "dead man walking". From this industry association's data, it seems that sales of packaged goods (DVD & Blu-ray) still outnumber the electronic downloads and streaming by a factor of 4 to 1.

Here's another anecdotal observation of my own this time. When I go to stores selling BD, I see a lot of folks picking-up cheap BD titles for anywhere from $5 to $10 or even $15 for some fairly recent releases.

As bandwidth from the ISPs in the 50 to 100 Mbps range becomes AFFORDABLE, you'll begin to see the streaming really hurt hard media sales. We're not there yet though. And when we get there, don't kid yourself, the quality of the compressed streaming 1080P content will not be in the same league as the PQ that you get from Blu-ray. As I mentioned in a previous post, resolution is NOT the only criterion for picture quality. Contrast ratio, color saturation and color accuracy are considered to be more important aspects of PQ than resolution and that's precisely where the streaming content providers will chop off with an assortment of compression algorithms designed to reduce bandwidth requirements, all at the expense of PQ but allowing them to claim 1080P HD nirvana. Oh... the beauty of marketing!

And if 4K content comes along in a few years, it will most likely be back to square one with a new physical media as bandwidth will likely be insufficient or prohibitively expensive for a few years more to come.

Best regards