The Electronics industry has selected Blue-Ray DVD players as Christmas Present of the Year, yet 60% of Norwegian women don’t know what what Blue-Ray is. Honestly, I didn’t, either, not precisely, until I read this article, but only because I’ve totally stopped paying attention to any news about physical storage media (well, except for Micro SDHC cards and hard drives). I didn’t pay any attention to the whole business of analogue TV signals no longer being sent, either. Those kinds of issues are no longer relevant to the way we consume media.

We still have a DVD player and the cable that comes with our rent, but neither are connected to the TV, and they haven’t been for a couple of years. Everything we watch now, we watch from our computers, either directly on the screen or connected to the TV, and our screens are big enough that we don’t usually even bother to connect a computer to the TV anymore. We haven’t had a CD player connected to a stereo system for a long time, either. If we can’t get our music, games, movies, or TV programs online (always legally where possible), we don’t bother to get it anymore.

Even five years ago, which is about when we got the DVD player, I would never have imagined that we’d be moving in this direction. Johannes and I are not quite early adopters, either, so I know we’re not the only ones who consume media in this way. We are, however, smack in the middle of the target demographic for media and electronics. Media producers really need to get their business sorted out to account for these changing patterns.