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One of the hottest selling items this Christmas is the Blu-Ray player. A significant number of the big sales at discount stores and electronic houses were trying to get blu-ray players under $200 or even under $100! Walmart had 5 blu-ray players in its Black Friday ads this year. One of those, the Magnavox Blu-Ray DVD Player, NB500MG1F was an astounding $78! Even one of my favorites, the Samsung BD-P1590 Blu-Ray Disc Player which supports Netflix and Pandora streaming is only $99.99 at TigerDirect.

With this push to get players into the households, will we see an upswing in Blu-Ray discs? I’m not sure it’ll really jump because of that. I’m finding that in my own household, what is holding me back is the rental kiosks not stocking Blu-Ray.

You see, I don’t feel the need to own too many movies these days, and with Netflix streaming and all of the free Video on Demand I’m pretty much a movie renter these days. Its cheaper to rent the movie the 4-5 times I’ll watch it over my lifetime than to own it. But that’s only feasible when its fast and easy to rent it at only $1 per day.

With all of the rental kiosks near my house (I have 10 within a mile – one of those is Blockbuster Express), I can make a quick trip down the street and pick up most any movie I want to watch. If the movie is one of those that my younger kids might watch over and over, well they don’t really care whether its in Blu-Ray or VHS! So those movies tend to be in DVD format because they are cheap and can be backed up.

So I really don’t have a need for a Blu-Ray player even at $78 because I cannot get the movies from the DVD rental kiosks yet. I realize its a chicken and egg situation. Once the kiosks start making Blu-Ray’s available, I’ll probably get a player. Or I might finally succumb to the Netflix streaming and purchase one just for that and get the Blu-Ray as a bonus.

Meanwhile, I guess I’ll put my HD-DVD player I ran out and purchased early up on eBay ;-) .