What you need to know about cloud backup

Less than four per cent of the PCs that will have shipped this year contained a Blu-ray Disc drive, market watcher iSuppli has estimated.

And it doesn't look like there's going to be any surge in demand in the near future. Come 2013, the proportion of new PCs with Blu-ray will have risen to just 16.3 per cent.

PC punters, it seems, are not interested in Blu-ray, at least while it remains a pricey option. iSuppli senior analyst Michael Yang highlighted cost as the main barrier to greater take-up of BD drives

“The cost issue is amplified by the fact that the library of content is so small that there really isn’t a reason for users to switch at the moment,” he added.

To be fair, the PC world has generally been slow to adopt new removable storage technologies. iSuppli notes that the 3.5in floppy drive took 15 years to be completely supplanted by CD. What gave CD - and, later, DVD - was its usage as a software delivery mechanism, not just for music but also applications and games.

There may be plenty of movies now available on BD, but that's it. PC games publishers and application developers have yet to adopt the format for their products, and it's releases like these that will drive demand for BD drives in PCs, moving the technology off of the 'optional extra' list and under the 'build in as standard' heading. ®

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