The whole point of Blu-ray is to make more money for the owners of the technology. DVD profits are going down, so they needed a new format that would revitalize those profits.
Unfortunately, the BD format is not gaining the momentum they expected after the death of HD DVD. To boost sales, one strategy is to provide the public with low-cost players, the idea being that if you already have the player, you will eventually buy a lot of BD discs.
Now, if the BD disc prices will also drop, then that would defeat the very purpose of Blu-ray, which is precisely to increase profits. That's why they can't just drop disc prices so soon.
You can see a parallel with the way music formats developed. First, CD profits skyrocketed, then leveled off, then dropped. To revitalize profits, they introduced DVD-Audio and SACD, the more expensive formats intended to boost profits.
They expected the new high resolution formats to replace the CD, but the public didn't bite. Instead of embracing high-res audio, the public went in the opposite direction --- consumers flocked to the iPod and the lower-res MP3, and CD was never replaced as the dominant audio format.
I foresee the same thing with BD. The average consumer will stick to SD DVD; many of them will get interested in video downloads; although some of them will have a few BD discs on the shelf.
