More and more laptops have built-in BR drives rather than DVD.

My guess is that the obsolence of DVD is already planned. We're already in a transition period, and the BR format was always designed so that it would be easy and cheap to manufacture players capable of reading DVD, CD and BR data supports. The whole thinking behind BR was to be the format during the transition to HD TV. The content producers were very concerned about their home market, quite aware that people spent tons to build DVD collections, that many had been put off by the fast obsolence of their VHS collections and have been slower in starting DVD collections, and that it had slowed down a lot the disappearance of VHS as well (forcing the studios to make the material available on multiple supports, forcing the retails stores to devote space to the two formats rather than increase the number of titles they offered). Part of the solution was to invent a format which players could read DVD and transform their signal into HD (without the quality, of course) and a more recent incentive to speed up the disappearance of DVD is to take no chance and include DVD, BR and digital file in the same product, without an effect on price, not to discourage those who have not yet switched to BR from buying movies until they do, and to reassure everyone that the products will not be obsolete fast. I think it's fairly likely that individual packaging for DVD alone will disappear sooner than later from the majors, remaining only for those smaller distributors that don't release BR (less and less of them...), but it's likely the 3-format packagings will remain the norm for longer. The extra costs are ridiculous for the majors, it doesn't require special casing, and unlike VHS back in the day, the two formats are produced by the same plants, which simplifies things a lot.

I'm not much in the know at all, but since the late 80s anytime a new format was to appear on the home market, it appeared on the professional market a few years before (2-3 for DVD, about a year only for BR and HD DVD). DVD were used as a screening/approval format before any commercial DVD showed up. Then it was HD DVD (which went the way of betama and BR.

ATM, there's not really any sign of an improved consumer format being in the work. Some are no doubt developped, but it doesn't look like the companies intend to release them. I could even turn out that BR is one of the last physical supports we'll see for movies - in any case all the innovations we've seen in the last few years are systems transferring/encoding/playing digital files, and ways to encrypt them to protect them from piracy. The "next gen" mass market players are likely to be high capacity Hard Drive players capable of also playing BR/DVD/CD as a prelude to a full file-based move. 75% of what pros did with DVD/BR is now done through softwares, of varying levels of security. E.g. When I work on dubbing, I don't receive my media physically anymore. For screening purposes, I log on the distributor's secured site to stream/download the files, and when I get full res material, it's sent via a kind of secured fiber optic intranet between LA and Montreal. It's transcoded at the post facility (it's all in codecs that aren't commercially released) and encrypted, and I get it at home via a fiber optic connection (installed and paid for by my client, thankfully!) and the software automatically decrypts the data. Americans shoot a lot in Montreal/Toronto. The director get to see his rushes at his hotel every evening. When they open in LA, the studio get to screen the rushes filmed earlier in the morning in Montréal. Only one major studio still sends physical drives all over the planet, all the others have switched to file transfers.

My guess is that R&D for the next gen consumer market is likely mostly, perhaps near exclusively, focussed on digital files. The content producers hate the ease with which DVD and BR are riped-off and uploaded by pirates, and are slowing down a lot the spread of digital files. If the MPAA and co. had listened to the developpers who foresaw all this well over a decade ago, we would have switched straight to files without dedicated media support after DVD, not to something like BR. The studios refused back then to jump on that bandwagon because of the piracy the music industry was facing, which proved a big miscalculation as a few years later and just as predicted by the experts the ISP made high speed service available and cheap, and now the content producers have fallen behind the wishes and habits of the consummer market, leaving much of that potential market go to piracy). But the time comes fast where they won't have a choice. They are already facing a retail distribution problem, and it's getting worse and fast. And yes this has an impact even though Amazon is massively popular, because they're losing all the sales made on impulse, at the last minute or purchases made because the title you wanted wasn't there and you took a chance with something. Many browse and end up buying more than intended from Amazon, but a lot more check only for what they want and leave. Several big chains have stopped selling movies/music except through their websites (they don't have to keep copies of most of the titles they sell in stock...they order as customers purchase), and even more are reducing their inventories drastically. I live downtown in a big city and at least once a month, often more, I have a problem finding a newly released title I want in a brick and mortar store - and not quite "niche" stuff - big US or UK titles that I could buy from several stores until last year... My favorite bookstores have stopped selling DVD and CDs, and have cleared 20% of their book inventory to devote a space selling their ebook reader and stations to buy digital books. Soon we won't have much choice to rely exclusively on online sellers for most titles if we want physical products, and I doubt we'll still have mass market physical media for movies/music past 2020 (perhaps sooner) - books I'm far less convinced. Past a certain point, the majors will decide all the investment behind physical releases (design, production, distribution) is not profitable enough anymore.