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Domain: screendigest.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to screendigest.com.

Comments · 7

  1. Re:Flawed Premise by KainX · · Score: 1 · on Why Has Blu-ray Failed To Catch Hold?

    Blu-ray was released globally in June 2006; by December 2010, even with PS3s counted, it had a consumer penetration of 10.7%, according to NPD. This is the slowest adoption of a non-fringe video technology in history.

    http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=4554

    For scale, DVD was released in Japan in Nov 96, in the US in March 1997 and in Europe in Oct 1998. Even though it took them two years to get to three continents, it passed the 12% penetration mark in under four months (I can't find a number between 8 and 12%, it penetrated so fast.)

    According to this, you are mistaken. It took three years for DVD to reach an appreciable footprint, same as Blu-Ray, and the BD chunk is larger than the DVD chunk after the same time. You also have to take into account that BD had direct competition from HD-DVD, whereas original DVD did not.

    http://www.screendigest.com/www/reports/2010629b/10_07_evolution_of_home_entertainment_chart.gif

    And compared to VHS, DVD looked just as abyssmal.

    So. Global release takes almost three and a half years to reach ten percent, whereas Japan-only release passes the 12% mark in under one financial quarter.

    Even LaserDisc, the famously failed standard, hit 10% in under two years.

    What is your metric for "catching on just fine?" Is it "I own two of them?"

    Nice try, but your trolling skills are rusty.

    No, it won't, for the same reason that the much more plausible minidisc format failed: it is ridiculously unweildly, slow, expensive-per-byte, fragile and so on. A blu-ray burner starts around $85, and a writable 5-gig disc is in the neighborhood of $3.50 in bulk.

    By comparison, the tiny, fast, durable, reliable MicroSD format will give you a reader/writer that pushes ten times the data rate of blu-ray *and* a cartridge five times the maximum size of a blu-ray disc for seven dollars.

    <ad-hominem>Are you on crack?!</ad-hominem>

    I can get a 50-pack of BD-R DL for $500. That's $10/disc for 50GB of storage, or $0.20/GB. By comparison, the best price I found for 64GB SDXC was about $140, and $60 for 32GB microSD, roughly $2/GB. The BD media price per GB is BETTER by an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE.

    Oh, and its stability isn't on the order of single digit year counts.

    Again, you are sorely mistaken and providing misinformation (with no evidence or proof whatsoever, mind you) to make your snarky comments look intelligent and well-considered. They aren't.

    http://www.techmount.com/index.php/20060905/blu-ray-lifespan/

    Blu-Ray disks will last 100-150 years. DVD's start at 10 years. Again, as much as an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE better. SD card life expectancy is similar to that of DVD's; even an SD card specifically designed for long-term, write-once archival storage will only last 100 years, making it comparable AT BEST to Blu-Ray: https://www.pcworld.com/article/199672/sandisks_sd_card_can_store_data_for_100_years.html

    Why would anyone *ever* turn to blu-ray for storage? It's flash or tape, guy.

    It is absolutely amazing to me that you're attempting to justify hardware choices in terms of the hardware being replaced, while ignoring the alternatives available. That's the kind of thinking one expects from a politician, not from someone with a five digit slashdot id.

    How are you on an HPC group at LBNL if you think things like blu-ray will succeed as a storage medium? Do you make clusters of 386es?

    Q.E.D.

  2. Re:All you Wii naysayers, your number is up... by fhage · · Score: 2, Interesting · on BBC Ponders Another Games Industry Crash
    The source of this analysis is Ed Barton of Screen Digest http://www.screendigest.com/about_us/analysts/ed_b arton. They want $3600 for an analysis that forecasts the PS3 as dominating. While they seem to have reasonable insight as to the past, they've completely missed the mark as far as the Wii goes. They have failed to predict the very strong mass market appeal the Wii has and how this will open up new markets. Perhaps the sea change is hard to see without actually owning a Wii. However, as a long time - console and PC game collector and Wii owner it it very clear to me. Nintendo has hit a really sweet spot this time around.

    My (free and mostly serious)Predictions for 2008:

    • New TV's and DVD's will interoperate with the Wiimote. TV's will have built-in sensor bars. Using cursor keys to navigate the DVD menu? - How quaint. I suppose you still have a rotary phone too, Grandpa.
    • One of Youtube's top browsers will be Wii Opera. I find watching internet videos much nicer on the HDTV. The new Wii version of Opera is much, much better than the beta version, and makes surfing a much more social experience. Javascript will grow support for multiple pointers
    • Specialised Flash games will become huge and will be a good way to reach specific markets. The quality and appeal of sites like Wiiarcade are already showing this potential.
    • Virtual console games will make lots of money. Customers like me are happy to spend 5-10 USD to get our old favorites up on the new HDTV. (I check weekly for Pilot Wings 64! :-)
    • Somebody will make a billion dollars catering to Seniors who own a Wii. 3-D shuffle Board! - CSPAN Interactive, oh yeah....
    • "RV Mayhem" replaces GTA as the top seller. "Compete with others for the best parking spots:- Pimp your virtual RV with the latest hardware and paint jobs. - Gather with friends in the online Coffee Shop" ;)
  3. Source Examination? by T0wner · · Score: 4, Insightful · on BBC Ponders Another Games Industry Crash
    Unfortunately you have to pay $1500 view the detailed report BBC used as it's source. There other source is a "Gerhard Florin, executive vice president at EA and the general manager of its international publishing business." The article itself resides in the Business section and was written by Tim Weber Business editor. The article reads like an EA advertisement for investors. It talks about future revenue streams such as in-game advertising user-generated revenue, online tie ins etc... I really have to question the neutrality of the source when the main interviewee has such a huge vested interest in the revenue streams he's hoping for his own wallet will come to pass. especially in the online sector where he incidentally berates the Wii

    Nintendo's efforts, scoffs Mr Barton, are "frankly stone age compared to the others". As well as the parent poster mentioning the Wii isn't losing money on the console. Aren't the sales figures wrong on Screendisgest's graph. That to me is suggesting as of this month the PS3 is outselling the Wii by 30%. I was under the impression that these sales figures are still be released for independent review and that the Wii was selling better than the PS3 was in at least 2 of the big 3 territories.

    Heres something which really caught my eye:

    Players will be able to create new levels for games and share them online. "Users could create revenue for games," says Mr Barton. "The potential for this is absolutely enormous". Step 1. Community makes maps, mods, skins etc.. for a game.
    Step 2. Publisher claims it as there own IP
    Step 3. Profit

    This really annoys me. They can go **** themselves if they think I'm going to spend 40 hours programming something interesting for a game I enjoy just to have them take it and make money out of it to subsidise the inadequacies of their retarded business model.
  4. I agree by novus+ordo · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Movie Studios OK Download-to-Burn DVDs
    Take a look at this sonic shill. What you will notice is that they include Qflix certified equipment and DVDs. So essentially it's going to be that you need a special Qflix box to download and (20 min to) burn to a special disc that you can play on a *different* device. How stupid does this sound? Also notice that their "market requirements" include:

    • Able to support multiple content protection solutions
      CSS, Macrovision RipGuard, SecureBurn, X-Protect, CPRM, AACS, ACP
    • Forensic watermarking
    • Multiple DRMs & encryption
      WMDRM, mpDRM, Helix, Coral, DiVX, AES, Verimatrix



    In other words, all the beautiful technologies we have grown to love! If you think all they are going to do is put CSS on disks you are greatly mistaken. They do seem to care about quality of disks but not your ability to archive or back them up. On a side note, this might not be that bad for kiosks, but I would rather buy a *real* DVD than wait 20 min for this thing to come out. Like I don't have better things to do.
  5. Re:Who cares what you think? by be-fan · · Score: 1 · on A Triple-Standard Disk

    You started this whole thread with the erroneous and uncited "less than 10%" figure, so why am I on the hook for citing sources?

    You want sources? here are sources. Oh, and this.

  6. Re:SFW? by myster0n · · Score: 1 · on Revolution Horsepower Revealed

    Here, read this : "On a global basis, by the end of 2010 the number of HD ready households will reach 174m or 22% of TV households. The figure will be 59% in the US, 66% in Japan and 30% in Western Europe."

    If these figures come true, I think Nintendo can afford to hold off HD until their next console.

  7. Why Free Software by groomed · · Score: 3, Insightful · on The Semantics of Free Software vs. Open Source

    I'm a Free Software guy, because after all has been said and done, the GNU philosophy provides a much more rational answer to the question of "Why use it?" than the Open Source Initiative.

    The Open Source Initiative answers that question by saying that Open Source software is better: the programs are better, the development model is better, the support is better. In some cases that's at least subjectively true. Apache really is a best-of-class webserver. gcc really is a very good compiler collection.

    But then the examples quickly dry up. Mozilla, supposed to be the posterchild of the OSI movement, was years late, and had to be forked to spawn Firefox to finally deliver something people will actually use. It's a bit better in some respects than Internet Explorer, but not by a large margin. What's more it has been plagued by the exact same problems that open source development was supposed to prevent: it's late, security issues have been kept under wraps (you'll need to copy-paste this link into a new browser window), and it's bloated.

    That's not to say that it's bad software. In fact, I think it's pretty good software. But after years of development, broad community support, and generous funding by AOL, the end result turns out to be just slightly better than the most important closed source competitor. It's hardly a compelling argument in favor of the supposed superiority of Open Source.

    It's easy to go on in this vein, and mention the whole or partial failures of Open Office, or Helixcode, or XFree86, but that would be merely antagonizing and besides, it doesn't prove anything. In order to debunk the claim that Open Source leads to better software, it's not sufficient to mention open source failures: it's necessary to show closed source success as well.

    Well, that's not hard either. There's Apple's spectacular introduction of MacOS X, Microsoft's splendid .NET framework, the continued, and apparently unbreakable, dominance of Adobe and Quark in graphic design. Packages like AutoCad, Maya, Cubase, Reason, Live and Final Cut Pro are not just best-of-class, they practically define the industry. And then there's everybody's favorite, games: in the 6 years since the founding of the OSI, the games industry has grown by more than 100%, all without giving open source so much as a second thought.

    Considering all this, it's hard to maintain that Open Source implies better software. And if it doesn't imply that, then why use it, or produce it? After all, isn't the Open Source creed all about doing what works best?

    Most Open Source advocates aren't quite ready to admit this to themselves yet. They claim Open Source produces more secure software, and use Windows' extremely poor record in this regard to prove it -- but they ignore the rising number of GNU/Linux exploits and the exemplary security record of closed source MacOS and HP/UX. They claim MS Office is bloated, but ignore the lumbering blimp that is Open Office. The list goes on and on, but I'm quite sure that at this point the few people who are still reading will wonder whether this post goes on forever.

    When all is said and done, what remains is the love of programming, the joy of seeing your work being put to good use, and the desire to share it with like-minded souls. Being "better" is important; what's more important is how we can protect our rights to share amidst a climate of overbearing patents and corporate favoritism.

    This is what the GPL tries to guarantee, and why Free Software is so different from Open Source.