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The Future of Digital Video?
An Anonymous Coward, in name only asks: "I've been asked to write about the Future of DVD technology for a newsletter and I've been doing some thinking and research regarding this. It seems pretty clear that DVD is a dead-end technology, due to be replaced by Video On Demand. Already Disney is launching a VOD service, albeit through traditional broadcasting. It's to be a brief piece, and I plan to touch on how VOD will affect viewers as well as professionals. What is a realistic timeframe for beefing up broadband (such as Powerline Broadband?) and smartening compression (On2's VP5 , MPEG7?) to create a workable VOD system that will replace DVDs? Is delivery more likely to be based on an open or proprietary standard? What do you see as the future of Digital Video? Any input is greatly appreciated." While I don't think that Video on Demand will spell the end of DVDs, it would be interesting to know how far the technology has progressed, and how much further it would need to be developed before you could can pick-and-choose your movie-of-the-night from your own living room.
DVD's won't be going any time soon. i think they will still be around for many years to come
Pay per view only makes up a very small portion of the entire media universe. There is no reason to believe that VOD will make significant headway against DVD. DVD, VHS, and CDs have the fundamental benefit of being able to be watched/listened to any time that it is convenient. VOD requires too many infrastructure improvements to be a viable media delivery system for years to come.
I have been pwned because my
VoD is nice, but what about when you're in a situation where you have no connectivity?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
It seems pretty clear? I hardly think so (at least not with the traditional definitions of video on demand). People want content they can keep around as long as they want, whether it be a VideoTape/DVD they purchase, or a TiVo recording they keep on their unit for months. Even Netflicks lets you keep the DVD for as long as you want before sending it on to the next person.
:) ..Jeff Keegan
The era of video rental stores demanding a return within 48 hours will eventually end. If given a choice, I don't think anyone will choose another system where they have to hurry-up-and-watch something, even if it's video that they ordered whenever they ordered it.
Look at Apple's recent music offering. People can purchase music and keep it as long as they want. Whether you like the idea or not (and whether you plan on buying music that way or not), it's a sign that we won't be limited in our purchasing options to such restrictive pay-per-view watch-it-now methods.
DVD's will be around a while, and when they're gone the replacement will be something more akin to a permanent download into a huge video jukebox appliance than some watch-it-once-and-never-see-it-again model.
Then again, that's just my opinion.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon filled with DVDs!!!
Sure - I'll believe this, right after everybody starts using video phones.
hahaha you lost by meer seconds. I got FP loser
I have VOD now (surewest broadband), and there is still plenty to be desired. I don't always watch a movie all at one time, some movies I want to watch a little today and some tommorrow, and DVDs never fail to play when the network connection goes down. The ownership model of video delivery will always exist in some form or another, but the business models and technology will change.
Working in the video industry for 7 years-- from my experience things will never go the way of VOD. The Video industry believes they have found a sweet spot with DVD's at sell through price.
There are those in the industry that have been dipping in the VOD technology pot for some time with no success (blockbuster). And there are also those that want the industry to adopt the VHS rental model with DVDs released exclusively to rental (at a much higher cost to the rental store) and eventually releasing the disc for sale at a devalued price. This is unlikely because the cost to produce DVDs is next to nothing and the studios want to capitalize on high volume sales, which is exactly what has happened. It has been the revenue sharing companies pushing that model--cheap DVD's hurt their business.
Also there has been talk in the past of a business model where Theater, Video, and VOD are all released at once, and there is always talk of shrinking windows between sell-through and theater releases.
DVD's will continue to evolve, in the next couple years you'll have High Definition DVDs-- which are the next big thing (HD-VHS already exists for those with the cash, but its still very pricey).
The fact is studios are paranoid about piracy, they've seen what's happened to the music industry and will continue to try to pump out encrypted product at as high a bit-rate as possible- in turn, making it more difficult to pirate high quality movies.
Video on demand is just not going to happen like some people think, it will really just become the next incarnation of Pay Per View and really only eat into that customer base. The technology exists, and there have been tests of services from different companies all over the U.S. but it still isn't a business anyone is interested in.
It all comes down to corporate interest, Sony wants to sell high priced HD-DVD players, so then they can also sell the HD-DVDs to go with it. How will Sony, for example, make money from a VOD service when they are able to make more selling DVD players. You also have Panasonic/Matsushita, JVC-- and all the other major electronics companies foaming at the mouth for the missed financial opportunities on DVD player sales (due to some cheap players coming out of the south pacific). In the end it all comes down to how to make the most amount of money.
It occurs to me that while VoD has its advantages, most people will still want to own a tangible copy of the product in _some_ form (vinyl, cassette, CDROM, DVD etc).
The bottom line is that it's social issues that will block the way to Video on Demand.
Technology wise, we should have had AOD (Audio on Demand) about three years ago. We had the codecs, we had the bandwidth, we had a variety of server/client technologies to deliver.
We even had some AOD trials similar to Disney's VOD service you mention.
But the music industry lost its nerve & we've ended up with the mess we have now.
Is the Motion Picture industry any different?
In fact... while MPEG4 may result in smaller file sizes than MPEG2, there are probably going to be some people who don't like it, anyways. Dolby Digital has better compression than DTS, but... audiophiles insist that they can hear a difference. In fact, enough people prefer DTS to Dolby Digital that many movies are released with both DTS and Dolby Digital tracks! And also, let's not forget SuperBit DVD's... DVD's which sacrifice the special features to give the video a higher bitrate. If these didn't sell well, the company wouldn't *still* be releasing SuberBit DVD's, but they are. So... even if the compression *did* manage to shrink the video down to managable amounts, it still might not be enough to give VOD a "nudge", so to speak.
Further, any VOD system will be riddled with DRM. Some people will no doubt complain that they can actually see this DRM manefist itself in the movies they download, and still others will no doubt have problems with the playback.
I believe the future lies in the HD-DVD. There are a number of proposals for this, including one that uses MPEG2 on a Blu-Ray disc (~50gb, if dual layered) and another that uses MPEG4 on a DVD (~9gb, if dual layered). you can read about them here:
http://www.dvdsite.org/
VOD won't kill DVD since what if you want to watch something more than once. Each viewing adds to the cost while DVDs that cost more are a one time cost. If you want to watch something more than once DVD becomes more cost effective (plus you get all of the extras).
I personally think that if the movie studios didn't tie everything down with their endless squabbling about DRM, we could and would have been enjoying VOD right now for a few years.
The technology is already there -- codecs like DiVX and its MPEG-4 based counsins can deliver near DVD quality video at bitrates around 1.5 Mbit/s, within range of most residential broadband technology. Server infrastructure, on the hardware and the OS side, has matured as well. With IP multicast, this could be even made more efficent. And all you really need on the client is a inexpensive box -- a current game console or TiVO could handle the decoding.
Sadly, it seems like the studios are holding it up, with their iron grip on content, not technology itself.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
I'm sure mainstream DVD sales will die as soon as I can capture and save video streams from VOD...
Some people just want to own their favorite movies. Now, VOD may put a dent into the movie rental business though.
The VOD is in a way very similar to the previous DVD standard called DIVX where you'd "buy" a movie but after you started watching it you had to finish watching it within 24 hours and after that it was locked up. The DIVX players had to be connected to the phone line for that very reason.
And DIVX disappeared. Although I believe that he is right in saying that VOD will be very important in the years to come I believe DVD (or some HDTV successor) will continue to thrive too.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Seriously, VoD is nice as an alternative to the video rental store but look how DVD sales have sky-rocketed in a few years in comparison to VHS sales over 2 decades of trying. People want to have high-quality libraries of movies that they can hold on to and claim as their own. And they definitely don't want to have to pay for them more than once.
And so is the combustion engine with the innevitable creating of super cool transporter beams. And so is television when they plug wires right into our eye sockets. And so is lip balm when they upload our consciousness into RAM. I'm not ready to count out portable physical storage media just yet. Ubiquitous bandwidth is a long ways away, and people *like* owning things that can't be taken away from them.
Video always lags behind audio by several years because it has a much higher bandwidth requirements.
You could edit digital audio on a home computer years before the computers were powerful enough to let you edit video. You can stream quality audio to your home over the internet today, but the pipes are still a bit too small for quality video. That will change eventually.
My suggestion is to look at all the cool things you can do with audio today and extrapolate to video. That should give you a good idea as to where things are going.
-from the we're-irish-and-proud-of-it! dept
New comment creation has been disabled on this discussion.
I already have VoD. It's called NetFlix.
People prefer to have their own physical copy of any media they pay cash for. If cash payment, be it for blank media or pre-recorded, is going to drive the market, that's the way it will stay.
If the assumption is that media interest can somehow force this issue then the important thing to look at is not whether or not that is possible, but to look at whether there are examples from the past that we can look at to learn from and see if that will be a profitable business model.
In this case there is a very clear example of a non-physical distribution media --advertising supported broadcast television. Looking forward then, we should ask if the advertising based business model of broadcast television is workable for next generation video over the Net. I seriously doubt that.
Despite the challenges, I have to assume that disk sales are the brightest hope for media interests. If the "talent management" side of things sucks, they can always get into making blanks. I hear the margins are awesome on volume.
There are already some legal internet movie services. Movie Flix offers a whole bunch of movies on demand. Streamcast lets you download the movie beforehand, but that takes times, and they use DRM which only lets you see the movie for a day or two. Meanwhile, all the major P2P networks have lots of movies.
Lots of people like to watch movies on their TV, but don't have a computer-tv hookup, but that will change. However, the major studios are trying to monopolize all distribution, and are just creating more problems. Meanwhile, movies are proliferating through all P2P, but quality still lacks, and it can be awfully slow, even with high speed internet.
is here: https://secure.shaw.ca/sod/main.asp
Ordered through the web, delivered through a digital cable terminal. I doubt that it will supplant DVD's anytime soon (death of DVD? VHS is still more popular) but I would be willing to part with a couple of bucks to make sure that I could watch the current '24' anytime I wanted.
Not that rumors sites are ever accurate this far in advance, but this site claims to have heard that Apple will be adding video services to its content-on-demand array in two years' time.
One thing that lends this a tiny bit of credibility is that ripping all those DVDs takes time. They've been working for the past year and a half to build up a library of 200,000 songs for the music service they launched Monday, so finding out this far in advance of a similar movie service isn't a totally wild idea.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
"Dead end" is a bit harsh. Nearly all technologies are transitional given a long enough perspective. I suspect DVD's will have pretty good staying power. Not as long as fire or the wheel, but longer than the 5.25" floppy I would guess.
And there will always be a demand for a fully private media, the consumption of which can't be logged by an online service. Whatever finally replaces the DVD, it won't be VOD.
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. BB
I bought a Strawberry Shortcake video for my girl last week (just before I heard about Penny Arcade's mix-up with American Greeting), and she has watched it at least two times a day since then. One day she watch the video 5 times! If I hear one more "Have a Berry Lovely Day!" I swear there will be @#*! to pay.
Quite frankly, when I purchase a video it is only because I plan to watch it so many times that it is worth having around where I can get my mitts on it. If the entertainment industry thinks that I am going to fork out money each and every time my little girl wants to watch Strawberry Shortcake, then they have another thing coming. Even at $0.50 a viewing I have saved money by purchasing this particular movie outright, and I didn't have to sign up for an expensive cable system either.
I think I will go read a book now.
Welcome to Microsoft DRM-enabled DVD-XP. In order to activate the video you have inserted, please call 1-8MP-AAO-WNSU.
*place telephone call... get authorization code... enter code into player*
Welcome to Microsoft DRM-enabled DVD-XP. Video activated.
Warning: unknown television set detected. If you are using this player with a new television set, you will have to call to re-enable this product. Please call 1-8MP-AAO-WNSU.
*user mumbles, "aww, fuck it" and grabs an old VHS tape*
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
Depending on the intelligence and power of the set-top box. Historically, controls such as pause, fast-forward etc. involved the set-top box having to communicate with the server. People get annoyed very quickly when they hit pause and the video stops three seconds later. Latency is a serious pain. Clever programming can alleviate a lot of the problems, but it's just another thing that makes VoD inferior to DVDs. This killed most/all the pilots I saw several years ago.
If I decide half way through a DVD that I'm too tired, or something comes up, I can power off the player and come back the following night and carry on as though nothing had happened. I don't believe VoD offers this kind of flexibility. If the content providers could truly supply a huge library of video, fix the latency issues, charge a decent (low) price, provide the needed flexibility etc. etc., then maybe VoD has potential. I'm not aware of any provider committing to this yet.
Tim
But check this place out for the real future of storage mediums. inphase holographic storage
By the way the cable and phone companies are really like the mafia. Very evil. Expect to pay alot for VOD .
SGI and Time Warner installed a mpeg VOD over cable system in Orlando, way back in 1994 (Scientific Atlanta did the cable modems). SGI later helped design and build a VOD over fiber-direct-to-the-home system for NTT near Tokyo in 1996. This was back when supercomputer CPU's clocked slower than some of today PDA's, so the set-top boxes were pretty pricey.
Then Mosaic got too popular and distracted everybody.
Imagine if you could use RFID to your advantage though - anyone who has ever lost their keys can imagine the power of a personal database of small possessions that could be triangulated anywhere in the house or perhaps by a portable scanner. I spent 10 minutes today helping a friend search for her class ring in a bed of flowers. If she had a PDA that knew her ring's RFID and could triangulate its position, she wouldn't be calling the maker about a replacement plan.
what, like how radio killed record sales?
(obviously we all know kazaa killed record sales)
By the way.
The future is holographic storage and there are already protoypes. They are just expensive. Technology is here. Pictures and media here
Certainly VOD will be a convenient way to watch movies, and many will choose this over renting DVDs at the local video store. However:
1. Quality. The quality of VOD is likely to be less than that of DVD for some time. I'm watching analog cable broadcasts of television, and I'm seeing more compression artifacts as satellite providers try to cram as much content in their pipes as possible. VOD is likely going to strain the bandwidth of providers, requiring more compression, reducing quality.
2. Ownership. There are movies I also want to "own". You know, a piece of physical matter I can put into a player to watch it again and again and again until I've memorized every line in the movie and dream of one day starring in the... err... You know, "own".
3. Investment. People have made investment in home entertainment systems. They're not going to throw those away anytime soon. They're still a captive market to sell DVDs to, and I expect they will be for quite some time. It's why VHS is still selling. It's the reason things use to come on cassette and8-track.
I think these are compelling reasons why DVDs won't disappear in the timeline that's being proposed.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
MPEG-7, incidentally, is not a compression standar, it's a standard for video meta-data (allowing content-based video retrieval).
in turn, making it more difficult to pirate high quality movies.
It's difficult to pirate high-quality movies because it's difficult to find high-quality movies. Even the best transfer from a film or digital master to a high-definition digital consumer format can't rescue a crappy script or crappy acting.
Even then, as long as players continue to provide a 480p component video output (which they will have to provide for compatibility with current available TV sets throughout the next decade or so), the analog hole will remain open.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You're asking slashdot? For the future of video, you should be asking the porn industry. Whatever the future is, they're probably the first ones who are going to be implementing it.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Some variant of popular video on demand technology has been the holy grail of cable providers for a long time now and it finally seems as if the technology is catching up to the vision.
I think the comments concerning the ability to physically possess the movie on a disc will fade as the requisite broadband infrastructure for true VOD increases. What I envision is that the major broadband players, such as AOL/Time Warner will eventually capitalize on their market saturation and make a move into home entertainment hardware..
A large portion of Americans are already used to the ubiquitous cable box. Combine this with the massive and constantly increasing capacities of computer hard drives. I predict that DVD will kick the bucket when you can sit on your couch, purchase a movie which downloads within seconds, and the copy is stored on the internal hard drive so that you can watch it again and again. This will relegate the need for a physical disc to those who want to carry their movies on the go, but with high speed broadband, portable hard drive products such as the iPod, and DVD burning there are various ways to address this info. I think we will definately see Micro$oft somewhere in this mix. With the xbox and their home media PC's they have already indicated their intent to conquer the home entertainment realm. Throw their trustworthy computing initiative and DRM stuff into this mix and it is not hard to imagine them positioning themselves to deliver a secure home media server.
The truly interesting thing is behind all this we could see a titanic struggle between the big name studios and the cable/broadband providers. Someone major players on both sides of the fence will have to get in bed with eachother before we see a passing of the torch between DVD and a variant of VOD. What is almost certain is that the company or coalition of companies involved will insist on proprietary standards and security measures. If it comes down to a market share slugging match which it very well might, you can bet each company will be doing its best to make it's own format as proprietary as possible and rely on a "superior" feature set to kill off the other companies and their mutually incompatable harware.
-bcollier06
MPEG-7 is a media meta data standard and is naturally not competing with of VP5, JVT, etc. It is a complementary standard for describing media and its contents. For the record, MPEG-21 is not a compression standard either.
Read a book.
Having worked for a month for a failed startup VOD company, the roadblock we ran into was the studios. There's no way they will release titles unless there is DRM in hardware, and even then they will balk. One of the interesting things that happened to me during my short tenure there was talking by phone with Phil Zimmerman about some of the issues. The other was forking my boss over to the FBI for massive fraud.
and you are asking everyone here to do all the work for you.
Do the people who asked you know what a worthless piece of human waste you really are, and that a hundred monkeys pounding on fisher-price toy computer could come up with a more informed article than you ever could?
If I order something on VOD, I don't own that forever, unlike with that DVD I buy. Also, how do I use VOD while in a car and I want to watch a movie? Or on an airplane? How does VOD deal with when I want to watch the first part of a commentary track, get interrupted, and come back to it a couple weeks later?
This is like saying that instant streaming audio online would stop me from buying CD's. Last I checked, I don't have an internet connection everywhere I want to listen to music, I can't loan that streaming music out to a friend, and I probably have to pay again to listen to that album. VOD might be nice if I want to have some friends over to watch a movie that I never plan to see again, but DVD's are going to still be my main media.
No doubt DVD will go the way of the VHS in 20 years or so but there will always be a need for physical media out there that can hold high quality audio and video. Besides, Hollywood will alway want to sell the consumer movies and I as a consumer will always want to have physical media so I can watch a movie I really like any time. Also if VOD takes off wouldn't it be the the death of Blockbuster and Hollywood Videos?
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
ITs obvious that video killed the radio star
Look at why DVD's are popular:
- No degradation through normal viewing.
You can watch your DVD as many times as you want and it will look the same every time. They are however less damage resistant in that 1 deep scratch in the right spot will turn the disc into a beer coaster.
- Near-instant access
You can fast forward or rewind to almost any point in the feature with the flick of a finger. With on-demand tech, this may never be an option. One of the biggest complaints with VHS were that you had to rewind them, and this took a long time. As did fast forwarding(or slow, I should say). Finding a particular scene took quite a while with VHS. Try doing this over a latency ridden network! It wont work. I don't think my cable company is going to install multiple, seperate gigabit networks for each neighborhood or street. If they did, I'm afraid of what I'd have to pay for it. Bandwidth costs. The cost structure to support it would be unfavorable to most consumers.
A high percentage of the cost of a DVD is the content, bonus content, profit, and packaging. The DVD disc itself is a small percentage of the cost of a DVD. If an on-demand service let you buy rights to view an on-demand movie whenever you want, however often you wanted, there would be continual costs incurred as well as initial investment. Even if I only pay $5 to buy a movie the first time, I won't pay another dime to watch it again. The recurring costs for the cable company to let you watch a movie again and again for free is unprofitable.
I'm not saying Video-on-Demand is built to fail. It can work in the same capacity that Pay-per-view does. The infrastructure required to suport VoD will not be put into place until either it comes over the preexisting copper or wide adoptance will make it profitable.
In short, VoD must provide the same features as a DVD at a lower cost before most consumers will consider it over actually purchasing a DVD. There are also those who, given both options, would choose the DVD every time.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
studios -like- VOD and other rights restricted "pay us and the twenty-three middle men we stuff in the middle to all send cuts out way" systems, but consumers much prefer being able to own something and watch it in the majority of the world that is not and will not be well enough connected for VOD services that even come close to what's available on traditional media.
Good VOD systems with a shitload of content all accessable at the time you want to watch it rather than today's sorry PPV services is coming in the next 10 years. But don't expect it to replace DVDs. Just expect netflix to potentially lose its head...
Nintendo Troll wrote:
I personally think that if the movie studios didn't tie everything down with their endless squabbling about DRM, we could and would have been enjoying VOD right now for a few years.
Then why didn't North America get the NES disk drive ("Famicom Disk System") or the N64 disk drive ("64DD") that came out in Japan? Simple: after Nintendo test-marketed those formats in Japan, the company decided that they were too easy to pirate.
With IP multicast, this could be even made more efficent.
Except that few ISPs implement multicast because they don't know of a fair revenue model.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You would think the video industry would learn the first time around with the fantastic failure of the infamous Divx format. Same idea as VOD, slightly different delivery method.
Hmm, perhaps something to research, then, would be Apple's newly released Music On Demand service, as a model? Wherein CDs are made obsolete by broadband, Visa, iTunes4, Quicktime, AAC, and iPods? You'd therefore want/need something similar in place to implement Video on Demand, if you envision something similar replacing DVDs and movie distribution.
Notice though that Apple isn't marketing it as a pay per view system, but a pay for the convenience of finding what you want when you want it system.
So in a world with fatter pipes, more aggressive encoding, and a defined distribution system, I can't see why Video on Demand can't work, as long as consumers have the ability to play an unlimited number of times, download at will, and burn to CD/DVD at will.
This doesn't mean DVDs are dead, it merely leverages the internet as a more efficient distribution method, without any of the political doublespeak of DivX or content leasing, or EULAs.
Though if you thought about it carefully, the success of Apple's model does demphasize the medium, it only does so because you have content you don't care to purchase, like other tracks, or because it's hard to find. A similar video solution, then, might not have the multiple languages, subtitiles, commentary, etc, which you would still want a DVD for.
GPL Deconstructed
Are you talking about Digital Video distribution methods? If so, comparing DVD video to VOD is also comparing two completely different things. VOD is a subscription service, while DVD video is an actual tangible medium. There is no getting away from that.
You could argue that they share similarities, in which case I will point you to DIVX (the failed alternative to DVD video, not the codec). It was a subscription service (the players had modems and you had to buy the rights to play the disks), but you (supposedly) owned the physical disk. It failed primarilly because people wanted the freedom to play their property (I'm talking about the physical disks) without having to keep paying for it.
Comparing DVD video to VOD is like comparing VHS to Cable TV. People buy and rent movies on VHS, but they still watch Cable TV. One hasn't replaced the other. They simply co-exist.
Simply, VOD will not replace DVD video because of the lack of it's portabilty. Quite simply, you cannot take your VOD player anywhere you want and expect to play movies. (I imagine Disney would frown on people taking their decoder boxes to their friend's houses and plugging them in to watch movies.) Until VOD is distributed wirelessly, this will never happen.
Where VOD will be an advantage, however, is from a marketing position. I believe movies will be released to VOD services between their theatrical release and the DVD/VHS release. Companies such as Disney will use it for extra cash, but will it replace DVD video? No.
DVD is far from being a dead end.
Video on demand won't replace DVDs for the same reason that proprietary (and possibly all) e-books won't replace regular books.
In a similar way in which a regular book gives me the security of knowing that I don't have to worry if the company that published it goes belly up, if I buy the DVD, I own it (for my own use, of course). I can watch it when I want. I can watch it on an airplane, I can take it with me on business trips overseas. It's going to be a long, long time before everyone in coach can watch "on demand" flicks on an airplane.
When you have a DVD, you're not dependent on the whim of a company. Consider shows like The Family Guy or Futurama where Fox never gave them a fair chance, then pulled the plug. They treated these shows like shit the first time; what possible reason do I have to believe that they're be treated any better "on demand?"
What about British shows like I'm Alan Partridge, Good Neighbors, or Father Ted? At best, I can watch them on BBC America or PBS, but unless I buy the DVD (or VHS, or whatever comes next), what are the chances that I *know* I'll be able to see these shows, when I want, here in the USA?
Then there's the content itself. What happens when the company that owns the rights to these shows goes out of business? What happens if a bunch of Jeezoids decided to buy the rights to something just to kill it (for the chillllldren, of course)? Or what if they just decide that something is insensitive and cut it. Jesus, what if they alter the original: Colorizing it or adding those fucking "informational" popups like they do when they show Double Indemnity on the Lifetime network?
What happens when some soulless bean counter decides that since I'm the only one who wants to watch Seriously Dude, Where's My Car?, they should just save the server space and dump it? You already see this sort of thing in video stores, when they decide how many foreign films can fit in that little section. The Internet Movie Database lists 268,836 movies released theatrically, 35,200 made-for-TV movies, 23,625, TV series, 21,420 direct-to-video movies, and 3,081 mini series. How many of these are going to make the cut? Which do you think will come first, some of those films, or "on demand" sports, so folks can have "Classic Games of when the Red Sox blew the World Series" nights?
Finally, why should I keep paying for the content through a subscription or a download fee each time? Compare the price of DVDs with rentals and pay-per-view -- if I think I might watch it three times in the rest of my life (or I might want to loan it to a friend) why not buy it outright for the extra ten bucks?
...sounds like fun. You hiring?
Whether VOD surpasses DVD is not the issue. Recorded media will always be better than transmitted media for the same reason that wired connections will always be better than wireless ones.
Think about this way: in order to view VOD, there is recorded media somewhere that is being transmitted. Now unless you are willing to say that the transmission takes no additional time, then you can always get more information from a local recording.
And as long as you can get more, why wouldn't you?
Now, that's not saying that I'll go out and buy every movie I would otherwise demand, but certainly the ones I like I will record.
Along the same lines, if I need to transmit information over a never-changing span of ten feet through a wall, I will always use a wire. Transmission, besides being subject and prone to interference, needs to encode and decode, encrypt and decrypt, correct and transmit. That all takes time. Why do it when the wire is faster?
Consider this:
First, the wide release in theaters. $10 out of your pocket for a ticket (a majority, if not all of your ticket price, goes to the studio).
Then, the in-flight movies, the hotel rooms, and other "semi-controlled" environments by which a studio can license to third-party vendors. $5-$10 tacked onto your plane fare, your hotel room, etc.
Then, the movie networks-- HBO, Showtime, Skinemax, etc. Another dollar or so that you pay, indirectly, to the studio by way of your cable bill.
Then, the DVD/VHS release. $25-$45 (if it's a "special edition").
Finally, the major networks -- ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox. No money directly out of your pocket, but the networks pay out of the nose to the studios to be able to show a popular movie in primetime.
All of these selling points take place a few months or so after the previous one. You don't get current movies on the plane, but you get movies that were in theaters just a month or so ago.
etc etc, I hope you get my point. There are many points along this chain by which the studios can collect money for the movie. By saying "DVD is dead" you're eliminating one of those sell points. That will never fly with any studio exec.
Instead, think of this: insert the VOD service somewhere in that timeline. Let's say, in between the in-flight/hotel room and the major movie networks. Pay $5-$7, and you can see the movie you want when you want. Pay-per-view is somewhat like this, and if any selling point changes, it'll be the pay-per-view system. No longer will you have to wait until 4pm to see the movie you want to watch, you'll be able to have it start at 3:47 if you want.
As far as codecs go, that is the absolutely last thing on the studio head's mind. I guarantee you that whatever the major cable operators are using, that's what you'll see. Right now it's mostly MPEG-1, with a smidgen of MPEG-2 in some systems. For VOD, you'll need a more intelligent head-end system and a better set-top box. There might be some concern around conserving bandwidth, but I highly doubt it. You're getting HD streams of ESPN these days on the current systems, so we won't require a more efficient codec to do VOD.
Hi, perhaps in a wonderland with gigabit fiber connections directly to your home this will happen.
But how about the other 99.99% of the population/world ?
From my point of view the bandwidth and compression are not evolving as fast as ours demands.
If you plan to retire your DVD with VOD how about when blue-laser HD-DVD becomes mainstream ?
I think we will always be in that game.
Remember when we thought that 10 Gb HD would last forever ? It's the same principle.
By the time someone copes with that requirements we push the bar a little higher.
Couldn't agree less - any foreseeable trend for video should have happened with music before. Now I never listen to music on demand.
I run a software company called Onion Networks that provides peer-to-peer content delivery technology to movie studios building VOD systems.
With fast P2P content delivery technology, MPEG-4 compression, and PVR-like time shifting devices - the speed, storage, and economics are there today to provide DVD-quality VOD.
The only problem is that it is taking the studios a long time to roll out there VOD solutions, but trust me, they'll be upon us in the near future.
For more information on the protocols that underly these P2P content delivery systems, please check out the Open Content Network Specs
Then again, the video store's not far away, so I could always just get there with my jet pack to avoid the parking hassle, so maybe I can live with video on demand anyway.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
and will not last 20 years.
#1. "On Demand" services are always touted as the next big thing that's going to replace being able to buy media. Unfortunately, content companies are still too hung up on trying to control what you can do with the content. Fortunately, people are smarter than I usually give them credit for, and are proving themselves to be smart enough to fight down these stupid DRM content non-ownership schemes. Once content companies give up trying to rape us, they'll fall back on giving us what we've wanted (and have been able to get with VHS, DVD, books, etc all along) - a copy that we can buy and keep. We just have to wait until they give up on the "Keep you over a barrel" model.
#2. The internet *is* ready for this sort of content distribution. For everyone in the world? No. For enough people to get an online movie store off the ground? Yes. And as people buy into it, the bandwidth will be able to scale to meet the need. Unfortunately, phone companies have a huge vested interest in you *not* having the bandwidth you want. They too are holding onto a "Keep you over a barrel" model of business: they hold the monopoly on the copper. Selling an inferior product (1.5Mbps down/ 256kbps up DSL) is better for them than giving you a real internet connection. If they did THAT, then your upstream wouldn't have lag spikes. And if THAT happened, you could get truly reliable phone service over the net. And that would mean competiton for the phone companies. So they're not going to sell it to you. That said, they will have to give up clinging to their monopoly sometime. Wireless / powerline / infrared / satellite / whatever will mature sooner or later, and they'll be forced to compete instead of continuing to rape us.
Neither #1 nor #2 is a technical problem. Current media formats are already good enough, as well, though newer codecs will make this easier of course. All that remains is for the companies involved to give up with trying to control us (and they will; independent competition will kill them if they don't). How long will that take? They can drag this out for another ten years if they really want, but in my uneducated opinion, I'd say that they'll give up in five, and start cashing in on the smaller profit of giving us what we want, instead of operating for a loss for another five years trying to sell us something that we don't want.
But the reality is, that disconnection will, for a very very long time, trump a full-time connected model (for viewing video).
Sure, it SOUNDS great that I can just get that video anytime I like... of course, to equal a DVD all of the following things have to be in place:
1) I have to be able to get to commentaries/deleted scenes/etc, on the fly, just like a DVD (I suppose some of that is a bit optional, sometimes people really just want to see a movie)
2) I have to have the player I want to watch on connected to whatever service feeds up the video, at the time I want to watch it.
3) I have to keep paying that service forever if I want to watch the video much later on.
4) The service and connection has to be up (a storm is a great time to watch a movie).
It's just so much easier, for now and a long time from now, to use DVD's. I can buy a $50 player and hook it up to a cheap TV to watch stuff in a shop. I can take the netflix DVD on a plane. I can bring a DVD over to a friends house to watch instead of my own. All of these things are going to be hard to do for a long time with VOD... the number of people with connections fast enough to stream DVD quality video is going to be small for a while, the percentage of those with receivers hooked up all over even smaller, the number of players with really high speed wireless connections built in so you don't have to place them near a connection smaller still.
I think Netflix has about 20+ years of growth ahead of it. And I'm not sure that a physical model will ever be totally replaced by a networked model, even for things you get to keep like downloaded songs. Even though I can buy songs from Apple online now, and whole albums cheaper than a CD, I think I'll probably still buy CD's from some artists anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It seems pretty clear to me that Video On Demand will never get off the ground. There are a few plainly obvious reasons for this: .au, but the geography problems are somewhat similar).
Availability. It wll be a long, long, long time before there is sufficient bandwidtch available for a decent viewing around the country (I'm actually in
Cost. The prices will never be reasonable. Most likely they'll cost about the same as hiring a DVD (maybe a bit less). People will look at that and think "well, for what I pay to be able to watch the movie as often as I want, I can get it on demand 5 times". The cost thing will apply even more for DVDs of things that aren't movies - Dragonball Z eipsodes and the like.
For video on demand to be a viable option, the price for a viewing would literally have to be an order of magnitude cheaper than buying/hiring a DVD *and* deliver equivalent quality. That just ain't gunna happen in the forseeable future.
There are also the less obvious reasons why DVDs are preferable to consumers, like bonus features, having an actual physical object, being able to show off your DVD collection to visitors and not having to worry about $advertising_firm and $shady_government_organisation analysing your viewing habits.
Personally, I think the Video On Demand will be a great big white elephant, forever "just five years away". The only things that are likely to unseat DVDs are smaller and/or higher capacity DVDs.
The costs involved are way too high. It's not just bandwidth. It's EVERYBODIES bandwidth and it will not be cheap to increase the core bandwidth so a few million homes can watch independent movie quality images at home. Not to mention the server requirements to pull it off.
Pay per view, a few dozen channels as they do on a DBS system is about the best you are going to do.
No the future is not going to be blue laser (this really has a good chance of being another betamax and minidisk for sony), it is going to be HDTV resolution using WM9 (Sorry this will happen so quickly, nobody really stands a chance to get in a different format, the economics won't work), on standard manufactured DVD's.
This is the next big thing for the movie industry. For the next year or so, there will be special editions providing the high-res versions, in six monthes or so you should see high end versions of DVD Players that play the new format, at the same time, all new releases will be available in the HDTV format.
Then as the cost of HDTV televisions comes to the mainstream, this will be the firmly entrenched standard, and with HDTV and 5.1 sound, you are likely to have satisfied the home user with everything that they need. Format, and superior sound and video quality, at a delivery price structure as current DVD's are.
WM9 will win, because there is no infrastructure cost changes. The cost of the equipment to press blue laser type DVD's is VERY expensive. The complete infrastructure exists to support it, from manufacture to sale.
WM9 will win because it is here now, and product adoption will happen too fast to allow any other standards a chance to get in.
With every p2p, usenet and chat client. It's uncannily easy to get first-run films even before they are released to theaters; older films and TV shows are exchanged in IRC and usenet "rooms" of all flavors. Many of these are very high quality -
I still recall how floored I was the first time I watched the copy of "Fight Club" I downloaded, and also how floored I was when I realized the usenet-ized copy of "Sleepy Hollow" was, despite the apparent problems with an amateurish encode, still of higher quality than the version running on PPV cable.
Didn't stop me from buying "Fight club" on DVD, nor did it stop me from picking up "Sleepy Hollow" when I found it in the bargain bin. Many DVD rips traded in usenet are of much higher quality than the crap DirecTV broadcasts - so what? DirecTV has more convenience, and DVDs have higher quality. I have no qualms about collecting stuff sqirreled away from usenet, but that's still not going to stop me from picking up what I *really* like on DVD.
The studios are absolutely NOT holding back PPV internet - no more than the RIAA is "holding back" internet based distribution. These services are going to continue with or without "the industry."
I live in a rural community that doesn't even have cable. the cable TV line runs right by us, but no one around here is willing to pay for the up-front costs of connecting the town. And with 7 miles of copper between us and the nearest pop, ain't no DSL, either. But I can buy or rent a movie at any of a dozen places within a fifteen minute drive.
I can pay three bucks to watch a shit quality stream from DirecTV, or I can go rent the DVD for the same price and, while I'm at it, either rip it myself or pony up just a few more dollars and have a "perfect copy" forever.
So how is VOD gonna compete with that?
The future of digital video is the same as the future of digital audio. the big distribution companies will die, peer to peer will thrive, there will be greater variety available, more of the profit will go to the creative people rather than shareholders.
It's just a matter of Moore's Law. When terabyte hard drives and gigabit networks are common, you'll be swapping movies just like you swap songs today.
Anything else is just (as everyone else is saying about VOD) a distraction. The end to end principle will rule.
simon
home page
. . to see that this VOD nonsense is being put back where it belongs - in the corner.
:
There is largely enough posts against VOD for various reasons, but I'd still like to add that, for me, VOD will only stand a chance when it answers the following conditions
- always available (talking connection stability)
- always perfect (talking streaming quality)
- very cheap (like $0.05)
- very large catalogue (like, everything)
Compare the situation to viewing a DVD : it is always there, there is no delay in viewing it. A DVD always plays perfectly, no skipping, no frame stutter, no bandwidth issues. It doesn't cost anything to view it, but of course one can only choose amongst what that person has bought. Yet, the available catalog is vast (count the number of different films available in the store) and the methods of access varied and abundant (supermarket, video store, even gas stations have some).
There is another point I'd like to make : the digital media industry is the ONLY industry where the same product (one item) can be resold an infinite number of times without a production run renewing item availability. I want to see that reflected in the price of usage.
I will not accept excuses about storage costs (going down monthly) inflating the price, nor do I wish to hear about bandwidth issues (just get more fiber).
In short, it costs little to make (the film is supposed to have paid for itself in the theater), nothing to store, next to nothing to sell, and just a bit to distribute.
Half a dollar is an acceptable price for a start, even though to view one must have at least a 512Kb/s Internet connection (and that is far from being the norm).
Later, with a large catalog and many regular users, I'll expect that price to go down to below 20 cents. Even later, with a worldwide catalog and user base, I'll expect to be billed in micropayments.
If it doesn't happen like that, it just means that the media industry have once again decided to fatten their wallets at my expense. In that case, I'll cut the costs and buy my DVDs. I'll pay the price once, and I'll have something I can pass on to my kids, without anyone billing me each time I so much as think about playing it.
The used physical DVD costs here (Irkutsk, Russia) about 150-300 roubles, if I remember correctly. The Internet traffic for the end user is 3.5 roubles/megabyte. It means that in order to obtain the 4.6 GB DVD movie online I should pay 16100 roubles - 2 orders of magnitude more.
Bulk Internet traffic costs here about 1 rouble/megabyte, but these prices require the 8-mbps channel and more (The Railway has put it's own cables, and they are underused and sold cheaply).
Even if I may buy traffic for 1 rouble/mbyte (I may not) one DVD worth of video will cost me 4600 roubles that is 15-30 times more costly than a physical DVD.
I think this applies to every country except continental USA.
The only exception may be the extra rare movie that must be obtained by any price. But even here VOD is not a choice: The extra rare movie must be stored on a receiver end.
I believe that VOD is something that is being pushed down the throats of consumers weather we like it or not, being that it is heavily backed by all the major media corporations.
If a broadband mediums such as Powerlines, or fiber optics due come in to being within the next 10 years then you'll definitely see a push for more "Pay per view" content from those investing corporations. True, pay per view has only seen moderate success...which could be due to lack of extensive video catalog available and lack of true "VOD"...
Sony, Warner, Disney etc...will be able to create interactive channels with a potentially massive catalog for viewers to "stream/download" which will of course enforce DMCA/encryption on the users. Knowing this, the question one weather it will be propriety or open is a given.
However, I do believe that if more users/website designers support open source standards by simply encoding their video files using open source standards like Theora/VP3 then a need for plug-in and native support will arise for major media software (mediaplayer,real,quicktime etc) as they fight to gain more users to dominate the desktop and the website.
With the consolidation of media conglomerates (AOL Warner, FOX, Sony, Viacomm etc), the consolidation of proprietary technology mediums including hardware (see Microsoft palladium), and the rising power of DMCA the future looks bleak for the independent broadcaster and content creators.
As the same case with the state of Mp3's on linux where software companies get charged to release encoding capabilities, you can bet your bottom dollar that microsoft and others will most definitely charge for encoding into their proprietary digital video formats. This of course will further enhance the DMCA influence on what can be encoded and what can't.
With the RIAA pressing on the bill to get independent radio broadcasters pay airplay royalties all the way back to 1998. Can this be further enforced with the use of consolidated property media technology and corprate controlled media? Given the current stance of the corporates with DMCA, they will conviently reinvent the Television from a once open, free, and independent friendly internet.
Jason
For one thing, take DV camcorders. They are getting cheaper and more accessible to the average gadget junkie by the day. Many use them right now. Not to mention the ease with which one can edit their home videos just by plugging in the camcorder to one's computer.
Perhaps the real story here is not that these two things are maturing. Rather that in few years we will come at a point where such products are as ubicuous as the cell phone (and most likely incorporated into it).
VOD and personal video might sound like separate things, but I bet you they won't be so separate soon. With the human fetish of reality TV an voyeurism being marketed by video so broadly now a days, it seems natural for the two things to evolve into a well connected pair.
This will be a symbiotic relationship, as the move to sell other's lives will make the corporations invest in the infrastructure of personal video and TV.
Putting aside the consumer market, plentiful other products are on the horizon.
Real teleconferencing is getting close to reality (or is reality, depending on who you talk to). And this is especially now, with companies realizing that they no longer need nor want to pay for business travel. With the continuous government bailouts to the air travel companies, it is becoming clear that their infrastructure is crumbling and a need for trimming the fat from the market will have to happen soon.
Live field reporting is here now. Armies (the ones with guns and corporate) are beginning to heavily use other new digital video systems. As it becomes more and more possible to equip field agents with video capabilities, this market will certainly grow quite large. From insurance companies doing video damage assessments to war correspondents and soldiers sending real-time images of current war progress.
I cannot end this discussion without mentioning surveillance. It's recent growth, is directly caused by digital video. From city streets under the watch of "big brother" to daycare being a click away for concerned parents. Heck I can even see my entire apartment live if I want to check on my cats and see a log of what happened during the day.
To reply to a whole bunch of comments that declare how VOD is going to fail:
First of all, people are confusing delivery method with reproduction technology. VOD is delivery, DVD is delivery (as in a shiny disc) AND reproduction (as in MPEG2 and AC-3): A DVD is in fact VOD. It plays whenever you want it to. So basically we are comparing Apples and IBMs here. VOD, as per definition, does not mean that you don't get to keep a copy on a local storage device.
Now for VOD failing because of
- Quality: "people will want better quality"
Not really. People had CDs and moved down to MP3s; obviously people care more about convenience than about quality, especially since quality is arguably more important in audio than video. In any case, some day digital video _will_ reach a state where a human can not distinguish technically better quality.
- Physical Media: "people will want to have a hard copy"
Same argument as above applies, I don't think anyone downloading their MP3s from Kasaa cares all that much. But think of a world where you could play the movies you had paid for anywhere and anytime you wanted to. Now does VOD still sound bad? Who the hell cares about physical media??!!
People that use this argument have become slaves of the RIAA and MPAA. This is EXACTLY what they want. But in all reality, the future has no place for things like CDs and DVDs. At the end of the day, the real value is in the movie or the music, not the booklet or the silver disc. The music or movie's what you want to get, so who the fsck cares where it comes from?
- People want to keep their own disc
Yeah right, ask blockbuster how adament people are about that.
I think people are confusing licensing issues with the true defninition of VOD, which is to watch video when you want to. I think VOD could be just as popular as internet for the very same reason: information when you want it.
I was a subscriber about 5 years ago of Hong Kong telecom's Video on Demand which delivered VHS quality content to your televsion. I watched a total of 3 or 4 movies in the 2 years I had it (it was also Hong Kong's first broad band internet service).
The strengths that VoD has are
* Access anytime
* Access "anonymously" (atleast the store owner does not know your perverted viewing habits, which I must mention I do not have!)
The strenths of DVD are
* Its everywhere now...
* Its cheap -- US$50 players can be found (they sell for US$20 here on the border in Hong Kong)
* Its international and not legislated by telco / Disney / whoever
* Its collectible. I have two 300 DVD players stacked with DVDs I've purchased over the last 4 years for the simple reason that I love movies and want to keep them around for a bit.
* You can pass your DVD along to friends to watch
* Progressive SCAN + DTS / Dolby 6.1
* Amazing data transfer rates
* Rentals are getting cheaper. In the US you can rent using Netflix (quasi anonymous again)
A big weakness with the VoD service that I had subscribed to was the ability to watch the movie again in a couple of days time (or pause and continue watching the next day) as the "rental period" was 24 hours.
I really don't think VoD is going to replace DVD. It has potential in the pr0n industry for ummm impluse viewing, but not in the mainstream world. Sorry... been there done that, paid the bills and don't see myself going back.
Hahaha - and broadband is available everywhere for $10.99.
bahahahahaha
I first worked on a massive vod system over 10 years ago, before the hype even became visible. Why did it fail ? Because the major studio's wouldn't licence their content.
Sure, as better bandwidth and compression becomes more widespread and cheaper, vod will spread. But slowly, and if the studios have their way, controlled by them.
Just as it took the competition authorities to prevent studios owning theaters, it will need the FTC to ensure vertical integration is moderated. A real role for burning-blockbuster's-bottom-line dept, probably.
And even when vod is widely available, remember retail vhs and rental coexist and there will always be some people who prefer to buy and some to rent, and most a mixture of both. Vod will not sweep the cultural factors that create that rent/buy mix to go away.
The original poster did not say what their newsletter concentrates on. If it is technology, it would be worth paying some attention to the impact of affordable dvd recorders in the generic video market, and consequently the Future of DVD.
"Congress - the best democracy money can buy"
Interactive TV is the real technology to watch out for. It has been slow in coming for years and will only likely hit the big time in 8-10 years.
VOD, by itself, is not enough of a business model for any provider. The whole Interactive TV which may morph into the ultimate "home entertainment centre" will offer internet access, pay-TV, online gaming, music and video on demand, video telephony, and numerous other offerings.
That is the holy grail!
I live where I can't get broadband. The only delivery system I could have is satellite with an dialup back link. Now taking this it means that to get VOD I have to use up the bandwidth of the satallite which means that I will have to indirectly pay for it. Then it would cost me to watch it each time. Now taking Sky they charge about £4 a time for a PPV so I would expect similar for VOD
So if I only want to watch a film once if might be worth it. Twice maybe not. Also taking I would lose DB5.1, Extras, Out Takes and all those things that can make DVD cool. I think I know where I will stick
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Well, to a certain degree.
However, the number of bits for "good enough" audio is a LOT lower than for video. For any reasonable extrapolation of high-end stereo system, (like a full home 7.1 system that can usefully deal with dynamic ranges and frequcies well beyond what speakers can do), we can already get to the "so good golden ears can't hear the difference" with a typical broadband connection. For people with typical systems, even 48 Kbps with some modern codecs like HE AAC has been shown to be as good as CD.
Now, for video, things get trickier. I doubt 8 Mbps will be enough for percepturally lossless 1920x1080 in a real-time stream, even with WMV9 or AVC.
My video compression blog
Somewhere, I remember seeing an article that the total data bandwidth of the USA is dominated by Netflix. By this, the article meant, there are more gigs of data shuffling around the continent in Netflix envelopes than on all the fat data pipes combined.
That was several months ago. Netflix has had negligible market penetration (think... how many of your family have even *heard* of Netflix or dvdbarn?). In the next few years we're to expect action by Blockbuster in this niche. Some are predicting 30 percent or more of households will have an 'unlimited rental' membership somewhere by the time the market saturates.
Meanwhile, the regulated residential broadband providers are resisting/lobbying/preventing any competition, telecom reform has just taken it in the teeth, and most home users I've talked to have seen stagnation or degradation in the measured bandwidth per buck they're getting in the last 2 years. A lucky few are seeing alternative providers and the beginnings of competition, but I'm betting a decade goes by before we see enough alternatives that prices drop hard and performance soars.
As much as I love 802.11b and other wireless protocols, that mediocre pipe ain't the answer to a whole neighborhood of VOD-loving customers without some astounding cell-like protocol improvements to get a couple dozen 8mB/s (based on my replay/tivo experience; I'm likely wrong on this detail) streams of data per Access Point out to all them suburbanites.
From there, a buncha me-too's on stuff like people liking ownership of dvd's, the effect of PVR's, market-stifling price structures, fingers pointed at how well Music-on-Demand is working (see market stifling price structures), DivX as a cautionary tale, etc etc. that everyone else is saying.
I can't trade kung fu VOD with people at work. I can't take it on vacation. And most importantly, I can't prominently display my VOD collection for visitors to marvel at.
It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired. - Robert Anson Heinlein
As many posters have pointed out already, VOD is not the ready for prime time, mainly because we don't trust the administrators of such a system to actually keep what we want. Basically, Video on Demand is an oxymoron. The current systems for VOD only have a few dozen (or maybe even a few hundred, to be optimistic) movies to watch at any given time, which severely limit their usefulness.
But let's look to the future. According to another poster, the Internet Movie Database lists some 268,836 films, of varying lengths, rarity, popularity and actual existence. An average movie is 2 hours, which can take as much as 1.5 gigabytes of space to actually look (and sound) good. 268,836 times 1.5 gigabytes is 403,254 gigabytes, or about 394 terabytes. Suppose we want the movies to have twice the resolution as what the average Kazaa user is used to, and we have about 788 terabytes of space. We still haven't broken the pedabyte level, and we've already archived every documented film in human history (including some that haven't even been made).
So assuming storage space keeps increasing, and bandwidth increases to the point that everyone can watch a movie at the same time without the networks clogging, and the political situation changes so that there actually is a public domain, or maybe somebody finally figures out a way that people can enjoy movies for free while still having the creators get paid, it is quite possible to have a VOD system that is actually useful to everyone.
It probably won't happen for a hundred or so years, but I can imagine a future where nobody keeps their own recordings, simply because they trust a benevolent entity to keep them in a no-questions-asked manner. Of course, I don't think people ought to trust a central organization like this, but I could imagine if it had a reputation like the Library of Congress, people probably would. When that time comes, that's when VOD will be viable, and we won't think of it as VOD. We'll just call it "watching movies."
I know this isn't the first time, but thought I'd ask:
Cliff, was this a screwup, or do you plan to pick fun Troll questions like this regularly? Cuz if you do, I'll start writing some questions....
Based on the success of Tomb Raider, it's clear that sex is superfluous and I have decided to write a paper on this. Can anyone talk to me about the overall trends toward the entire species dying off due to lack of interest in anyone else in comparison with Laura or Angelina, and what's the consensus on how quickly this will happen?
A cousin of mine who works on an Free Software project just got hired by Microsoft and I'm wondering just how long it'll be before everyone doing free software gets hungry, gets real jobs, and Linux dies off?
My cat just hurled up something truly horrendous. Has anyone tried using this stuff for case modding or overclocking? If I do, where should I submit my story? Tom's hardware seems the obvious choice, but this goop smells suspiciously like the Register's style of investigative journalism.
Well, the overclocking didn't work quite as planned, but the heat and electrical jolt seem to have spawned a new life form. Am I required to get a patent on it, and if so, is there a GNU-like document for preserving li'l blobby's rights without exploiting him/her/it?
I recall having this same discussion in 1996 over VOD versus VHS. At that time BT (in the UK) were running VOD (or almost VOD) trials on some crufted up (but adequate) technology and getting very poor feedback. One of the biggest objections was that any provider would only ever have a small subset of the things you actually wanted to watch - almost no better than premium cable channels - a case of VOS (Video on Supply) rather than VOD
Of course it involves a fat pipe and DivX.
...of reeking pork. This people who would like you to believe that actually buying content on DVD is dead are the same ones that want you to believe the 99 cents a song iTunes will be the end of peer-to-peer music.
PIGS!
The same kind of pigs who invented Circuit City's Divx discs. They will be just as successful.
See the description from the MPEG group's page for more information.
To quote:
It was assigned the number 7 under the assumption that MPEG-5 and MPEG-6 would be used for future video compression technologies.
For additional information about MPEG-7, see the MPEG-7 home page
Its another one of these misnamings, such as Moores law (a marketing term coined by the head of Intel to sell their product philosophy).
Its never been _on demand_. Its been on request. If I demand I want repeats of an obscure late 80s comedy show shown on uk television (called Absolutely), theres no chance I will get it.
And it will never knock out recorded technology.
Yet again the MPAA wants a shift away from anyone owning their content in the end. Maybe its the future, but its a future where they will sell less, and get less money for their product. And in the end, it just means we record it off the television rather than buy it legitimately from them.
Didn't they learn from the original DVD-subscribe idea of DIVX?
As for Video On Demand itself, its been one of those "killer app" technologies which the telecomms companies have built since 1995, and never hugely deployed because the customers don't really want it. It offers them little, and local rental shops can always deliver (or post rentals to you). Its a novelty, and probably the last choice of the consumer. So they don't demand anything in the end...
I work for a large telco company in Europe, and we have a VOD trial that looks pretty good. You have to assume that the Internet is never (which means 5-7 years) going to give you the bandwith and QoS needed for Video On Demand.
Some tests tell that you need 3 *constant* Mbps in order to get TV quality. The trial is a service in which you get 5Mbps or so (I don't have the figures) via DSL. You get a set top box, liek the ones used in satellite TV. The telco deploys in the exchange offices video boxes loaded with MPEG2 movies. You get TV channels and you can rent movies. Access to the specified movie is granted whenever you want during 2 or three days.
Basically, it's what you get at your blockbuster, but without going out to return back the movie. If the price is right, I think it will be a hit!!!
Adittionally, you get Internet access for your browsing pleasure and your Xbox.
The future of VOD now depends more on marketing than on technology (which is advanced enough).
Unless everyone manages to standardise on MPEG4 (the main player in the codec battles), then I suspect we'll end up with loads of proprietary standards being used, depending on which set-top box you have. The only issue with this is storage for the content aggregators who will have to store the movies in all the possible formats to farm out to all the different set-tops.
Microsoft will make a massive push with Windows Media, and rightly-so too - their codec is probably the best right now and includes it's own multi-channel audio codec too. At least they've finally opened it up so that it can be made available on other platforms - before this happened I would have been wary.
And anyway, they've already encoded Terminator 2 which will be available as a WMV file in the new T2 DVD release!
> Chaz
I've already got a VOD service - homechoice - delivered over ADSL and no way is it going to replace DVD. For a start, it doesn't support widescreen tvs, the compression method they use means the video doesn't look anywhere near as good, they don't have all the extra features you get on dvd and most of all you only get the film for 24 hours. Even if they changed over to mpeg 4 and started supporting widescreen tvs it still wouldn't replace DVD's - at least with a DVD I can play it whenever I want and I don't have to worry about the film not being on thier server in 6 months time. However, homechoice also comes with a selection of tv programmes and music videos that come 'free' with the service, which is nice when the Tivo hasn't got much on it.
What VOD is usefull for is that it helps to eliminate any need for going to video rental shops - the back catalogue on homechoice is cheap and if I really want to see a film right now I can. With that and Blockbuster UK's dvd rental by post I need never darken the doorway of my local video shop again.
I think DVD's will be around for a long time - or at least 5cm shiny discs holding video will be around a long time. My bet is that some 'superDVD' will come out at some point to support High Definition (though the apperent lack of take up of HD in most of the world will probably slow down it's arrival), and after that another super-superDVD for super definition TV when that eventually comes out.
Tk
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
I think ordinary people prefer to buy goods than
to buy service. So they are much more likely to shell out $15 for a DVD than $5 for VOD.
I imported 8 seasons of Friends from France
a year ago. And I've watched them once!
Yet I would never pay even 10% of what I spent
for Freinds VOD!
It's not a video codec, is it?
Try Ubuntu GNU/Linux, it's great!!!
it seems pretty clear that VHS is a dead-end technology, due to be replaced by DVD.
Consumers look to DVDs as the CD-equivalent for home video. That's not entirely correct. Unlike CDs, certain dual-layer and double-sided DVDs can suffer from corrosion-by-air called "DVD rot" (basically, air gets in side the layers through micro holes created when the layers were slapped together at the factory).
If DVD rot begins to appear in large numbers in a few years, some consumers will begin to distrust DVDs, feeling betrayed that the one-thought infallable format is potentially self-destructive.
In large numbers, this could either spell the end of the DVD or spur the creation of a better disc format.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I'm happy.
I'm smarter than the average bear.
Have you even done any reading about it before mentioning it? MPEG1 is a compression scheme. MPEG2 is a compression scheme. MPEG4 is a compression scheme. MPEG7 and MPEG 21 are not. If my memory serves me correctly, MPEG7 is a Metadata description language and MPEG21 is a more holisitic solution incorporating MPEG7 and compression technologies.
You're missing one key point. To use VOD (aka pay-per-view w/o the time constraint -- in theory), you have to pay each time you want to watch it. At least with my DVD's, I can watch them any time and as often as I wish. If I want to pay once to view something, I'll go to the movies where I can enjoy it with more people than can fit into my living room.
m unications/two-tin-cans-with-a-string....
Oh, wait! What am I thinking? It costs as much to go see a movie as it does to buy the DVD and hold a cookout for all my friends and then sit down and watch the DVD.
Problem is, the market won't support it. MP3 players are a fine example of this. There's already growing resistance to RIAA trying to control all channels of what people can view. When people pay to own something, they expect that they will have material possession of that item, to use wherever and whenever they choose.
VOD is more akin to video rental.
If you want to find out about what will replace DVDs, you should look at the budding technologies coming out of data storage. Holographic cards the size of a credit card that can hold multiple terabytes of random access storage at high throughput data speeds.
Don't forget about quantum computing approaches. I know of at least three major computer manufacturers that are in a quiet race to develop quantum-level computing for the consumer market. It will be a while before we see a functional CPU, but the storage capabilities may show up sooner. Rather than have bits that can only have two values, 0 or 1, a quantum bit can have many more values. How about 0 through 9 -- a true decimal computer. I'll leave it to the math gurus to figure out the storage density of decimal over binary. My guess would be multiple terabytes in something the size of a grain of salt, and all data accessible instantly (forget about discussing xHz).
In the end, VOD is only about control of distribution. If people have to pay every time they want to view something, or pay on a regular basis, it will get old real fast. Look at pay-per-view. It's exactly the same thing as VOD, just using a different moniker. Only, I can't use VOD/pay-per-view when I'm sitting on a plane with my computer. Or, if I'm on the road. Or visiting relatives who don't have cable/broadband/satellite/some-form-of-modern-com
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Well, if this achieves deep penetration, then obviously it'll be the end of movie rental. But for people who still want to own the films, rather then paying every time they want to see it, DVDs and their successors will be around for a while.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What a farce. It's like those Dot.com outfits that went belly-up. Lots of Noise and Hype, not much real substance to them.
Only a utter idiot or somebody who didn't know any better would subscribe to something like this and get shafted by the "monthly charges" such a service is going to have when you can get the same old moive at Wal-mart on DVD for $6.00-$7.00
Look at what the brodband penetration rate is in the US, less than 20%, in comparison, it's something like 75% in Korea(ROK). Now before you start whining, realize that most people live in high density apartment complexes. Ok That being said, If you really want to see if VOD displaces DVD, ROK might be a sutable place to do some research.
Tell that to the industry that reaped billions in profits from selling them last year!
Feh!
Everyone pretty much thus far has been thinking about VoD as a delivery for only movies. Thats not the only thing it can be used for, folks.
Here in Charlotte, Time Warner offers up Cartoon Network, HGTV, CNN, DIY, and a couple other VoD channels where you can select the show you want to watch - free. You can also pick from ~50 music videos that are currently available. In all we have about 12-15 VoD channels available to us.
While the shows are currently limited, they've been adding them pretty quickly here of late. Movies show up shortly after showing up on PPV.
I've used VoD quite a bit and have had no problems watching what I want, when I want.
While I do not think VoD will make DVD's go the way of the Doo-Doo, it may make companies like Blockbuster rethink their business model. Why should I goto Blockbuster to get a DVD when I can just order it up on my remote? Currently, I have 24 hours to watch the movie (VoD TV is free, pick when you want, what you want, for how long you want). Thats long enough for me. Maybe they'll change that some day. Pay 50 cents more for a week rental.
Oh but VoD doesnt do High Def. Currently, no, it doesnt. But iNDemand will have 3 High Def VoD channels available by the end of the year (www.tvpredictions.com).
Well first of all vod in a very nice concept, but i would always rather have a hard copy of a movie instead of it being on a server somewhere. Its good for some things but how are you goin to watch the new matrix on a plane to europe... its much easier and more convienient to have a copy for yourself... holla
I disagree with your other points, though. People don't always want just the music or the movie. Sometimes they want liner notes, documentaries on the production process, a poster for their wall, or simply a physical presence so their small pre-literate child can let them know WHICH movie or show they want to watch with a minimum of whining. Not only that, but when we bring home a DVD my child wants desperately, he is busy for hours and carries it around with him, and practices the alphabet, and wants to learn to read so he can read all the words on the cover himself. Sitting at a computer browsing through a catalog simply doesn't provide the same experience.
And yes, go ahead and ask Blockbuster how adamant people are about keeping their own discs. Haven't you noticed the new "get a discount when you buy a movie you've rented" program? I'd say they're trying to capitalize on the people like me, who rent a movie solely to find out if they like it enough to buy it, and then buy it somewhere cheaper! However, there's currently no way to tell which people purchase for economic reasons (it's cheaper to buy than to rent over and over) or hard copy reasons (simply liking to own a physical copy). The people who buy for economic reasons would probably love VOD if it was a purchase, rather than a rental scheme. However, the people who simply like hard copy are unlikely to ever embrace something so ephemeral.
Independent musicians and registration-free net radio at EmergentSound
VOD is simply a euphemism for PAY PER VIEW, and PAY PER VIEW is exactly what the content cartels want.
With PAY PER VIEW, the cartels won't have to worry about pesky consumers selling used DVDs at prices that undercut their own overpriced product...
Besides, I already have video-on-demand, I put a DVD in the player and press PLAY
It seems pretty clear that DVD is a dead-end technology, due to be replaced by Video On Demand.
;-) )
Yeah, the same way that no one buys tapes and CDs because radio exists. Oh, wait...
OK, there's a little difference, in that radio isn't quite On Demand. OTOH, do you think there's enough bandwidth and storage space in the universe to make it so that every single person in the world will have instantaneous access to every single movie ever made? Not to mention all the shows that are on DVD right now, including Six Feet Under, Law & Order, X-Files, every flavor of Star Trek... And remember, that list is only going to get longer and longer. In the upcoming year, there will be a few hundred more movies added to that list--new releases, straight-to-video and -cable that winds up on DVD, old movies that they finally decide to release, and foreign films. Hell, there will probably be more like 2,000 new DVDs released this year. I don't know, I'm just guessing, maybe 5,000 unique titles, especially if TV-to-DVD picks up steam. (Finally got my *&#@$% Futurama last month!)
VOD will just be the slow evolution of PPV--selling ultimate convenience to a handful (compared to DVD-buyers and regular cable/satellite viewers) of consumers, not much more. Why would any studio start cataloging and making instantly available everything ever made (not to mention infrastructure--upstream needs to be *substantially* beefed up, even with better compression (note: I can just *barely* sit through a DivX'd DVD, and sure as hell wouldn't pay for it) and no sense mentioning the infamous 'last mile') when they can just sell shiny discs at a ver high profit* and make the consumer do their own cataloging? Not to mention people like to just plain *own* stuff and have it be theirs. And read yesterday's thread about Apple's new music store--people are apparently very fond of owning boxes with liner notes and cover art. (Or maybe they're just using that as an excuse to bith about the service.
If anything, VOD will make use of TiVo-like boxes--new movies will be sent to your set-top box in the middle of the night the day before they're oficially "released" and there will be a small fee will unlock them for viewing. Just like how QuickTime has been distributed for the last 5 years--everyone with QuickTime 3 or newer on their computer *has* the full version of QuickTime Pro already--you just need to pay for a key to unlock it and gain access to all those features.
*remember, all those movies in the $7.99 bargain bin (Broken Arrow, Miss Congeniality) are still making a profit and cost no more to make than a brand-new disc like Harry Potter or 8 Mile. So, let's just say that on an $8 DVD, there's $1 of profit to be made. On a new release sold for $19.99 there's $13 to be made on *each* disc! $24.99? That's $18 profit *per disc*. OK, *maybe* the $7.99 mark is a loss-leader (but I doubt it), in which case I'm sure the $9.99 discs turn a profit. There are *way* too many of them every week to all be loss-leaders.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Some players (my standalone included) have buggy firmware that sometimes doesn't handle FF/REW very well. Better players (any decent PC player, for example) have no problems on the few DVDs where I've had FF/REW problems.
In most of these cases, it's partially a disc problem, but one that only occurs on some players. Probably the player didn't see that the P-UOPs (Prohibited User Operations) preventing FF/REW in the FBI warning were removed for the main title.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It won't do anything to the retail DVD market (pay-to-own). Just like rentals haven't killed that market.
Where VOD will make a HUGE difference is competing against Pay-Per-View. (Actually, it won't compete with it, as VOD is the logical "next generation" of PPV, cable companies will simply upgrade their PPV setups to support VOD instead of scheduled display.) It will also allow companies on the Internet to compete with cable PPV systems, and possibly win. (Not likely, the cable companies have a LOT of local downstream bandwidth to spare. Remember that DOCSIS is 30 Mbits/sec or so, and the cable company can easily add multiple 30 Mbit channels.)
VOD may or may not compete with the rental market. It will probably give PPV a bit more of an edge against brick-and-mortar rentals and maybe Netflix too. Not too much.
VOD will be successful. It won't be a major industry-changing success, it'll just increase the popularity of PPV a bit.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
There will always be a power struggle between content users and creators/distributors that want to maximize the long term profit from their product.
Look at what's happening in Congress and the court system, right or wrong, their bolstering the rights of content owners to make sure no-one uses their content in any way not authorized. The reason for this is clearly to open the door for more limited use sales of digital content.
DVDS are damn hard to copy for a reason, and if they thought that people would buy even more crippled versions, then they'd stop working after the 3rd time you watched em (remember Divx?).
I can't imagine VOD panning out to be anything other than a pay for use service model.
People want what they want when they want it, including content distributors who define that as "more of your monthy income"
The problem with it is the price. They want to charge $6/movie. I can go to any video store and rent one for $5 ($CDN btw). Sure, there's the convience factor, that I can watch it without having to even get off the couch, but I don't think that's worth any more money. Espessially since it loses the whole going-to-the-video-store feel, browsing through shelves of movies, and being able to look at the boxes etc. Sure, theres the overhead of the equipment, but they don't have any additional overhead costs for doing VOD - they already own the building, they don't need a huge staff, etc - ongoing costs that a video store has to cover.
It's also unproven. If I go to the video store, and rent a VHS or DVD, I know it will work (and if it doesn't, I can rent another for free). I have no idea how well VOD will (or won't) work. If they want it to take off, they need to make their pricing on-par (or cheaper) than video stores, and probably even give people a couple free viewings, to get them comfortable with the technology. Until then, I'd rather spend less money on proven technology.
Speak before you think
A standard is only necessary if you use a hardware decoder. With a software decoder, the technology of compression is free to evolve and improve, and it won't matter if it's proprietary or not, so long as you have the codec. If you use hardware, being able to add (low-cost, PC) decoder cards would be a must. I think that's the way it should go. Locking in the standard a la DVD in hardware only means different players support the standard to different degrees, not all of them perfect, so why not just go all the way?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
2 problems with VOD that I see.
1. How will the Entertainment industry implement this? This is a huge implication to will or will it not kill a service already in existence. This could be a topic in itself. How would you like to see VOD implemented?
2. Multiple viewing's and sharing. This is a big stepping stone that the Entertainment industry does not want to continue.
I agree with all the post in here that VOD will eventually replace Pay-Per-View. I hate pay-per-view and will not order it. If it was VOD then I actually would consider ordering it. Also don't know if this was discussed but if (going to topic 1) implemented this correctly it could be the death to PVR's.
Now for DVD's.
It really made me made to read in the first couple sentences of this post that one would say that DVD is a dieing technology. They obviously didn't think about all the uses of DVD! DVD is not just for HOLLYWOOD, it is used in the home for recording! I don't think this has been discussed yet, but I have not read every article. How does one record his home movies for others to view or for storage if he can't use DVD's because DVD's have been killed by VOD. Well personally not going to happen in this neck of the woods. I'm not going to go back to VHS. So how would media change for this? Well they would have to create something new (hopefully more protected from damage). Since this would be something different than VOD, VHS or anything else then it would actually be the Death of DVD.
Just goes to show you that sometimes the /. crowd knows nothing. All the talk in the video industry is about H.264 (one of the newer MPEG 4 codecs) and not one mention of it here?
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
For porn. Don't have to be embarrassed by walking into the adult video shop and renting a few titles, when you can order them from the privacy of your parents basement. Of course, you must make sure that you intercept the bell, lest mom and dad find out what you are REALLY doing in the basement.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
From now on, all /. questions about broadband and or streaming should end with 'What have they done in Saskatchewan'? Seriously. If you want to see cutting edge technology in the hands of consumers, move to Saskatchewan. We got it all baby....
.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
I recently attended the NAB conference and sat in on a lot of presentations. The industry is building the tools to deliver MPEG-4 and/or WMF9 through digital cable/satellite. The talks about DRM seemed to balance the need of the producers to make money off what they make and the need of the consumer to do what they want with the content (outside of sharing the content with one million of their closest friends). The big thing with DRM was to create tools that would allow for a wide range of potential usage.
There seemed to be an assumption that within the next 5 years the PVR will be ubiquitous. I also observed a large amount of set-top-boxes on display from a number of manufacturers - many of these had DVD burners built in with the PVR and digital TV tuner. There was also some concern expressed about delivering content in a format that consumers could re-purpose for any devices (home or moble) that they want to view their content on.
Oh yeah, and a lot of talk about how the broadcast industry would be able to change their business models in order to take advantage & make money off all this.
And pretty horrible bandwidth too.
Boeing 777. Enough said.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I've had digital cable for quite some time and it is still unable to deliver theater sound. AT&T told me they had no plans to upgrade their boxes to allow for digital theater sound.
Anything you say will be held against you.
DVD can be 480i OR 480p. I think most DVDs are 480p.
HDTV can be either 1080i or 720p. Many people think 720p is better than 1080i.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Call me a Luddite, but I have no cable, satellite, etc. Therefore, I do not have the magical option of VOD. I certainly am not planning on spending $30/month in the future just to be able to watch VOD movies!
Physical media copies of movies are not going away, and if the **AA groups think they can remove them from the consumer market (and somehow manage to do so) they'll certainly change their minds once the studios start LOSING billions of dollars a year from lost revenue.
(But that's just the pirates' fault, right?)
The future of DVD vs VoD really comes down to offline vs online.
I believe the following - but it's open to (a lot of) debate:
1) Any type of online service provider will _always_ have downtime
2) wireless operators will _always_ have deadspots in their networks.
3) Transfer times will _always_ be quicker from local media than from networked media
There will always be some applications that make more sense for offline storage. At the very least offline storage will be used for local caching.
You might find that the limiting factor for viewing video is the screen technology, for instance, and that memory / other storage technology can be fitted into the box at marginal extra cost.
Think back about all that network computer b0110x a few years ago.
Good luck with the article.
...we're paying metered phone line costs, so the whole concept of VoD is just too funny for words. Now, remember that there are almost 400 million people in the EU now, so those are a lot of DVDs that you can sell...
Yes, advanced codecs like JVT will improve on those rates. But even with a 3:1 improvement, we are looking at a stream that averages 1.7 Mbps and spikes as high as 3.3. Affordable broadband using any of the current technologies cannot deliver even that reduced level of traffic to a significant portion of households on a continuous basis.
To me, a big part of purchasing DVD's is OWNING the DVD. I have hundreds upon hundreds of CD's, and I haven't stopped buying those in the age of MP3's. I still purchase atleast a dozen CD's a month, because to me the collecting is part of the fun.
I also know I'm not the only one...many people enjoy having a sizeable DVD or CD collection. Why do you think there are so many pieces of display furniture available? There is a reason people don't keep their DVD's and CD's in cardboard boxes, but on display next to their entertainment centers.
Sig.i>
Let me answer your question with a question of my own, and perhaps with a little thought you can see the light. I videotape my kids, then edit the footage and send tapes to grandparents, etc. How, in your no-DVD world, do you propose I do that?
As a format DVD is a great way to store lots of data. As a consumer good it's a great way to get people to buy the same item multiple times.
VHS/Magnetic tape have obvious drawbacks, but how often did you cut out half of a tape simply by setting it improperly on a coffee table.
How useful are rented DVDs _really_?
No wonder the movie industry embraced them so wholeheartedly
The problem is look at the selection in a video or sell through store? Compare to the limited selection that could possibly be offered through basically limited pipe. The problem is the name of VOB its should be called LTVOB or Limited Titles Video On Demand.
There were some concepts of software durning the late 90's of using java and downloading when you want to run it. Solves patching etc. It basically died except for flash/simple entry on web pages or nice way to wreck your system.
Sega and others have tried this with games on demand of a working collection of 10 to 30 titles over the years. It never survived.
How about newspapers? its 2003 and they are still printing newspapers in the time of 24/7 news coverage. Its basicaly a good media transportable and can be takens just about anywhere.
The only way this will overtake any hard media is if everthing and any thing can be dialup for a basic fee per month. Everything from the first "movie ever made" to the latest movie, tv show etc. Even the net with it 'n' pages does not cover everthing. It is a good exmple of info on demand. But there are still libararys and bookstores being built and expanding on even after the explosive growth of the last ten years of the net.
The bottom line is its just one drop of water in a sea of media transport. It fills a nitch but cant do the whold thing. There is not enough bandwidth or instant storage to be abble to accees what the description of VOD is letting you beleve.
As someone working in cable industry on S/W specs for two-way digital cable as well as on industry standards in this area, movement away from existing technologies is extremely difficult. There are millions of legacy digital set-top boxes out there that have a rather restricted footprint of performance and memory. Any changes in technologies MUST be compatible with those legacies, even if it means dual carriage. Furthermore, the cable operators have invested billions in the existing headend equipment. Given the state of the economy, they don't have a lot of capital to work with to invest in new technologies to replace the old ones.
The existing transport for content on cable is MPEG-2. All those legacy boxes have MPEG-2 decoders. Thus, for several years, MPEG-2 will remain in place. However, new compression schemes are being examined. Perhaps when those set-top boxes start to include DOCSIS modems enabling wide bandwidthIP traffic, will things start to change. This, however, is also several years away.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
...ever want VOD as opposed to my DVD collection? While VOD would be interesting its not that much different from pay-per-view now. I dont use PPV, not because i cant find anything i want to watch, but because i dont like to use PPV. I'm paying enough for cable as it is.
[OK ok...so my girlfriend pays the cable bills]
-k-
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
...I know some people that use it all the time over the Uni network (watching directly by streaming, why bother downloading, but you can if you want). OTOH, I don't think that was what the article was talking about... [/troll]
I don't think VOD systems will ever replace DVD (or whatever comes next in the HDTV age) because colleting movies is all the rage. Today, more people than ever are buying their favorite films instead of renting or PPV. Its great to line your shelves with LOTR box sets and that cool metal slipcase for the Highlander DVD/CD set.
This is kind of like the case with CDs. They are now a collection of singles and give no reason for ownership, unlike the old days. I remember buying the Led Zep Houses of the Holy LP with a awesome die cut windows on the cover, or how about Styx Paradise Theater with the doublefold artwork and the laser etching on the B-side of the LP. All this has been lost to the record labels, but not to the motion picture studio who give us great artwork and extras on the disc up the wazoo.
I hope the newsletter is for the VOD trade group, 'cause it won't get much traction anywhere else given your premise. I design broadband systems including DSL, CMTS, FTTH, FTTC, wireless, etc and I can let you know that none of them are remotely ready for true VOD. In fact most of the "VOD" systems are actually the near VOD similar to what DirectTV uses. Now given that everyone would _like_ to have real on demand VOD why do you think company implement near VOD? The simple answer is bandwidth, with IGMP proxying Click here for the RFC you only need the amount of bandwidth equal to the lesser of either your total number of subscribers on each DSLAM/node or the total number of channels. Take a simple example of a DSL system that offers 100 channels of broadcast & near VOD and their density per DSLAM is 300 subs and that they only allow ONE set top box per household. This means that I need to provision at least 300 mbps (OC-12 minimum) to that DSLAM to handle the traffic (100 channels x 3 mbps per channel I'll address the reason I use 3 mbps later). Now lets says that I want to offer true VOD, suddenly our bandwidth needs to that DSLAM have tripled to 900 mbps (OC-24 minumum but I'll probably have to use an OC-48 since most vendors don't make an OC-24)because VOD is inherently a UNICAST not multicast service. It doesn't take a mathematician to see the challenges. To further complicate matters, most of the DSL systems in the world work run ATM at layer 2. This is a problem since ATM is inherently a connection oriented protocol, in other words there is no simple way to send a broadcast as you do in Ethernet or other baseband shared acess system. This means that you have to have a large system or systems to handle the load of (1) creating the main IGMP streams at the head end and (2) doing all the work to SAR that data into and out of the ATM cloud. This adds a great deal of cost to the system since SAR'ing takes allot of processing power. Also to run video reliably you need to be running your PVC's as VBR-NRT or better. All of this adds up to very expensive gear. The reference to power line based broadband is very much wishful thinking, that technology is not even close to being ready for a major deployment and there are NO standards for access. 1.5 mbps as a planning bandwidth per video channel is also not realistic, it is possible with some of the very low bit rate encoders but those are all two or three times as expensive as "normal" 3.0 - 3.5 mbps encoders and you still haven't made any provisions for HDTV which runs in excess of 27 mbps.
Is not VOD vs. DVD kind of apples and oranges? Maybe VOD can be compared to PPV the (Pay Per View) service that is offered by many cable companies. I am not kidding -- how can you compare something you can purchase and own to do with what you like to something that you have to rent and either pay for each viewing or for a set time period? I think I would be more than broke on those disney movies my kids watch hundreds of times. (Every time a new one comes out it is "stuck" in the DVD player for weeks...Even at a quarter per viewing, I would be in the poor house soon -- and what about 6 months down the road when it becomes the hot thing again.)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Solid State storage devices like compact flash will be the real DVD Killer. No moving parts to break, faster access times and smaller size. It is only a matter of time. VOD is nice, but you cannot take it with you. I expect the future to a a combo of both.
Sure but look what happened when they tried grabbing more power with Divx.. the public ignored it. It never took off.
Things need *someone* interested in them for them to succeed. It's not like big media suddenly said "Ok, this is it. DVDs. Get used to it" and DVDs took off. No, people actually got some things they wanted: random access to video, extra content that added some spice to the experience, and 5.1 surround sound. And it took a while to catch on, too.
Things tip because they're embraced. Granted, sometimes the public doesn't have many options and they'll go for the lesser of two evils. But if *someone* offers the better solution (and it's really better for everyone, not just a select few), then it's got a chance of succeeding.
Divx didn't. I don't believe a vanilla watch-it-within-this-time-period solution will either. If there isn't some real benefit for the user, people won't embrace it. And if people don't buy into it, content providers can push it all they want but it won't sell.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
Give those places a net connection, problem solved.
When CD's just started to come out, often containing many programs, John Dvorak asked what was a sensible way to price them. Obviously no one would buy a CD with 100 applications if the cost was $100 per application or $10,000 for the CD. (And today it is clear that no one wants to pay $15 for a CD containing one good song and 14 blah ones.) His suggested rule of thumb at the time was to assume the typical buyer would use 5% of the CD and would be willing to pay 1/200th of the nominal value for it ($50 in my example case). For most of the CD and DVD era, it appears that manufacturers have found prices that make money but are perceived as somewhat too high by the slightly larcenous public. But the next big jumps in storage size will repoen this issue. In the future we will buy small optical cubes that can easily contain 1,000 full length movies along with multiple sound tracks, formats and out takes. No one will pay $15,000 for them but they might be willing to pay 1/200th or $75. What would you be willing to pay for a music son-of-DVD containing five good songs and 3,000 bad ones? BUT MORE LIKELY the increase in storage capacity will radically change our view of what ought to be included on a volume. Speculate away, this sort of thing is really hard to anticipate. For example, a movie on a son-of-DVD volume might routinely come with copies of every web page containing every last bit of information about the movie, its cast and makers, the raw rushes, the intermediate edited chunks, etc.
and it's just as likely that DVDs will be replaced entirely by VoD.
(Don't tell me that "video killed the radio star.")
I already have Video on Demand. It's called TiVo...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
In the really long term, after bandwidth and storage has caught up to the demand, movie files will be traded exactly like mp3s are today. Hell, to a large extent they already are, albeit only among people with fat pipes.
Personal computers are more and more becoming media hubs, and Apple has been pushing digital music for a few years now to great effect. Media is becoming a killer app for the home PC; when home networks connect the computer to the TV and stereo system, digital media on the computer will only become more prominent.
Whether the MPAA will accept this as inevitable and offer a low-cost legitimate alternative (like Apple's Music Store) remains to be seen. The MPAA certainly won't allow it without engaging in mortal combat with the Internet first (exhibit 1: the RIAA), but that'll ultimately be a fight they can't win.
For example: I got into Will & Grace fairly recently, and I'd like the opportunity to go back and watch the first episodes in my own time, perhaps two a week. There's about 22 minutes of actual content in a half-hour sitcom. a DVD box set is overkill, because I want to see certain episodes, once only. This sounds like a great application for VOD.
(Whaddya mean, you never heard of Will & Grace? The only thing wrong with it is all these self-serving guest stars... where's Carol Burnett when you need her?)
(this is not a
First, the on-topic discussion:
The current consoles do have the processing power to efficiently decode an MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 stream and play it on progressive scan rivaling the higher-end DVD players, but they just won't do it in the best way, because the manufacturers don't want the consoles to directly compete with DVD players as they only get revenue from the games, i.e. they don't get a royalty from someone playing a movie on their consoles. In fact, movies are the greatest competition for game companies. It's a grip, but on a different type of content.
The only reason why the three consoles play DVDs (yes, even the Gamecube in its Q version), is because it's an attractive feature, and a selling point. But they still don't support progressive scan for DVD (though the PS2 will, soon), they do integer approximations when decoding the frames, and the player functions leave a lot to be desired. Now guess what? It'd be the same for any broadband stream as long as there's no tie-up with a big content provider. Sony, of course is also a content powerhouse, but it's not going to happen at least in this generation of consoles.
Also, I disagree that a 1.5 Megabit connection would suffice to replace a DVD. DVD is also appreciated because of the high A/V quality, and while MPEG-4 may be able to achieve better video quality at less bitrate than MPEG-2, what about the audio, do we use 128Kb 5.1 channel Ogg/Vorbis or what? DTS 5.1 is encoded in a 1.5 Megabit stream by itself in many DVDs, and the low compression ratio is actually DTS' biggest competitive point. Simply put, saying a current broadband connection could replace the content a DVD provides is just inane.
Now, for the off-topic: I have experience working with Nintendo in several platforms along the years. I meet people from NCL every year at E3, and I can assure you there's no "New Technology Research Department" in Japan. I know VERY well, because I worked in a "second party" company that tried very hard to convince Nintendo to make new projects which were not 100% related to entertainment. Nintendo of course adamantly rejected those efforts so this Samir guy saying he's the "head" of such a department just annoys me to no end.
Furthermore, he can't be a "head", since there's no such position in a japanese company. And a New Technology Department is not the same thing as an R&D Department. He's just a well disguised troll.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
So, I'm sitting in the airport for a 3 hour layover between flights. How do I view a VOD on my laptop again?
Hmmmf.
Good thing I kept all of my 'dead end technology' DVD's for just such an occation.
Eschew Obfuscation
While I don't think that VoD is going to take off, much less erradicate DVDs (or any other long-term storage du jour), I don't think that it's reasonable to expect that new and original movies, by any delivery medium, will be essentially free (I'm calling anything under $5.00 "free"). If you will bear with me, this is my back-of-the-envelope anaylsis:
One movie probably requires the creative skills of several hundred people (writers, editors, costume designers, set designers, make-up artists, carpenters, tailors/seamstresses, camera operators, sound technicians, lighting technicians, special-effects technicians, and human resource administrators, not to mention the actors and directors) for, at least, the better part of a year or two. The cost of equipping and employing those people for that time is likely to be in the range of $100,000,000 (yes, I know that indie-folk can turn out a compelling and original story in under a year for less than $100,000, but that kind of production only goes so far. Every once in a while I'd like to watch a real Hollywood blockbuster with aliens blowing up the Whitehouse and explosions chasing people down hallways instead of Clerks or Smoke). That money has to be recouped relatively quickly in order to ensure that the studio can go on to the next project without laying off it's staff (all the techs and admins, not the actors and directors).
Let's assume that a reasonable size domestic (U.S.) audience is on the order of 25,000,000 people (about 1/8 of the U.S. population). These are the people who want to see the movie and will bother to shell out for a theater ticket. Let's also assume that the theatrical run will be about 2 months. At $8.00/ticket the movie will gross $200,000,000 over it's run. Since some of that money goes back to the theater owner, and some to other middle men (distributers, promoters, etc.) let's assume that we only see half of the ticket-counter gross: $100,000,000. We just manage to break-even.
Now we need to bank on long-term sales for home-viewing (mass-media broadcast, rental and direct sale) to get any profit out of this turkey. We can assume that there is another 25,000,000 people who wouldn't have watched the movie in the theaters but will see it on TV, or rent/buy it from the local video store. The TV audience is limited by the amount of time we can hold the movie back from the rental/retail sales channel, so we can only expect to get a few showings. I have no idea what the big networks will pay for the rights to debut a movie on TV, but we can assume that it's not all that much money, and that it's pretty much a one-shot deal (After the movie has made it's TV debut, the amount that the networks are willing to pay to show it again will plummet). We can assume that a fair amount of the money we get from TV will be eaten up in the effort needed to make the sale in the first place. Now we are left with only the rental/retail market to make our profit.
As I said, our rental/retail market is probably about 25,000,000 people. Some fraction of these folk will probably have already seen the movie in either the theater or on TV, but let's just neglect them for the moment. The rental/retail market has a much longer life-span that either the theatrical release or the TV release (virtually infinite) but the rate of return is correspondingly lower. Lets assume that we will move only 5,000,000 units per year. At the end of a 5 year period we will have saturated the remaining market and our income will have dropped to a trickle (as close to zero as makes no odds).
We need to put out some amount of effort to market the movie to the rental/retail channel (there is limited shelf space in any bricks and mortar store) so there is a non-zero cost to every movie that we sell. We also need to allow the retail outlets to make some profit, so our return is diminised even further. I will assume, purely for the sake of argument, that reproduction, packag
As a memember of project in Utah (http://www.utopianet.org/) that will be bringing FTTH to initially 18 different cities - the demand and convience of VOD will easily surpass DVD rentals.
Working on similar projects in the past and seeing the popularity of having a movie you can rent via your set-top box for 24 hours and not having to return to the store all for $0.99, with the functionallity of your DVD player w/o the hassle - I saw the beginning of the decline.
Yes, it requires bandwidth, but things the network can do the DVD player can't - regular DVD encoded at variable 4.0 meg stream, network stream capable of Superbit DVD (try and find a BlockBuster that carries Superbit) streams of 8.0 meg or even better HDTV quality - 19.2 meg!
Which would you choose - regular DVD or high quality (Superbit to HDTV) VOD!
VOD is here - time shifting video is coming - Tivo and RePlay show us this - what's next NAS for your video, music and media files, all available anytime!Blockbuster+DVD works well because you can get 18 GB in 20 minutes. It's a high latency connection, but tons of bandwidth!
While broadband connections and modern codecs are getting good enough to do a reasonable quality standard definition broadcast, we're not too far from blue-laser HD DVD.
My video compression blog
I always have one of those videos looping on a computer at home somewhere.
Heck, I am even trying to do "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones" using Winnie the pooh clips.
Don't even get me started on "Apocalypse Pooh"
http://www.ifilm.com/filmdetail?ifilmid=2404060
I'm sure this has been mentioned before but VOD will replace DVD the same way DVD replaced VHS. It will happen just like VHS replaced cable and cable killed the networks which ended theatrical distribution of films. Perhaps the only "class" of entertainment distribution technology that didn't kill off its predecessors is satellite which was pronounced to be "redundant" by tech journalists in the early nineties. Following that thought its notable that the American public only adopts technology that's been deemed "acceptable" by the press so Beta is the dominant form of analog video tape format. Tech journalists need to understand that when it comes to predictions regarding consumer adoption of entertainment distribution technology nobody knows what will happen. I worked for a large Pay TV service (now part of media conglom that includes a rather large ISP) during its steepest growth curve in the early 80s. In 1980 along with 10 or so other bright young brains I sat on a "blue ribbon panel" charged with predicting when VOD would be a technological reality and what [Pat TV Service] should do to prepare. Our answer as to when: 2000 AD. The sole technological hurdle we saw was the price of RAM. Bandwidth was deemed to be irrelevant. Even when the predictions are semi accurate they are almost always for the wrong reason. The only other advice I would give anyone involved in tech prognostication is to analyses what the big media congloms are up to in this area. See where they are investing and the solutions they are developing for delivering their product. The universal rule regarding these efforts is that they will fail. Invariably these projects exist to short circuit the evolutionary process of technology adoption and dictate features and capabilities they are self serving, redundant and costly. But regarding VOD vs DVD I was confused which is probably due to a hasty reading more than anything. DVD is MPEG2 (VOB format but still MPEG2). Most existing VOD uses MPEG2 and have begun to move to MPEG4. So if DVD is truly dead what is the compression standard VOD will be using? Windows Media 9 ? I don't think so. But I really don't know.
(The television warms up: a man is sitting behind a news desk)
Man: Hello! Well, it's just after eight o'clock, and time for the penguin on top of your television set to explode. (the penguin explodes)
1: 'Ow did 'e know that was going to happen?!
Man: It was an educated guess.
I agree that when ether really is ether, stuff like VOD would be feasible.
But anything even close to that is at least 50 years. Any set of transmission methods you pick is going to have some weakness, some flaw, and more importantly some cost associated with it that there are going to be areas where ethernet will not be ether, ever.
I think perhaps a better way to put it is that until WE are ether, living as beings of pure energy, that things will stay primarily in the physical realm because that's where we are, and are comfortable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
. . . Roomster. I've been working on a DVOD platform for a few years now and the technology is alive and well. In terms of the adoption curve, the major factor is bandwidth (read: either bandwidth goes up or compression gets better).
The telecoms crash (e.g. fiber glut) was due mainly to the fact that the last mile never materialized thanks to our friends at the cable/phone company. Had that happened, DVOD and a whole range of applications would be further along in deployment. Innovations, including wireless technologies, will solve the last mile problem at some point in the near future.
In the mean time, companies like the one I work for (Roomster, Inc.) have chosen to go where the bandwidth is, hotels. This is the market in which DVOD technology is actually being deployed, both in terms of digital set top boxes and content distribution technologies.
Digital video technology is here and being deployed in the hospitality market. These technologies will shift with the cost effective availablity of bandwidth to the home market.
As far as the impact on DVDs, worst case I would say (for the format) would be at least another 10 years of life. But I don't think that portable, buyable media is going away. I agree with the comments about studio content release windows and the home video market. There's no way the studios will abandon this important market. DVOD may compete with DVD as a distribution mechanism, but, at the end of the day studios will make their same buck and then some (where DVOD will enable new markets).
See this company, www.eyeball.com Truely the ultimate video solution, forget VP5, checkout eyeball
Gamblers Forum
Actually DVD is now alot more popular, at least here in Australia. DVD sales/month overtook VHS almost a year ago now! And just going to my local "video" store you can see the effect of that. Perhaps we should now start calling it a DVD store.
The infra-structure required for video on demand is not there yet. There's not enough bandwidth to go around. Despite what some of you in the big city think, broadband is still NOT available to a LOT of people. Until we make some progress in that area, VOD is a no go.
VoD is non-tangible. I want to see my collection on the shelf. Hold it, read the back. Swap and loan to my family and friends. I think many people will feel the same?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
...for a while and then will be superceded by something else. There will always be a market for high quality, artifact free, interruption free, i-have-it-on-my-shelf, pretty package media delivery though it may be an ever-shrinking market.