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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.
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.
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/
Bah!
If people wanted physical copies of things why do things like netflix and Blockbuster (shudder) exist? Video on demand with a decent price and selection will do as well as these traditional rental companies. People don't buy copies soley to view them or listen to them, many people are interested in the extras (CD Labels, DVD extras, general packaging).
Personally I feel the future of Digital Video is in DVD players with ripping capabilites. Once HD space is cheap enough that a DVD player can hold 50+ hours of video for under $199 people will move there collections onto the players themselves. Have a sapranoes marathon without changing DVD's. Using a CDDB type of service will let you navigate your collection quicker than the traditional "flip through the boxes" technique. Furthermore people hate having to change disks. Blue laser DVD's will allivate this problem but personally I belive slapping in a 300 gig HD will be dirt cheap by the time those drives hit the market.
Time for me to get back to finals and quit reloading slashdot.....
I need no spell checker! It's much more fun to guess what I'm trying to say...
DVD's are not going anywhere for at least another 5-10 years. Look how long the CD has lasted. THey tried to replace it with the MiniDisc and that did not even phase it. Cd's and DVD's are just too easily produced and cheap as well, which gives them good staying power in any market.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
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
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.
You shouldn't get VOD mixed up with Pay-per-view where you have to watch the show right then. The idea of VOD is that you can watch it when you want. Who's to say that the VOD that gets implemented doesn't allow you to watch it as many times as you like after you've paid for it? Or perhaps to watch as many number of movies when you want for a monthly fee. What I'm saying is that VOD doesn't have to be bad - if they offer a monthly fee to watch movies when you want how long will Netflix stay in business against that competition? I mean - Netflix relies on snailmail to give you the movie - how stone age is that? Imagine if you could just watch the movie on a whim from a selection as large as Netflix? That is the promise of VOD. VOD doesn't have to mean "watch-it-once-and-never-see-it-again", and hopefully market forces will mean that it isn't like this.
The technology is very rapidly approaching. Speaking unofficially, as someone who is in charge of delivering "every video or TV show ever made on demand to your television", this technology is viable NOW in many areas. There are some pieces of the whole puzzle which are still being tested, taped out, or otherwise being tweaked to meet certain requirements, but in five years it will be ubiquitous.
It has taken a lot of technology pieces coming together to make this work right, but there is essentially nothing missing from the puzzle now. It is just a matter of making those pieces all come together smoothly. Most of the technology guinea pigs have found the ability to view anything they want on demand to be an extremely addictive type of TV technology. It isn't just movies, it is TV shows too, anytime you want, delivered to your television in real-time.
The biggest problem is managing the sheer volume of content available to consumers in my opinion.
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
Agreed!
Consumers like having some control over what they have purchased. If they are going to dish out some cash for something, they do not want to be told what to do with it.
Compare this to Tivo. For about 10 bucks a month, the user gets the equivalent to video-on-demand. But in addition to this, the user can do pretty much what they want with the videos that their Tivo device captures. They can save their videos indefinitely, watch them hundreds of times, or delete them without watching them. There is strong appeal to this level of control that should not be underestimated.
Compare the two different approaches:
PPV:
- User only has a limited time to view the video
- Large infrastructure cost
- cost burden on slow moving "head-up-thier-asses" cable company.
- General costs are close to video rental prices.
Jukebox/Tivo:
- User has complete control over the videos that are recorded.
- Low percieved cost to user, but guaranteed monthly income to provider. (12.95/mo) This is probably comparable or better than the average income from your average PPV viewer, and the end user gets MORE product at little cost to the provider. This creates loyalty... (e.g., the rabid Tivo evangelists)
- No infrastucture to change.
- Works with a variety of media sources.
- User has control over the hardware platform (user can switch to Replay/WMC/UTV etc)
As you can see, there are clear advantages to the tivo model from both the consumer and provider ends...
But that's not what I want!
I want to be able to get whatever form of entertainment when I want it. That isn't to say that I want pay per use, but rather that I want to pay a yearly entertainment fee and get whatever I want to.
If I want to find out what's so great about a particular show that I've heard about, I want to see it now. I don't want to wait for it to come on or to buy a collector's set. I'm even willing to deal with commercials, but I want things to be on my schedule rather than the networks'.
I like the idea of everything being at my fingertips. I'd like to be able to summon any obscure movie at whatever time I choose. Or any song. Or any book. Or anything. If some sort of flat-rate content on demand service were available it would give me the control I desire. Peer to peer services already do this to a degree, although not quite legally in some circumstances (I see no wrong whatsoever in sharing shows that have been publicly broadcast already though; they've already been given away).
I don't like the idea of pay-per-use, but to say that I don't like getting what I want, when I want it would be like saying that I don't like caramel. Everyone loves caramel.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
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
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.
Agreed. Speaking as someone who designs video servers for a living, the design of the head-end equipment for a huge VOD system presents huge difficulties. The problem is that you get huge diseconomies of scale with very many asynchronous channels. What kills on disk based recorders (which is the only technology in view) is seeks. The data transfer rate of disks, once you are on track, is magnificent. But seeks kill. Seek and rotational latency represents the vast majority of access time. If you have your own private DVD - or your own private Tivo - you don't need seeks. But if you are trying to share a video library between 10,000 asynchronous viewers, you have to seek for each bufferfull for each viewer - which kills.
People have built some largeish systems for hotel use. They ain't good, and they won't scale beyond the level they aready are at.
A Tivo-style home solution, with the movie being streamed at very high data rate onto your local disk and then played out at your pleasure would probably be the technically optimum solution. But you have to solve the commercial issues. You buy the right to a view a given set of movies, and yout Tivo caches the most recently viewed. If you want to watch one that isn't on your local disk, it gets streamed down (at no futher charge) when you request it.
But I cannot see the studios allowing this. They just don't trust people with good digital copies of their products. While I see their point to some extent, I think they are overprotective, to their, and the consumers, net loss.
Meanwhile, the DVD is simple. Stamp it, sell it. The ability to copy DVDs is some way away from home users, and commercial copiers, while a pain, can be tracked, at least in the west (where most of the money is made - of course they would like to make more from Asia, but that is the jam, not the bread-and-butter).
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...
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
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!
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).
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.