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Broadband to Kill Off DVD?
Elteto writes "Just when we thought the DVD could not be any more ubiquitous, Serge Tchuruk at the Alcatel Forum in Paris announces that the days of the rapidly adopted medium are nearing their end. The increasing availability, affordability, and speed of broadband will contribute to a more efficient delivery method of media content. Will DVD join LaserDisc in obscurity?"
Yeah, when people stop being interested in physical objects.
I still collect Laserdiscs you insensitive clod!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Netcraft confirms that the DvD is dying.
Philosophy.
Over half my library is from BT. I haven't bought a dvd since last year.
The calculator didn't phase out the abacus in Asia, and the PDA is still to replace the memopad.
Unless things start getting *much* more ubiquotous, I'd say the DVD is here to stay much longer.
PS. First post?
This is a tough one.
Hmm... no.
it wasnt till about a couple years that Pioneer discountined making LD players and around the same time period Sony stopped supporting beta as well. They were in use for a long time in the proffesional market long after considered dead in the consumer world.
Everyone I know has at least one DVD. I know nobody who has ever owned a laserdisc.
If given the choice to pay for and download movies online, I'd be all over it.
When I buy a game or a movie at a store I download it at home, because it's easier to mount an image than find and insert a CD or a DVD.
It's so much easier to manage files on my computer than CDs and DVDs in meatspace.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
i guess it's "hip" to try to be a visionary by predicting an early death of something.
Shouldn't that be generalized to include other things like TV and radio? Radio is currently being replaced by webcasts for those who listen to it at work and home. If enough major metro areas implement WiFi access (which they will eventually) then people would be able to get radio that way too. The Internet and distributed communications technology in general will pretty much be the end of all classic media delivery systems once broadband really takes off and people can stream near realtime HDTV level video.
--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox
Wired article as proof
The did not fear Walmart- or BlockBuster entering their space-- but they were seriously concerned about VOD. They saw that as a killer for them.
ahem...legal ones of course...
or else!
Did Americans give a shit about french thoughts?
People like to have something tangable when they buy something. also DVD allows you to go pretty much anywhere with a DVD and a DVD player and watch your movies, online services would require you either recodr your files onto some kind of removable storage or have a haigh bandwidth connection anywhere you want to watch movies.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
How many people have used DVDs and DVD players? Or have a DVD drive in their computer?
They may be going the way of VHS or casette tapes (or at worst 8-tracks), but they're not going the way of LaserDisc any time soon.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
People will never be able to figure out how to run a VoD file on their TV...
"Honey, why won't the ethernet cable fit in the coaxial input?"
Wait, that would be MPEG, not NTSC streams...
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
I don't even need to RTFA for this one...
Broadband cannot replace DVD's. I don't see a day where accessing large amounts of data is as guaranteed as having a disc with everything accessible right then and there. I know I would rather have my DVD available than rely on some server that may or may not go down when they feel like it.
I also enjoy being able to boot a device not connected to the intarweb with a DVD. I don't see DVD's going anywhere, unless Blu-Ray/HD-DVD manage to oust it (this will still take many a year for the prices to even out)
HD DVD or BluRay will kill off DVD.
My father never even made it to DVD. I tried to tempt him a few times with a DVD player and he even bought a shoebox full of discs at a garage sale, but he remains hopelessly committed to the VHS. He was proud enough to call me today to mention that he had successfully googled some antique car info that he was curious about. He is also curious about email, but hey, one day at a time I guess.
Is just too expensive or unavailable in too many markets. Plus a DVD holds a hell of a lot of data. If people were downloading full quality video (DVDs) from the Internet they wouldn't be doing much else with their connections. Torrent traffic would be 95% of Internet traffic instead of one-third. And what about the laws being passed banning efficient methods of distributing data such as torrents? No, broadband won't kill off the DVD.
...under the Christmas tree? Weren't e-books going to replace physical books by now, too?
Short answer: No.
Come on people. This article is just plain stupid. I can see the DVD being upgraded, for more storage capacity (see blue-ray), I can see the DVD fading away gradually (like VHS); but saying that Joe Sixpack will suddenly stop buying DVDs and use, say a broadband connected Tivo-like-device, is ludicrous. Technology lingers. That's why Microsoft has to build in special modes in their OS to run older programs. People still use legacy technology! Hell, I still have a tape player in my car.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The article doesn't talk about Tivos, Internet TV streams, or some new emerging technology. In fact, it doesn't really mention anything!
I'm not sure how articles like this end up on slashdot. I should write an article: New Power Source will replace Gasoline!
Hey, put me on slashdot!
Slashdot = ((Technology + Politics) / Trolls) % Grammar Nazis
The question is when..
... well ......... before then...
But I have a feeling i will be buying the Blu-Ray HDTV DVD extended version of LOTR
In fact i'd be the shire on it...
wow, i just saw this, and already the 3 stereotypical posts have been made.
Anyway, No, it will not pass into obsurity anytime soon. The reason is, unlike laserdisc, DVD actually has a sizeable installed base. That means, that the next gen format will support DVD, and the gen after that will probably do so aswell.
Sure it makes alot of sense - phyiscal possession of content is the real problem that RIAA etc is fighting with. The only real answer is "pay-per-view", and broadband brings control of the distribution back into their grubby paws.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
I call "no".
Not until my VCR-DVD-whatever-player-of-the-future can read directly from the Internet or other storage (but apparently not DVDs, because they must be going away), and not until everybody has broadband. Speaking of everybody having broadband, that's an issue in itself. It's not available everywhere, and my rural area is one of them. DVDs certainly aren't going anywhere around here, or many other places, if broadband is all that's going to make them "obsolete".
R.Mo
Like many french folk, he has become infected with the idea that his ideas are important. This is a completely laughable idea. DVDs...or other media will not simply disappear. Granted, with a country as small as france, it would be much easier to give broadband to each little farmer, but it doesn't happen quite that easily in countries as big as Russia, China, India, or America. Serge is a bit caught up in his ideal world. The matrix is not here yet buddy.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
..Of an article I read long ago about the internet replacing CD's....
And what of those who don't have a computer (e.g. grandparents or those who just refuse to buy one because they don't really need one)?
There will always be a need for a physical format for delivering a movie - and even music for that matter.
Broadband is not everywhere yet, and never will be. I can take a dvd and watch it in my laptop or a portable player in the car or train (while driving through a tunnel through a mountain), on a plane, in the middle of nowhere, etc..
Furthermore, people have large collections of DVD. Why I want to wait even a few minutes to download something when I can just stick it in my DVD player. More likely, by the time that DVDs take a few minutes to download, I will have my entire DVD collection sitting on a massive harddrive in a media jukebox anyways (provided some corperation doesn't make that illegal, anyways) and I can watch on demand, just like downloading. Except I don't have to pay extra bandwidth fees (if applicable) or anyone else any money who wanted to charge per viewing (since they can).
Speak before you think
If this is the future, then ISPs need to stop putting caps on everything. I mean, imagine the frustration of what could happen. Companies start streaming full DVDs ISPs say "Use our hispeed to watch DVDs!" User downloads a few DVDs ISP: You downloaded a lot of bandwidth. Probably illegal. Here's a big bill (or in the case of Rogers Hispeed here in Canada, they just terminate your service).
cities will do this. Plain and simple, the networks can deliver, but only if you are connected. But much of America, let alone the world, is still not connected. Funny though, it will probably be S. Korea that will be the early adopter of this, just due to their low costs of high bandwidth.
You know, I think there really is a Simpsons reference for every occasion.
Considering the number of DVDs in the wild compared to Laserdiscs, unlikely. They will become obsolete eventually, of course, but we will all still remember the days of watching movies on DVD.
The toad can't burp - and for some reason can't fart either, so it swells up and eventually explodes. --Anonymous Coward
it sounds more like what he wished would happen instead of what he really believes will happen.
The truth of the matter is, people enjoy having physical copies of their media to represent their collection. And its a good backup. I don't think the medium will be replacing the media anytime soon. Just expect storage to get larger in capacity, and smaller in physical size.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I can't see many people being willing to switch from DVDs at this point. I would bet 3-5 years before the industry manages to pick one and titles start showing.
And really, unless you have HDTV the new formats aren't going to be worth it.
Thearters survived Video tape,
DVDs will survive broadband, in countries with wide access to broadband the actual take up rate is low, only getting higher where Gov. makes it cheaper.
I am a casual collector of DVD and their shelf life makes them 1000 x better than a VCR cassette.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Video killed the radio star!!!!
__________ Leave me alone I'm compiling a RPG II program on my S/36...Thanks to metamucil I'm a Regular Meta Moderator
I own 0 MP3s. I own about 100 CDs.
I own 0 downloaded movies. I own about 40 DVDs.
I have broadband and the cable company still makes me think twice before downloading big files because of their usage caps. If the cable company sold the movies directly it would be closer to functional, but watching movies on a computer sucks. It's basically just PPV on demand.
Broadband killing off the DVD? Yeah, kinda like the paperless office, huh? Not going to happen.
There are three reasons this is bunk:
;-) and that bring us to:
First, the idea that we will throw away out current media has been floated since the days of the floppy. It's always a correct prediction, but only because a better physical medium comes along.
Second, the idea that we're going to be OK with just using storage on the Net and not having any physical media on which to store our data sounds good, right up until the first datacenter fire that loses me last week's data storage. It's also a terrible idea to keep your wares and copyrighted porn on someone else's servers
Third, PRIVACY. There's no single reason why networked media will never win over good-old local storage that beats the desire for privacy.
The last time I heard the name "laser disc" I think I was still reading Disney kindergarten books. Obscurity is right. It's just that with DVD's, you can use them as coasters, whereas you can use laser discs as plates or those... things you yell "pull" and shoot. Good southern fun.
Yeah, and they said vinyl died.
Mono vs Stereo.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
I for one welcome our new broadband distribution overlords.
How about storage. It takes a lot of space to store a movie collection. People will still want to own the movies, no?
Or is this dude predicting that everything will become pay-per-view? Or else people will go through the trouble of downloading a movie and then burning it onto some media which seems more hassle than just buying a DVD.
I guess it all depends how far ahead you're looking, some day this will all become true, and we'll get flying cars too, but not any time soon IMHO.
1) Quality. Sorry, but DivX doesn't come close to quality. It works like an MP3 works: it's portable and playable, but it's not the best in terms of quality. I'd rather pop a DVD into my player and enjoy it with my wife on a 27" TV with a DTS surround sound system than have the two of us huddled around a 17" monitor and a pair of $20 speakers (sure, we could upgrade to surround on the PC, but 5-channel output is not programmed in DivX...but if I'm wrong on this, feel free to give me a swift kick to the mod points).
2) Ease. Buy a player. Rent a DVD. Put it in. Play. And there's no crossing your fingers that it doesn't crash, no reconfiguring of the stupid screen saver to not interrupt the movie, and no stupid "remote control" that keeps getting in the way of playback every time the mouse gets bumped.
3) Physical portability. MP3s finallybecame famous and widespread when you could move them around in a player no larger than a pack of cigarettes. Granted, DVD's are physically larger, but you can carry 20 DVD's in a portable CD-wallet...Come to think of it, I suppose you can do that now on some portable DivX players (100 min. movie = 700MB * 20 movies = 14 GB 20GB players). But DVD's are (right now) less cumbersome, but I don't think they'll stay that way for long.
Market penetration for DVD's is too common to simply fade away quickly. Also, it has proven a convenient medium of distribution for data that a copyright holder wants to maintian some control over.
Things to keep in mind:
DVD's do not require an internet connection to work.
DVD's are portable (watching a movie on a laptop during a flight?)
DVD's are not lost when your hard drive fails.
DVD's are paid for once.
I think that DVD's will continue to be the medium of choice for poeple that buy movies. But for renting movies, DVD's will be replaced by on-demand downloading.
http://www.alcatel.com/ http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_02 /b3865705.htm
*ahem*
I don't think this really needs discussing any further. People have interests, these interests are financial - people will say things to support these financial interests.
Obviously the CEO of a NETWORK company would like to convince people that physical storage of data is a thing of the past.
Otherwise, they'll get supplanted too quickly by newer formats. Right now my best local deal is 3 Memorex for US$20.
no. Next question?
Longer answer: people like to have things they can hold and touch. They like to know that this is movie X, this is movie Y, this is TV show Z. There's something about having a physical collection of stuff lined up on the shelf.
Ebooks haven't taken over from paperbacks yet; nor will they until the ebooks experience is markedly superior to paperbacks. For me, that means having nice, crisp text; no need to worry about loss of power preventing from reading my books whenever I want; and the knowledge that I won't lose my books just because some chip decided to corrupt them.
Likewise, broadband distribution of movies will only displace DVD when you can get a movie quickly; when the quality is at least on par with, preferably superior to, DVD; when the price is reasonable; and when you can be certain that your hard-earned money isn't going to be wasted if some random chip renders the movie unwatchable for whatever reason. It's the speed and price, and not losing access to the movie, that are the likely sticking points in the near term.
I dunno about others, but I like having the physical disks (DVD and CD). I have a CD changer, and a DVD changer, so the movies and music are stored, and easy to get to, but not taking up hard drive space. Plus, I don't have to worry about losing everything if (when) a drive fails.
Of course, I would back everything up...Then I'd have twice as much drive space being used, and I STILL have to worry about drive failures.
Pfui. I prefer the original silver disks.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
...that media format no longer matter. At least for me. I have personal data going back to 1985 that I've migrated from floppies, to HDs, to CD-Rs and now to HD arrays and DVDs. The point is that the data is the only thing that matters. This is true of non-personal content as well. As long as the content is in a standard protocol (MPEG, MP3, AAC, FLAC, Vorbis, Theora, etc...) it doesnt' matter what it's stored on. Unfortunately, a lot of people out there still have this bizarre attachment to physical media. Once they get over that (another generation or two) and once the wireless bandwidth ANYWHERE is on the order of about 1 gigbit or better, this wil die out. The main thing that needs to happen is for people to know what a standard format is. Back in the 80s when I was doing a lot of electronic music composition, I chose to use MIDI files to store my performances rather than the proprietary song formats my sequencing programs offered. I did this because I knew that I would have to keep this data alive for decades. And it's worked. Today, all of the music I've composed and saved in MIDI files (not the cheap cheezy crap your browser plays, but MIDI files that play my pro audio offboard Roland/Emu gear) dating back to 1985 are stored on my drive array on the home server. Many of the files were created on Macs, Atari STs and then some on PCs in the 90s. Now I can open any of those songs in Rosegarden under Linux. Same thing with the MPEG2 files I record TV with today. I will still be able to view them 40 years from now. Choose your data protocols wisely and your data will live or at worst be easily converted for eternity.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The last few times I have rented DVDs from the video store, I have had trouble with the physical media. Scratches or whatever. The movie would play until about half way and then just 'hang'. Sometimes I could skip to a scene past the problem and see the rest of the film, but what a pain.
I don't know how to download rips. I suppose I could figure it out but I am just not interested. Yes, I would be willing to pay to have a movie download over night to my Linux server or set-top-box. I can also see value-added services for browsing, previewing and directory searches being worth while.
For me, the biggest issue is what kind of cripple-ware might be included with the downloaded movies. The last DVD I rented (A Perfect Storm) had trouble in the player so I popped it in my laptop. Warner Bros decided to include some special player with the DVD - downloaded and installed automatically and did not work well. I would have liked to just use my existing player, or boot into Linux and use Xine (or whatever).
rambly post, I know.
Digital media certainly hasn't killed off CDs yet, which have been around for a good bit longer than DVDs. People are finally starting to build up DVD collections, and grandma and grandpa just learned how to use the damned players.
DVD's actualy work.
But a *RELIABLE* one also. if you have the dvd it doesn't matter if you dsl/broadband is slow or dead.
I'm amazed that people will use online only solutions for mission critical applications. I am aware of agency management software for insurance agents that is completely data offsite. If the dsl goes down, they would be playing solitare on the computers.
eric
try playing a dvd from another country in your dvd player. the region codes will lock you out.
This article presupposes that broadband is 1) Available everywhere and 2) Unmetered
... and then BT are blaming "heavy users" for doing exactly what they were told they could do and claiming the "greed" of people are forcing them to introduce these caps.
In the UK at least, where BT's infrastructure seems to be roughly analogous to a whole lot of pieces of string and lots of tin cans, neither case is necessarily true. BT is currently implementing broadband caps (15gb is one of them... plenty for lots of email and webbrowsing, DVDs? Not so much). Whilst other companies are holding off sooner or later I see broadband once again being a metered service. Damn BT. Crap infrastructure and lack of investment. People are buying broadband with the promise of fast speeds, downloading music, always on access
Also, even people who download and then burn to DVD will sometimes want a nice case, a nice little booklet, and all the extra goodies some DVDs offer. I don't see the DVD going the way of the dinosaur anytime soon.
A couple reasons. First, the DVD wave has not yet even reached its crest. Laserdisks were never extremely popular, but it has been a few years since DVD sales first outnumbered VHS sales. DVD-R/RW drives are becoming less and less expensive, so The DVD as a form of storage media has yet to reach its full market potential. Also, there will always be a need for a physical form of data storage and transport, and so far there is nothing on the horizon to replace DVD's in popularity as a physical form of data storage.
but with all the bittorrent hoopula I thought I'd try it out. Either I suck at finding torrent links that are actually valid or this whole infrastructure is creaky as hell.
The many suggestions by luminaries have boiled down to: if the content is findable, organized and reasonably priced people will buy it instead of pirating it. I AGREE!! This "free" crap is a waste of my time and it's only twits in junior high, highschool and college or of otherwise juvenile bent who I guess don't value their time. Rips should be low-bandwidth, low resolution. Enough to see if you're at all interested in paying for the high quality stuff.
I can get a song on my 'broadband' connect (DSL, 1.5Mb/s down 256Kb/s up) in about 30 seconds on a bad day.
If I tryed to download a DVD, let us be generous and say it's a single sided dual layer of data so what 9.4GB?
That'd take what, a day or so?
I don't know what 'broadband' these guys are talking about but until I can click a button and have a movie in a few seconds it will not stop me from using Netflix or buying a movie
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
..I know I'm not buying the 3rd iteration of George Lucas's "Special Edition" mutations.
...out of it's collective ass, then using DVD media for content delivery may die off eventually. As it stands they're more interested in shackling any sort of new technologies that may benefit consumers than taking advantage of them. That said, I see DVD living a long a fruitful life. Mostly because content providers aren't willing to let go of 'the content'.
The Internet is still way off being suitable for viewing any decent video. Any sites that have streaming video are extremely poor quality. To view anything decent it needs to get to at least digital tv quality which requires around 15-25 Mbit for viewing. Here in Australia we can currently get 8 Mbit adsl2 Internet right now (will go up to 12 Mbit in the next year or two then to 25 Mbit in a few years) but we get limited to the amount we can download at high speed ($50 for 20 GB per month or $90 for 80 GB). This means that streaming at high speed would cost more than its worth at the present plus needing to pay for each individual movie would make it cheaper to simply rent it from the vid store for $2/movie.
Who cares?
This is the same thing that the music companies tried with digital media. They thought that people would be happy licensing music for a short period of time. Turns out that, for consumers, a big part of music and movies is the idea of "owning" it. Not in the copyright sense, but in the physical media sense.
Here's an idea: when someone spends money on something, they want something that they can take home with them, that they can show off in a library, that they can say is theirs.
Broadband has already done wonders for the porn industry...
Broadband is ephemeral, flakey, and not something you can neatly package up to hold, stare at, and share. I think there's something ingrained in our human DNA that demands we're able to hold something we call 'mine'.
I've become addicted to buying DVD sets as presents for just about any occasion. It seems there's a DVD set out there perfectly tailored for just about everyone I know. There's just something awesome about buying someone a complete season of a show they love, nicely packaged up with liner notes and all.
who the hell is this guy? he's a freakin loon.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I can rent high definition movies through my cable box and pause, rewind, etc. No Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player required. Net distribution is beating the hardware version for the first time. Plus I can't (theoretically of course) use DVD-Decrypter to backup a bunch of movies to my computer which is plugged into my HDTV (1280x720progressive if you're curious). It makes Netflix' distribution model look archaic.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
If American cable companies have their way, you'll be right. Just because Americans are stuck buying little plastic disks doesn't mean Japan or Korea will though. How long has 1-3 Mb/s been considered "high speed" in America now? How many YEARS? What happened to progress? By the time average Americans get to 10 Mb/s, the rest of the civilized world will be getting gigabit connections.
...how many times can George Lucas re-re-re-re-release Star Wars on any given format?
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
like CD's would instantly kill cassette. Hang on, let me turn over the one in my WALKMAN....
They're more plentiful, cheaper to produce, more resistant to crushing by the men in black, and Homeland Security sez it blocks all of their transmissions!
Paper hats will all be the new rage.
Tinfoil hats will simply go the way of the pocket protector and the stereotype of the nerd.
How about console gaming? I don't see DVD or disc media going away any time too soon.
You should write the article. It doesn't even have to contain any content. The editors and most of the readers won't bother reading the article anway. Oh, mention how it'll kill Linux. Sensationalist headlines works here best.
bah. start over
The DVD format will probably die out (and by DVD format, I mean the current DVDs and all their logical sucessors, like BlueRay, etc). It will not be convienence of broadband that will kill them, however, it will be our changing consumption habits.
When my parents first starting buying CDs in the 80's (they were around $25.00/disk then) they accumulated them carefully, picking what they like, and checking carefully that what they were buying coresponded directly to the LP orignals they were used to. They listened to them one at a time in an old Pioneer CD player (25+ lbs, lasted over 20 years before it died). By contrast I, and others I know, like to have our music quickly. I find and download files, burn tracks, buy CDs on a whim, digitize them and deemand that they all be available to us at once on small portable MP3 players. I keep my music on my laptop and it follows me wherever I go. My parents and I use music in fundamentally different ways, and we expect different things from our music.
The same thing will happen with DVDs. The easier something is to use the more people will use it. The day will come when our culture comsumes such a quantity and variety of media that streaming, downloaded, or otherwise transmited movies will make much more sense for our livestyles. We will wants LOTS of movies, want them now, and want them everywhere we go. DVDs are nice, but they are also bulky. Our whole collection can't travel with us around the globe or fit in a hand-held player, or a car theater system. But these things are in development and in small circles in active use. These lifestyle changes will be the driving force toward a new file-less format.
That doesn't mean that disk are dead. That day will come when we have a 100% reliable, superfast, globally accessable storage and transmission network that you could feel cofortable uploading media to and knowing that it would still be there is a couple of centures. (I'm not holding my breath). Until then there must always be a hardcopy of some kind, if only because encodings change so quickly that we need a "master" to rip from.
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
No, wait, that's for frisbees. They're not going anywhere.
(Yeah, I know Discraft makes "flying disks" and "frisbee" is a name brand. It's funnier the way I wrote it.)
If broadband takes over DVD companies, FREE PORNO FOR EVERYBODY!
it takes too long to download a full DVD movie
and in case the author hasnt notice, there are tons of us that can't even get DSL or Cable modem and we're in big major cities.
damn frogs dont know anything at all, we have never relied on them for any real info, besides how to lose a war or not support allies.
I P T V
Content control is as much of a psychological issue as it is a technology issue. Decision-makers at content companies (movie studios in this case) need to overcome their fear of digital transmission. They were OK with DVDs because of CSS, but in the end, you can buy "unlicensed" DVDs for $1 each in many parts of the world, and CSS didn't do anything to prevent this. So the studios couldn't end up being any worse-off than they are now, but psychologically, they may not be able to see this. What they really should do is adopt the Netflix type pricing model and just say "watch movies all you want for $20 a month." If it's convenient most people would rather pay $20 than try to find and distribute unlicensed copies.
But those barriers will both fall. Technology is like the tide; you can resist it but it will eventually get its way.
The article makes a lot of assumptions, provides no details, and is meant to be a two paragraph filler piece at best.
I wouldn't mind reading a good article about how broadband will kill off dvds, but this ain't it.
if by Broadband you mean High Speed Internet Connections with peer to peer file sharing networks, then I would say yes. It seems movies these days are released to P2P file sharing networks before they are released to the DVD format. Usually by someone with a video camera, and a video capture device on their computer.
Of course the Internet Pirate versions of the movies are of a poorer quality than the movies, but most people do not care because it is free.
The MPAA needs to wake-up and start their own movie-sharing network and charge per month or per file for access to it. I know they are trying to use digital film to replace the celluloid reels, but why not go all the way and use a digital file format?
If people have DVD burners, give them a chance to burn the movie to a DVD with subtitles, menus, etc. Maybe limit this ability or something.
Of course you know that the Cable and Satelite TV services are going to lose a lot of business to Broadband file sharing networks, as TV shows, etc are being shared as well. Why not offer a service for their Broadband users to download TV shows, movies, etc to their broadband computers for customers who own both a Broadband connection and a subscription to Cable or Satelite TV?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I first thought "No" but how about this idea.
A lifetime liscense to a virtual DVD, backed by the right to make personal copies and make unlimited downloads with copyright fees waived.
You can have your DVD and buy it in a brick and mortar store if you want to drive there and pay for their overhead. You can get a physical DVD like now but you are also paying for pressing, color printing, distribution and inventory costs.
You can download to your hard disk but don't have to worry about burning it at home, though you would be able to do so for all content with open source tools, nor do you have to worry about renting a data center or keeping a RAID jukebox in the basement.
Your purchase would give you a transferable, resaleable, unlimited right to the product, for all resolutions/file sizes up to that of the purchased product, though you might have to pay a one-time encoding fee if the format you desire is not on the publisher's server.
You could likewise easily order rights to various printed materials, audio interviews, bromides, "making of shows", television versions, etc. linked to it, whether by the same publisher/distributor or not (thanks to automated searching over google, blog listings, or other mechanisms). Some people may opt to only purchase time-limited liscenses but smart people will go for a "lifetime" or better yet perpetual liscense, and no company except maybe the biggest mega studio will begrudge it, considering that if they have higher quality masters they can remaster for even better than DVD quality.
To me this is far superior to what is currently available. The current problem is you do not know when the DVD you buy will deteriorate, and publishers similarly have ticking time bombs. I don't happen to use DVDs but I do buy the same books over again.. just like I rent the same VHS tapes many times, and know I can do so again for a few bucks even if my player eats one (happened before), I have bought the same (scifi) books many times over the years as I move around and am unable to carry them all with me. So I would definitely pay for a lifetime right to a work, plus the guarantee of durability.
Such a system would also allow us to show dvds to friends or trade with them at no charge. In fact I believe it would be cheaper to have no copy protection at all, and simply guarantee that a given customer id would always be able to get a fresh copy of a work, even if issued by someone else. We would all win.
I envision studios making a deal with insurance companies to put digital masters in escrow, and one day these will all end up in one place and accessible freely to the public (when copyright expires) minus perhaps distribution fees (if indeed the fee is not negligible by then). When you consider that even TV is going or has gone digital, but there is just too much of it to archive or it has been too hard to do so, you can easily envision the same system being applied to TV and other media. Also considering the costs that broadcasters will have to pay to go digital, this is a good way to finance it (better than the hostile takeover being financed by U.S. a securities company that is being played out in Japan this past week).
I have been waiting an awfully long time to be able to access past years of TV shows and if I can easily "bookmark" a scene I am watching on live TV instead of rushing to hit the record button and missing bits of it, that would be worthwhile. Then a whole genre of websites would spring up to index the shows and scenes that could be accessed, and we would be bathed in a real digital ocean of our shared cultural history, which would be as broad as the entire world and as deep as the earliest decades for which the media have survived.
In this vision, broadband access to the Internet could indeed be said to have beaten the dvd, itself an evanescent instantiation of a physical specification, since broadband will ensure that the physical item you purchase and treasure will remain with you for the years to come.
I recently cancelled my cable TV and digital cable box but kept my high-speed cable internet. I rented a few "on-demand" movies but it was not that great, as the fast-forward and rewind were really slow and the responsiveness of stop/play was laggy. Anyway, yeah, broadband might eliminate DVD rental places... but only because I'm downloading movies off the internet and burning them to DVD myself. heh.
Meh.
My UT2k4 copy is on DVD. Yes, you can buy it on 6 cds, but WHY? World of Warcraft is currently on 4 CDs, and there's no DVD version (the Collectors Edition shipped with 4 cds and a dvd) available.
:(
DVD is currently becoming the new cd 'standard' for sharing software. Families are distributing home movies on it at christmas (at least, ones I know are) and people are starting to backup to it. Heck, you can get Encarta or Wikipedia (soon) on DVD. The benefits of dvd for software are not going to go away just because you can download movies over broadband now (while almost half of the country still sits on dialup and with major broadband isps not looking to expand there...), so I am quite sure it'll stay around for some time.
Plus, there's those new DVD-Audio type things sound like they'd sound great, although I don't know if I'd notice the higher quality as much as the surround sound. I don't know (currently) of any software that could play them in my computer, either
For context, click Parent.
Everyone is different, some people like to have the actual cd or dvd in their possession and some people are content having the audio or video on their computer.
It's kinda like the pack rats vs. the disposable hero's....some people want to hold onto something forever and some don't.
1. I treasure my boxed sets of old UK television shows. I like to have and to hold, and having them available any time for a fee is NOT the same as choosing, buying, owning.
2. When my ADSL connection goes wonky and I can't get on the net I pop in a DVD and waste some time waiting for it to come back up. If they deliver my entertainment over ADSL I'm going to be foaming at the mouth when the damn thing falls over.
3. I will never put all my eggs in one basket.
4. I can browse DVDs on the shelf and pick up a couple when shopping. On the net I'm already bombarded with crap so how am I going to choose what to watch? Sometimes all you need is 3 bad movies and 1 good one to decide what to watch.
5. Never underestimate the power of impulse buying and a physical product. Many dotcoms did exactly that.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
I live in a small town in Montana. Many of my real-world friends don't have the internet, or a computer, some of them don't even have a phone. However even the ones without phones have a television and a DVD player (I'm the only person I know who doesn't have a television). Traditional television-based entertainment is much more widespread than computers and the internet, and it's going to take a long time before every home has both. The people who don't have the internet don't really care about it even if it is cheap and readily available. They're not interested no matter how cool everyone tells them the cyberweb is. However, everyone wants to watch TV and movies.
How often do they release a CD with more then 3 good songs ? At least, the DVD contains ONE movie that I really want and would watch more then one time... the other thing is cost... the cost of a CD is too close to the cost of a DVD, why buy music when you could pay a little more and buy a movie you really enjoy ?
Asking if DVDs will be replaced by broadband is like asking if distributing software on floppies will be replaced by distributing software on BBS's. The answer is yes to both being replaced. It never ends.
Slashdot used to be a place to come and find good stories about legitimate tech/geek news items. Are things really so bland that all we have is filler?
I live in Utah. Orem, specifically. They say I'll have Utopia in the next couple months. For anyone that's not in the know, that's 100mbits up and down bandwidth. However, even though I could take some data to work an hour away, or want to send something to my friend in New York, it would still be faster and more reliable to just put the data on a DVD (if it's large) and ship it to them. Then the DVD is always there for them, as well.
I still see DVD being much more used than this guy thinks for a couple years. Then when BlueRay or something else replaces it, it will probably die down then. Physical media will always have its uses.
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
When I first glanced at the topic, I was expecting another "The Internet with its peer to peer file sharing and broadband will kill the DVD industry just like it hurt record sales.
.
I was suprised when I found out the culprit was legal downloading. It's nice to see the doomsayers make a little more sense.
The Internet will never kill DVD ownership, but it might bite into the sales of rentals. An Internet connected set-top box capable of easily downloading and displaying a movie on a home theater system at DVD quality, if priced right, will make renting movies so much easier then going to a brick and mortar store that it's a no brainer that the video rental shop is going to see sour days ahead.
But unlike music, the convenience of the Internet will never replace the private ownership of DVDs, because the video business is doing most things right that the record business does wrong. For one, DVDs are typically at a price point that is fair, considering the content. One would think that it would be a wakeup call to the music industry that a $9.99 DVD would sell well, while nobody would touch the $15.99 CD soundtrack of that movie. Even if filesharing of movies reached the level of music, people would still buy the $9.99 DVD, because if it's a decent movie, the price makes ownership worth it. Secondly, movies typically are either a quality piece of work or they're not. It's so common now that a new release CD contains only one or two songs worth listening to and 10-12 tracks that are filler. It makes more sense to the consumer to spend money on something that they know, as an entire piece of work, is all good.
Personally, I've only purchased 3 CDs in the last year (all used for ~$6.99), but some 30 DVDs, all new, and with a few exceptions, all under $22 dollars (most in the $10-$15 range). Even if I could get the movies direct to my TV for a few dollars cheaper, I like to own the whole thing. There's something about having the work sitting on a shelf, and the act of perusing one's collection deciding what you feel like. I would buy more CDs for the exact same reason, if I didn't feel like I was paying too much for what I get.
The only segment of the DVD market I can see being effected by direct Internet downloads would be music video DVDs. I paid $35 for the Criterion Collection Beastie Boys DVD, and now that I have it (which is rarely put in the DVD player), I realize that while I wouldn't purchase another music video DVD, I would be willing to play a couple bucks to download single video (so as long as the quality of the sound and video was to par with DVDs, and as long as I could store it, copy it, and play it whenever I wanted. But ultimately, music video DVDs don't make up a significant enough market share for DVDs to dramatically effect the industry.
This is all assuming that most consumers think the way I do.
What will kill DVD sales? Another video format superior to DVDs which is likely to see mainstream acceptance in another 10-15 years. In the meantime I'll keep buying DVDs, even if I can find a good divx rip of the film for free on the Internet. I see no reason why charging for the work would make that different.
The Internet is generally stupid
Hey, is Prince still cool? Can I be on the front page of slashdot too? PLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASE????
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have Broadband - YOU FUCKIN BETCHA!!!!
And what is my precious bandwidth?
All of 326k!!!!
Yep. And that's on a good night. Tonight is fucked -I'm barely pulling 280 right now.
Now: it's 2005, and I can barely get 326 on DSL, thanks to SBC. And these clowns want to pump 1080i into my house? Even if you compress the living fuck out of it, you're still nowhere NEAR what I can do on DSL. And Cable is BETTER?
Well, let's see: Cable's kind of dodgey around here, thanks to a 900 foot tall TV tower cluttered with all manner of telecommunications transmitters. My wife can't even open the door to her car with the remote...
But: It's a Nice Place to Grow Yer Kids Up, only without the churches and liquor stores...
So Cable sucks.
And these clowns want to put HD over broadband.
Bunch a' maroons I TELL YA!
By the time I can get enough bandwidth into the Spoilsport rat hole to do that, I'll be too old to fuckin care, and it'll be TO HELL WITH THE LOT A YOU - YA YOUNG PUNKS!
I'll be sittin' there with my DVD collection on my multi-terabyte RAID array entertainment computer, which will be in the form of the Lenovo Home Pro, which was sold to me for 99$ at Fry's 2 (the original was burned down 20 years earlier, during the food riots of 2015, during the second American Civil War.) and it frickin ROCKS - my entire music collection and video collection on a raid. I bought them, ripped then (there is NO perfect crypto) and now I get to see and hear whatever the fuck I want, when I want.
but, I hate it when i get unstuck in time like that.
And I'll still clean all the seeds out of my pot using the gatefold cover to "Close to the Edge" by Yes. Even when I'm 90.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I don't see how anything net-based could replace DVD (or b-ray, or hd-dvd etc) disk-based video distribution in the not-so-near future. Why ? Simple: quality.
I wouldn't drop DVDs for anything with less quality, even if it would be a bit more comfortable to get, than going to the local DVD-store or order a DVD online. True, that good quality compression can be today achieved in less the filesize, but these techniques are not so widespread, as DVDs and MPEG2 are. Not until H-264 will be really ubiquitous (both in sw and hw players) will we have anything capable to deliver good enough quality in a size which will not take hours long to download even on "broad"band. I wouldn't want to download a movie and paying for it if
a). it has worse quality than my DVDs or the HDTV movies on tv
b). takes longer to get than going and buying or renting a disk
c). won't stay on my collection just for a few hours/watchings/etc because of bull DRM applied.
Besides these above, I mostly buy such movies on DVD which I consider classics - on many scales - but I still didn't manage to get some I wished, e.g. Blade Runner can't be bought in my region [dvd region that is] for years now. So what if the net-based movie rental company decided not to make available older movies: you'd be left with nothing. I don't want that. I might just be too paranoid with this, but today's businness practices tought me/us not to really trust _any_ company in the long term.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I've gone almost totally digital.
:P
No books (Damn textbooks), no radio, No TV, no CD's, No DVD's.
Devices:
Tungsten E - 32 megs of books, is A LOT OF BOOKS. One charge = about one read book, I get a lot of sci-fi short stories, a bunch of classics, the bible (I can look up quotes with find), william gibson (Though I own several copies I still enjoy the ebooks more). It's backlit for when I go out to smoke, or am lost at night
Computer, DVD Burner for backups. I can encode with XVID from DVD when I want to. 240 gig SATA raid.
Nomad Jukebox 3: In 1998 the iPod wasn't out yet (or it was only 10 Gigs) anyway it wasn't an option (And I still don't like it) This thing is 20 gigs. Fits in my pocket and it's TOUGH I took it for 6 months through asia. Lots of diffrent power sections, diffrent operating systems, it's got 24 hrs battery life. Line in and Line out optical and analogue. It's got all my music. My computer also has it all.
A modded Xbox, now this is key, after I finish ripping a movie or Downloading it I can transfer it over the network and leave it on the Xbox or play it directly from my computer, I usually keep a few music vids and a movie on there just in case someone is curious and I don't have the ethernet plugged in. It plays DVD's which is useful since I still have about 200 Chinese Korean and Japanese movies I bought in Beijing when I was over there (Haggle you CAN get them for 75c it just takes patience). So I guess I'm not DVD free, and I have a stack of Operating Systems on my desk on DVD mandrake,Suse,Redhat etc.
But mostly I never touch physical media...
Personally I stick with CDs only when I'm actually interested in the release (album, single, whatever) for the basic features such as art, lyrics, and background information. Four great examples are Alice In Chains (Tripod) by Alice In Chains, Spiritual Machines by Our Lady Peace, The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, and Antichrist Superstar by Marilyn Manson. Musically Tripod was an OK album but the physical packaging including art and the green case made the investment more of a steal. I went so far as to get two copies because of how hard it was to find that green case. Spiritual Machines, The Downward Spiral, and Antichrist Superstar all had external protective cardboard cases and a full stapled lyrics/album insert (with atleast 10 pages of lyrics and atmosphere that added to the album). To me it felt like the artists didn't just put their time into the album but into the packaging itself.
When most people buy a DVD they expect some extras and are willing to pay for special/collectors editions if the packaging merits it. Personally I think Audio CDs are going in the same direction only instead of focusing on additional "special features" artists are focusing on packaging. I know I'm not going to set down $16 for a jewel case with a folded slip of paper and 1982 style cd when I can get the same thing at home for under $11 including the cost of labels, jacket paper, and media using music from iTunes. If you want me to buy an audio cd put some effort into the entire package and make it worthwhile.
Just not yet.
My personal belief is that we are currently seeing the death of CDs right now and they'll still be around for at least another 10 to 20 years. CD are being replaced by AAC/MPEG3 files but the real killer will come from SACD/DVD-A or DVD-HD/BlueRay. I know both audio formats have had a rough start but I think they are going to be big in the next year or two. I'm betting on DVD-A for the long run. The big selling point is 5.1 audio but I personally appreciate the improved sound quality.
DVD will see a quick death or at least as fast a pace as everyone is upgrading to HDTV. Blueray/DVD-HD will be a big upgrade for all those HDTV people.
As long as physical media has a benefit then it will continue to sell. I still can't download full CD quality music, so I would rather purchase a disc instead. Downloading is great and I do purchase songs from iTunes every once in a while but I would never purchase an album from iTunes. I personally want the full CD audio instead. Hell I've only been purchasing SACD/Hybrids or DVD-A discs as of late.
The Laserdisc was no where NEVER as popular, viable or accepted as the DVD is. The Laserdisc player never reached sub $100 levels, and the quality of the media did not justify the size of the laserdisc - the size of a traditional record waxed LP platter.
Making the argument that broadband will overtake DVD's is like saying that Cable television would stop people from renting videos and/or going to the movies, neither of which has happened, and the experience of a movie theater with perfect strangers enjoying a movie together will never be duplicated in a significant portion of the populace.
Brooklyn.
I meant that I would not watch the movie rather than download it. Before as in preference, not in time.
We bought a satellite-based PVR in November 2001. We subscribe to the movie channels, and watch every good movie that is released. We have hardly seen a commercial in the past 4 years. No DVD player in my house.
Can't wait until the iTunes Music Store starts selling movies.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Broadband will replace DVDs when bloggers replace newspapers.
So what ? Natural selection.
Sure they (BigMedia(TM)) will oppose *any* form of media they cannot limit and control and proclaim it is dead.
/nerve/!...and they *copy* them for data protection--how audacious! Stopping our meter from running! We must halt this limit on our avarice! We must eliminate hard copies of our wares. When the only source is controlled by us and cannot be captured, i.e. broadcast via the 'broadcast flag', we can run back to their wallet pulling out money time and again! [Howls of accord and rapture from the audience] Let's announce it: "DVDs are dead!" Why wait? Carpe diem...err...Carpe argentum! DVDs are dead, long live controllable ephermeral data streams...err...'consumer choice and flexibilty'...yeah, *that's it* yeah...choice.
Secret recording of a joint MPAA/RIAA cabal:
"DVDS? Why those pesky consumers insist on the right to use them more than once...the
Now, where's my broadband? /me continues waiting...
Hmm... did 56K replace the CD?
Once information infrastructure becomes ubiquitous, once data pipelines are in the air all around us at all times, there will be no need for physical media.
One will only need a receiver. "Codecs" will become the impediments/enablers of media consumption, just as physical media has enabled/disabled the media monopolies of today.
Sure, one might cache some media on the reciever, but let's not split hairs. Transmission is where it's at. Or, rather, where it will be.
vk.
The trend in broadband seems to be strictly controlling the upload speed for your typical residential line. I get nice download speeds, but 40Kb/sec won't cut it if I want to send my friends a full quality movie. It's a lot easier for them to just come over and grab the physical disk.
Of course, in my own home, my wireless network is perfectly fast enough to watch a movie from a different computer than the one which hosts it. If that sort of bandwidth became common, then this whole thing seems a lot more practical.
If this were really true, why isn't Windows Media Center Edition flying off the shelves? I think this is fairly implausible since I don't think people will end up usign computers for everything. Buying a TV and a DVD player is a lot cheaper than buying a computer, so I think people will always use that to build an entertainment center off of, not a PC. Plus, these movies being downloaded via broadband will probably have some kind of DRM that prevents people from burning them to disc, or at least they will if a certain Media Center Edition OS producer has anything to say about it. In the end, I think the convenience gained of downloading movies via broadband does not outweigh the inconvenience of setting up a computer to do everything a TV does, especially considering the price differential.
What about the great glory of uncompressed high resolution 24/32/64/XYZ bit audio?
Has anybody even thought of the possibility of someday actually using a medium that requires uncanny amounts of space, because the recording actually records the physical calculations of a drum stick hitting a snare through the friction of air and travelling to your ear?
Sure nobody really talks about "Super Audio Compact Disc" because its "elite" format that has little equipment to playback and a really bizarre selection of titles to purchase, but it's something I could give as a present and feel estatic to recieve for a gift.
It might not even be a laser-disc in the future, but whatever the massive storage medium it WILL require, If you can make it a collectors edition, and put it in a leather bound case with air-tight seals and holographic/print/data embedded pamphlet insert of the artist's entire creative process & world, then I choose the real world medium.
Downloading is an alternate method of transportation. One that exists like spandex exists in the same world as silk.
And I think the Ipod Shuffle is a rip off. It's a fad-crazy exploiting techno-fashion. You don't even have EQ control, let alone the ability to change the batteries.
....their media?? This smacks of a social-engineering effort to 'rid' us of our books, hard-copies, physical media so that we can eventually be spoonfed whatever 'they' want to feed to us. If history becomes inaccurate, they will change history to match. Orwell must be spinning right now.
Ok, so, let's pretend for a moment that *tomorrow* we magically all have the technology to download enormous video files of DVD quality in a reasonable time.
Where are you going to put it?
Okay, so you've got a nice fat hard disk on your computer. That's just great for storing your first 10 or 20 movies that you buy for delivery via network. But where do you store all this data after that?
I have, at a guess, about 500 DVDs (and increasing rapidly), and really my collection isn't that big compared to a lot of my friends. That's 5 terabytes or more of data right there. Is everyone going to have to have a really big expensive server just to store their movies?
And how are we going to back all that data up? It will have to be backed up if the files are purchased, or when the server crashes the owner will lose their entire (very expensive) video collection. High capacity backup systems are not cheap or easy, and whatever solution is selected has to be simple enough that grammaw can use it after a 2 minute lesson or it won't catch on. Heck, I'm not at all sure that the entire concept of backups isn't too much for a lot of consumers to cope with. I suspect in a few years after recent model macs are finally gettting old enough to experience hard disk failure, there are going to be a lot of irate Itunes Store users who didn't heed the application's advice to back up their music.
No, we need a physical media format to be around for a while longer, until storage space is very very cheap and reliable (cheap enough that we can all have an enormous RAID array on our PVR) and easy to manage.
Laserdisc is not dead! I used one today at work (no joke)
"Broadband is not everywhere yet, and never will be."
Are you sure? I'm always hearing how the Internet will solve whatever problem Slashdotters don't care to face. Don't like big business? Internet! Don't like big government? Internet! Have a small penis? Internet.
that may be the case...but one must also take into account developing countries like India where a large proportion of computer users still don't have access to true broadband...
Mark Cuban recently blogged about buying movies as prints. Sure, they're 700 bucks a pop but the concept is interesting. http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000710024187 /
Quoting from his post:
"Picking on Hollywood some more... There is always a reason why their transition to new technologies has been slow. One of the repetitive themes is that there is a big risk in having a digital copy of a program or movie available because the quality is nearly as good as the original. That fear brought us the stupidity of the Broadcast Flag. It brought threats not to offer programming in High Def. Not that long ago, it was a threat not to offer programming and movies on DVD! All for fear of near original quality hitting the masses.
So imagine my suprise when I go to the newstand and pick up a magazine that I won't name, and I see ads for pristine 35mm prints of newer movies that have yet to be released on DVD.
I have been buying this same publication for the past 6 years. I started buying it not because I'm a movie collector, but because during the broadcast.com days, it was a great source of public domain movies and programs that we would host for streaming."
Pop Culture Theme Quizzes posted onto my blog. Have fun.
Sure bandwidth will...eventually...be ubiquitous and plentiful, but we've a ways to go before we'll be streaming MPEG2 at DVD speeds over the typical broadband link.
Sure MPEG4, H.264 and other standards will make it possible to cram more into less bandwidth, but we've got a few years before FTTH (Fiber to the Home) makes this a true possibility. Or, perhaps, Wimax will make it there first? I'm not counting on the telcos, in the US, to expand the bandwidth they provide, significantly, in the near future...that's for sure!!!
Cheers,
- hawkeye
"...The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders." - Erwin Rommel
Broadband to kill DVDs? No no... Broadband spawns DVDs. Broadband + Usenet + DVD burner = Wachow! Here comes the MPAA gestapo with their shocksticks at the ready!
:P
Seriously though folks, Piracy Bad(TM)! But if they want to come after me for downloading movies in 1080i HDTV (If you've never done it, you have no idea...*drool*) that I own on DVD, or DVDs of movies I own on VHS... They're welcome to.
I really should stop trying to encite them though... My livingroom (Read: Ample seating and a DLP projector) has 'unauthorized exhibition' written all over it as it is.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
a frenchman I am sure. Like you can really argue that broadband will be everywhere, and that there will never be any need in the near future for actual, physical data. Stupid frenchman.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
Needless to say I'm keeping the VHS machine for a while longer..
Replying to my own post... There is still one area where physical media are going to be needed for a long time: situations where the infrastructure is not adequately developed. Most of the world is still using dialup. Plain old DSL is many years away for large parts of the world. Super-bandwidth DSL may be more than a decade away, while physical media costs and duplication costs are already very cheap and getting cheaper. So my comments in the parent post apply only in the more "city" parts of the developed world.
The main advantage to direct download of video content for distributors is that will have much more control over where and how many times their media is played. Via various encryption schemes that would require you providing a personal key, they could charge you per play, could restrict which players you use, etc.
It's all about DRM and their control.
Just dump a bucket of water on them and call it a night.
CDs WILL die out, just like DVDs. To find out when and how just draw a time graph of music/video sales. You are likely to see a common pattern - a new technology emerges, slowly/quickly gains popularity, enjoys that popularity for a while and then fades back into obscurity. This always happens and will continue to happen, a truly universal pattern of the technological progress.
Look at MP3 sales. Look at MP3-player sales. They are growing and it can mean only one thing - the old technology is dying.
P.S. The fact that you only see what happens with CDs today and try to rationalise why that won't ever change simply means that your prognostication skills suck.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The argument that Broadband downloading will greatly reduce the demand for DVDs is rather flawed. It assumes that Broadband will be widely adopted. It assumes that an extremely wide variety of movies will be available for download from somewhere. It assumes that entertainment consumers will prefer a pay-per-view format over a physical disk recording that costs the same or less.
None of these arguments are reasonable. {note to grammar eagles, I'm assuming the word 'none' is an adjective of the noun 'arguments' so the verb 'are' must be plural. Please don't tell me 'none is' should be the correct form.}.
-DVD players sell for $30-$50, which is less than a single month of broadband. DVDs sell for the same as a pizza.
-Studios are in the process of converting every film in their archives into DVDs for sale or rental. Speciality video stores in every city will have titles that will never be available on-line. Broadband pay-per-view will always have the Star Wars flick from two years ago, but suppose you want to see Brian De Palma's The Fury or the original version of Swept Away (which is so much better than Madonna's version)?
-A physical disk means something. It has value. You can play it over and over without damage. Stop it and play scenes again. Sell it, trade it, lend it. Broadband distribution of films will never have this characteristic.
DVD's are challenged not by Broadband pay-per-view, but by the physical limitations of getting the physical disks of ten of thousands of movie titles distributed. Partly this will need a change in mindset. Filmmakers have to be willing to distribute their work on DVD. They have to be willing to accept that the vast majority of people who will see their work will see it on a video screen, not in a theater.
For example, every year my fair city has a 'film festival'. Prints of a hundred or so films are brought from all over the world and shown once or twice in a local theater for $10 each admission. Then they disappear; most never to be seen again. Suppose for $10 you could buy a six-pack of DVDs of your selection from this list of 100 films. Rare and interesting films would get much wider distribution and acknowledgement.
This is where the natural advantages of the DVD format will become apparent. The people who say that Broadband pay-per-view will wipe out DVD in the near future are just making wild statements to get their names exposed in the media.
[X] overpopulation
[X] overpriced housing
[X] liberal/gay nuts conversing with trees
[X] bums chauffeuring cats about
[X] stoplights with no intersection
[X] shitty bandwidth
...for me anyway.
I used to love DVD shopping but in the last two years my "habit" has come under severe control.
Everytime I think about buying a DVD I ask myself what I'm paying for that I couldn't get online for free. Are the extras (if any) really worth £15.99 ? Nope. So I'll go and download myself a good DivX encoding and add it to the library.
The only DVDs I do buy these days tend to be box sets and hard to get titles, even that's a rarity.
I amassed over a hundred titles in my first two years of DVD ownership, I think I've bought maybe half a dozen in the two years just gone.
Before they stop to give any physical objects they should bring people not to be materialist...
Further more during the encoding you can enhance the image wich would be to costly to do during live playback but doesn't matter during a one time encode.
Frankly a good encoder can really save a DVD suffering from blocks.
As for the sound. Well someone else already pointed out that DivX is for video not for sound. Most of the container formats (avi/ogm/mkv) allow you to use any audio codec you want.
Ease? Well lets see. Mplayer comes with linux easily and plays everything for free. DVD player costs money and requires me to open my PC. It is all relative.
Frankly I don't like DVD's. Why oh way do the search functions suck so much. Not to say anything of the FBI warnings. Only way I can see the warnings is if I got a legal copy. Kinda like the police pulling people who are driving the legal limit over telling them not to speed while letting the speeders go free.
DVD's you can keep them. Long live DivX/Xvid/Godknows(or cares) + audio codec in the container format of your choice. Just that the next person to mistake DivX for anything but a video codec will get one between the eyes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Actually a good example of video that is heavily Internet distributed is actually Anime. It's widely shared in file distribution systems and most folks who are big anime fans are also big downloaders. So does that mean DVDs are doomed? Not really! Most big Anime fans actually still buy the ultra-expensive DVD sets of their favourite series. It often comes with a very nice looking box and the quality is much higher than mpeg4 clips you can download. Unless broadband speeds allow you to somehow download 8Gb of data (which is about the size of dual layer DVD) in a matter of minutes, I seriously doubt DVD as a format will be in trouble anytime soon. Another importent point is that we're able to detect visual compression easier than we can detect audiable compression. This is partly due to the fact that most of us downloading will be using our computers to watch video and computer monitors completely destroy TVs when it comes to image quality. I'll bet that mp3s wouldn't be as popular if by default we used high end sound systems on all our PCs. By default we have high end video systems on our PCs.
I like the idea of having a physical disk which contains an entire movie. The storage isn't yet cheap enough to 'just keep it on disk', and DVD's have more ....permanence... being optical media than magnetic media. It's hard to get a head crash on a dvd player, or as a web site published "Power corrupts, Power failure corrupts absolutely!" (They were down due to a power failure with resultant database data loss). A DVD is a complete high resolution digital movie. If the MPAA is worried, then they are insane. There isn't a 'new technology to compress movies onto some new media' yet. It might be a while. HD-DVD isn't here yet, and compressing video is a bit more of a challenge than compressing audio. Mpeg is alredy compressed. You might get multiple DVD's onto an HD-DVD, but bandwidth isn't that great yet, and the cost benefit analysis of buying a DVD vs downloading and burning results in it being cheaper to buy the DVD and then (maybe) archive on a HD-DVD. The sneakernet might be an issue, but no more than people trading LP's.
What was the successor to the CD format? MP3, a lower-quality format,...
I suspect that this not only applies to audio, but to everything that gets digitized.
The digital result is always poorer in quality than the original medium. But the advantages of digitization cause it be widely accepted, not as a replacement for the original medium, but as a powerful alternative.
For example, when the musical instruments are digitized by synthesizers and samplers. The result is always a poorer quality musical instrument than the original. But you can change the instrument by just pressing a button. And you can fit hundreds of instrument samples on a single small chip. The inexpensive plastic keyboard that plugs into a sampler will never be as good or expressive as a real piano, but you don't have to transport a piano to very many performances to see the advantage of having a sampler the size of a video cassette that sounds almost as good.
Purists can tell that CDs don't sound as good as vinyl records. But they're smaller, cheaper, and last longer. And sound much better in a $30 CD player than a vinyl record will sound on an old $30 turntable stereo. Again digitization reduced the quality of the medium, but it was accepted for its other advantages.
Writers used to feel an 'intimate connection' with their typewriters that they often didn't feel with PC word processor programs. No one today would spend ten minutes with a typewriter and claim that it's better than a word processor program.
The phenomenon is seen everywhere. Little handheld cell phone voice quality is nowhere near as good as 1960's Bell equipment. Watching a film on DVD is nowhere as good as seeing it in a movie theater. Inkjet prints of scanned photos are far inferior than the original photo. PDF files of chip datasheets pale when compared to a big thick Data Book on crisp, thin, bright white paper. Hacking through an airline website to plan a trip is a poor imitation of having a good and knowledgeable travel agent.
Digitization turns everything into crap. BUT, the advantages of connecting the results of digitization in ways that were inconceivable with the old media makes the results of digitization widely and gladly accepted.
Two weeks ago I've bought a simple, but nice DVD/XVID player Wiwa HD228. This little thing plays nearly all DIVX/XVID encoded media, from many possible sources: CD, CDR, VCD, SVCD, DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW..., on big TV screen, with 5+1 audio. Without clumsy connections with PC and its noise.
Having a complete set of the Ghost in the shell episodes on one DVD is great. What is the point of using comercially available discs and/or media broadcasting services, when their content is usually not very different from DVD rental shops?
If I wish to watch some Nick Zedd videos, or something with equally unusual content, I have no chance to find them outside p2p community. So, what these media CEOs could offer me? They're outdated already.
This would be the greatest thing ever. The FCC would no longer have a job...WHOOOO! Then all the HAM radio guys can roll up their licenses and smoke 'em.
I need something to burn my videos on after all.
Half the people in the country will have a hard time moving from DVD to download. The DVD player still fits the old VCR model - stick something in the front of the box, and it plays. DVD is really just a more advanced VCR, as far as most people are concerned.
Downloading, of course, is a foreign concept to most people. While my dad is computer literate, my mother has never touched a computer, and she wouldn't know what the f*** a download is. Literally, she has no concept of it.
If downloading becomes the norm, it will happen through the cable box. Again, the cable box is a box hooked to the TV, a concept everybody understands.
No, I don't think so. DVD replaced VHS sort of media. Broadband isn't really comparable with DVD. The penetration rate is marginelly different. There are still plenty of areas that aren't covered by broadband. The cost of owenership is higher, and hey, not all people are computer-friendly!
"Evil thrives when good men do nothing"
And what am I going to watch when Speakeasy is experiencing a Network Service Event (aka downtime)? What the hell am I going to back up my video, music, and work files to? HDDs don't last forever. DVD's a great storage medium. It's okay for movies, but hey- I've been ripping my DVD video to DIVX. I've found it handy to keep the optical drive free.
:P
I'm not interested in 4398573489 commentaries, cast and crew bios (imdb is much more thorough...), FX production documentaries, Making Of documentaries, etc, etc. That shit all started to blend together well before LOTR shoved the "extras" thing straight into overkill. The few movies I really want to see extras on (Repo Man, Dark Star) are light on 'em.
If Apple could do for selling movies what they've done for selling music, I'd be on that shit in a heartbeat- cheap entertainment I can back up and view whenever I get bored. No problem.
DVD's great for extended bouts of offline, or if you're one of those consumers with the Ultra Mega Home Theater, but video viewing is tied fairly tightly to my computer useage, so hey- broadband video delivery is right up my alley.
But I'll be burning it off to DVD-R for backup and offline storage, kthks.
Very few movies I watch I feel are worth buying. But if I do decide it's worth it, I want full commercial DVD quality and often times buy the movie.
However the bits get onto the DVD (stamped at a factory and shrinkwrapped, or downloaded from somewhere and burned to disk), is irrelevent for what each person determines is worth keeping in their collection. It's probably very few people who do not buy a legitimate copy or make/obtain an illegal copy of a movie they truly enjoy. If you've gone through the effort of downloading off the net a movie you really like, you'll very likely burn it to DVD rather than delete it and have to download it again weeks or months later.
The rest is either rented and returned, or downloaded and deleted and for each person is a matter of personal preference whether to keep or not.
But in terms of broadband killing DVD, I think is like saying the car kills off the sale of shoes. Just because you don't need shoes to ride in a car, doesn't mean the sale of shoes will decline because of the availability of cars.
It sucks having to connect to the internet to play Half Life 2 but it's really going to suck if I need a net connection to watch a movie.
Also, maybe I'm a bit ignorant but since when were DVD players have internet access?
I now buy a lot more CD's than I ever used to. Until a few years ago I very rarely bought CD's or other music media, because I didn't want to spend that amount of money without really having any idea of what I'd be getting. There's not a lot you can tell from a CD cover, and it's usually difficult to sample something more than a few minutes in a CD store.
Since MP3's have been available, I often download one or two of an album that looks promising and keep them around to listen to for a few weeks. If I still like what I hear after that time, I'll usually go out and buy the album with the knowledge that it's less likely I'm throwing away money on something I won't listen to in the long term. MP3's that I get sick of don't stay around for long.
Looking down my playlist, I can see that I have bought the respective CD's for most of what's on there.
Because you are a dumb one too!
The heart is the star at the end of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, "it is done" and there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great pleasure it is the skeleton enclosing the brain.
The polka is a long time.
Over 60% of the bootleg movies from the Internet are DVD-rips. No DVDs, no quality bootleg movies on the Internet (what is left are some HDTV recordings plus low resolution, crappy stuff)
CDs, DVDs and downloaded content all have their place. Sure, I download music all the time (and pay for it), and would do the same with film if it were available.
However, when I find a gem - something I really love - I'll still fork over the cash for a physical copy of the item. It's worth owning a DVD or CD for the artwork and inserts that come with it, but even more so, it's something to collect and display. It's no different than books - I first read 1984 and Neuromancer online and subsequently purchased both.
Perhaps nobody will buy bad movies on DVD anymore as they've seen it online and been unimpressed, but I'd say that's a good thing.
It doesn't matter how many times it's tried I for one am not going to put up with a subscription only model (which is what this idea represents)
If I buy something I want to receive a physical object in return for my cash. Furthermore if this physical object is a container for digitised media I want to be able to transcode the content (so I can play it on new devices) and to back it up how I see fit (as a computer user I know the value of backups)
So no, broadband delivery is not going to attract my money - nor I suspect the vast majority of users.
On this note I have never bought an MP3 and do not intend to due to them being DRM crippled. I have however, and will continue to, buy CDs that conform to Phillips Red/Orange etc. book specifications (And all my purchases in the recent past have been by non *AA artists)
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Will DVD join LaserDisc in obscurity? [Cue Organ Music]
Tune in tomorrow for our next exciting dupeventure!
Slashdupe is brought to you by Xerox, makers of fine copiers.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I don't see any increasing availability, affordability, and speed of broadband in Greece where I come from. Right now we pay more than 50 Euros for a 386/128 ADSL connection per month. And last time I checked Greece was part of EU. Ok granted that Greece is not the most technologically advanced country in the world but I am sure that there are countries less advanced as far as technology goes than Greece (I maybe wrong ;)).
Then again what do you expect from someone from Alcatel to preach. Anyone from TDK, Maxtor or Fuji on the same subject?
Will DVD join LaserDisc in obscurity?
Yes, it will be as obscure as corded telephones and VHS and those little cassette tapes. Sure, we'll come up with something better to replace it, as we do with all things in time. But it was so popular in its day, so ubiquitous in its market, that obscurity is just the wrong word.
Is it really that common to use P2P to backup your disks? :-)
Seriously, that's my point -- I prefer a physical medium to backup data on. Broadband isn't the Solution for Everything to me.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Uh, no. That's like saying everyone in the world is going to be ordering cable internet / broadband / wireless / etc. Not everyone wants or even needs to be "connected" any more than everyone is going to want to stop using DVD.
they come on a spindle...
...it's an iPod
Will DVD join LaserDisc in obscurity?
Eventually, but not any time soon. DRM creates severe longevity issues in a non-physical media. When someone buys a DVD he expects it to still work next year. You don't just need fast broadband, you need to solve the drm problem too.
The near-term risk is to Blockbuster and their ilk. DRM doesn't matter so much if you're only watching it once anyway.
Netflix will probably outlive Blockbuster since broadband is slow coming to the rural areas.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Or will something replace broadband before broadband replaces DVD..
No one is going to go back to VHS quality just because they can download it faster over the Internet. It ain't going to happen. The download of DVD-quality movies takes hours over most people's broadband connections, and we're going to high-def in 2007, let's say. That's going to add bandwidth and get even slower as we go to high-def.
Even if people don't want to go back to VHS quality, DVD quality might be the point where most say "good enough for me". Right now, I know someone who routinely lets his PC run overnight to get movies from p2p networks.
With better codecs for smaller file size and faster broadband connections, this might become even more common.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I have a cable modem, and even with bitttorrent, it still can take a few days or more for a DVD-sized amount of, ah, linux isos to download.
By contrast, I can drive down to the store and return to my house with a shitload of DVDs in less than an hour.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
try not to be so hard on the guy, it's not like he said something about your mom :)
Based on my recent experience I'd say 2 things will kill off DVD:
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Of course, that's in the US. In Korea only old people buy DVDs.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
I think what's interesting is he went straight into the demise of DVD. I think what's going to happen first will be the demise of regular satalite broadcast TV. Unlike DVD the quality of regular TV isn't expected to be as high *yet*.. With the emergence of faster and faster copper based broadband it won't be long till TV on demand won't need to come from local tivos etc but will be centralised on your broadband providers uberTiVo(TM). Watching highdef movies will come later when the bandwidth is avilable... then you can download them to your iVid or burn them to DVD or whatever. But it ain't gonna happen tomorrow is it.
I think broadband has a good chance, but DVD is something physical. And THAT [most] people will want.
Downloading of movies, legal and otherwise, won't kill DVDs. If anything, the trend most likely to smash the status quo is amazon.co.uk's DVD rental by post.
I suspect that a large number of people buy DVDs because that's the only way to get at the full choice (not just what's on the local Blockbuster's shelves). They only want to watch the film once or twice and afterward the expensive bought DVD is dead weight. Widespread and easy rental by post could easily collapse most of the DVD purchase market. It could also reduce downloading. Why wait three days for a torrent of a DVD-rip to complete, and tolerate the inferior viewing experience, when you could recieve a posted DVD in one day and watch it in comfort?
I have been hearing this since the Enron (yea, remember Enron... ) Wanted to market broadband like eletrcity and they sold on that movies will be on demand. I also hear this from the news that Netflix main competitor is not walmart cheap dvd rental, or end of late fee at blockbuster, the main competitor of netflix is movies on deamnd. I think where are the movies? It takes a long time to download a movie (legally or otherwise) So what's quicker and faster. You get your DVD on your DVD player and watch. To add to add, If you rent a mini-van, let's say you and your pal take a road trip. You can add dvd on that rental (maybe you bought a car with it) and it is nice to watch movies or let your kids watch movies. There is not way (unless you are redneck and put directTV on your mobile trailer) that you can get movies. So DVD are not dead yet, and nor will be in a long time. You can arguee now that VHS tapes are dead, but DVD. Come on!
It sounds nice in some aspects, I guess, but consider...
I live 20 miles from a fairly large city (Pittsburgh, PA). We only got cable broadband about a year ago, I've had DSL for 5.5 years but I'm so far from the switch that my "1.5 meg" connection is pretty slow. Still better than dialup, mind you, but still not enough for real streaming video. Perhaps our area is just out of step with the national trend but if my area represents the typical model than decent broadband is only available to ~20% of the consumer base.
Also consider that today's catch phrase in technical entertainment is portability. Everyone wants it; iPods, laptops, portable DVD players... Everyone wants small units that they can carry to provide 100% of their media entertainment. This trend is only going to continue. Once we can get a stable "on demand" style music service that is not tied to either cellular or landline sources I can see the future prospects for physical media being slim. As it stands now I can carry a few hundred DVDs and a few thousand albums worth of media content in my backpack with my laptop and a few DVD folders.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I used to work for a company that developed a settop box/atm over T1 solution. It was basically an on demand movie system providing video content at 1.5 Mbps. This was 1995-97. I'm sure that by now the engineers I worked with can cram DVD grade video over 768 Kbps, with HDTV in the 1.5 Mbps.
Alcatel funded this project, and had a test system of about 30k subscribers in the DC area, and a few buildings in Singapore outfitted with it. Tested and working in 1997, just too expensive.
They are just waiting for cheap bandwidth to roll it out.
Broadband as it exists today, is neither fast enough nor wide spread enough. And who will be paying for all the fibre to the home, or the infrastructure it will require? Not to mention the obvious: If CDs haven't gone away because of broadband, why would DVDs?
http://hughgordon.com/
DVDs are cheaper, and now the blue disks can hold more information, so DVDs can squeeze more shows in collector sets, - all your favorite 'Friends' shows on just a few disks..
So, unless broadband drops it's price to $9.95 a month,
don't expect them to replace DVDs any time soon...
Apple will give you the option of lossess recordings now. A lot bigger - probably half the size of a corresponding *.wav file, but it is available. And that'll allow one to effectively make a bit-correct copy of the CD.
Note that, as another responder alluded to, it would be great to do *better* than CD at some point as "CD quality" is a misnomer to some.
The biggest reason movies won't be streamed through broadband is the ever lowering bandwidth caps ISPs are enforcing.
I have DirecWay satellite Internet, and I can't even download a single-CD Linux distribution without running afoul of my bandwidth cap. Even if a movie's quality were horribly degraded and the disk image highly compressed, I still couldn't watch the movie online without getting bitch-slapped by DirecWay for exceeded the cap.
DSL and cable Internet providers are increasingly moving to the same restrictions, so having consumer broadband is getting less and less meaningful.
DVD capacity will grow orders of magnitude faster than consumer Internet bandwidth, making them increasingly suitable for data backup more desirable as a movie transport medium (higher quality movies or more extra content).
DVDs aren't going away in the foreseeable future. If anything, their usage will expand into other areas.
The head of a company who has a vested interest in widespread adoption of broadband technology says that "broadband access will replace DVDs." That's a shocker.
More accurate statement: "We'll attempt to replace physical media with a bitstream that we control, can force you to pay for over and over again in order to maintain access, and can attach all sorts of licensing and DRM to. Oh, by the way, you'll need our special CinemaFiend Broadband service pack at $49.95 a month in addition to regular content subscription fees to make it work."
On-demand video streams will become more available, and supplement the sale of physical media. They'll obsolete DVDs in the same way that radio obsoleted records.
At 3 A.M. you can see people's auras; at five you can see their contrails...
Does this dude have any idea about the bandwidth of a tractor-trailer full of DVDs on an Interstate highway? Roughly 260 exabytes/s (10^15). [first heard as station wagon of tapes].
India, man? I live in Europe and I'm still far from getting anything resembling broadband.
OTOH, I'd welcome some about-VHS-quality pay-per-view system that would allow me to see some shows I've been longing to watch for years now. In the end, it all boils down to content for me, and I just can't afford all those DVDs.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magtapes hurtling down the highway."
New technology doesn't always entirely displace older technology. I would say that it does so only rarely. Rather, we get more choices, each with its own characteristics which makes it most suitable for a particular style of use.
I'd rather pay $10 for a DVD that I can watch a hundred times than pay $1 each time to watch someone else's copy a hundred times. So for me, DVD beats broadband hands down. Others may disagree...well, they may. Celebrate diversity, okay?
There are some interesting posts. Check it out here.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
About 7 years ago a co-worker held up a dat tape and said "Never under estimate the bandwidth of FedEx". That was after 3 days of failed attempts to ftp a tar file about the size of a DVD movie. With netflix you could say "never underestimate the bandwith of the postal service." The point is still the same.
Think Deeply.
i always thought it was just the people who rented his VHS tapes at Reel Life on Bedford avenue...
that's the power of the internet for you--his is a truly a niche market (and an acquired taste;>
Bullshit
They want something they can take to work and leave it lying about on the shop floor without losing hundreds of pounds if their e-reader gets robbed.
What does theft of an electronic book display device have to do with Weight Watchers and gastric bypass?
That's right, if you go for a subscription model you end up owning nothing when you unsubscribe. I'll take the plastic discs any day since I can enjoy them for the rest of my life - or even sell them on if I choose. Sure, they may be more expensive to acquire, but in the long run they will most likely be cheaper and I tend to watch the same movies quite a number of times. That's mainly because I only buy films that I think have repeat viewability - otherwise it's rental time.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Considering that many people in America (especially in NE Ohio where I live--not the most technically astute part of the country) either (a) can't substantiate the cost of DSL or Cable Modem, (b) the phone company has not gotten off of its hind quarters to build out the access or (c) the cable company hasn't gotten around to offering the service --Time Warner was testing Roadrunner in Akron, OH (pop. ~225,000) in '96, Adelphia didn't roll out cable modem until 2002-2003 in Cleveland (pop. ~490,000), it's not surprising that this just wouldn't fly here in America.
While, in the meantime, people can waltz over to nearly any store and grab a DVD, rip off the wrapper and pop it in. No phone company bs. No cable company bs. Just content.
I don't buy DVDs either. Thats what DVD mail rental is for.
I take it you don't have small children who like to watch Welcome to Weebleville or Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland or Cats Don't Dance repeatedly.
I still prefer a good analog LP over the CD crap sound
What you're probably hearing is the loudness race. When recorded to specification, the peaks on LP have to be compressed more than the peaks on CD, but the loudness race has pushed CDs out of proportion. Compare CDs of the 1980s to CDs of today to hear what I'm talking about; the older recordings are mastered quieter, but they sound more lively because there is a greater peak to level ratio.
Use a good ADC to turn your LPs into CD-Rs and tell me if they don't sound identical. Or are you a youngster who can still hear above 21 kHz?
What the hell is he talking about?
1: My so-called "broadband" connection takes many, many hours to download a full-length movie. And yet, I have an above-average cable-modem speed for domestic US customers. Broadband speeds would have to increase by a huge factor before I could get real-time HD video. During the past 7 years, I have seen only a paltry increase in broadband speed.
2: They still haven't figured out standards for HDTV connectivity, after years and years of dicking around. The Entertainment companies are making sure that battle drags out for as long as possible, to thwart the inevitable orgy of piracy that will occur as soon as it becomes truly straightforward for anyone to hook up a computer to a HDTV.
The disc has a long, long life ahead of it.
Well I know where I live, in Pennsylvania, broadband isn't even an option. It's not even the fact I live out in the middle of nowhere, they (companies) just stopped the wire about 2 miles from our location. And I'm not going to pay 100$/month for the DirectPC, or whatever it is.
So until the entire country has broadband access, I don't see this happening anytime soon.
FYI the Freebox with TV + phone is available in most French towns (I'm living in a 100 000 people town). And the offer is actually 20 Mbps, but the real bandwidth depends on the signal attenuation which results from the distance between the DSL adaptator and the telecom central (I've got 10Mbps, far from 2,5 km from the telecom central).
But Free.fr now also offers 10 Mbps down, 320 kbps up (since one month) in roughly whole French territory, for the same cost.
More information is available on:
http://adsl.free.fr
And you can train your French there.
Only someone who wanted to have 100% control over your access would say something like that. You can't lend someone a broadband feed, you can't watch it again any time you want (you are at the mercy of availability), and they can edit the content, etc.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
But he's wrong about one thing. 'None' is a noun, not an adjective, and it can be used both singularly and plurally, as he says, depending on the quantity it's expressing.
Only for movies I don't want to view more than once. At 4GB a wack, I'm not going to fill up a fragile hard drive with things I want to preserve for many future viewings yet.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...what happens when my connection to my ISP goes down? Then what? I still wouldn't say that broadband is "reliable."
TV by broadband isn't even the same market as DVDs. Broadband could conceivably replace cable, as that's the same market. You watch something once, then move on. Given the abusive restrictions on making recordings and copies of downloaded content, you can only think of it as one-time television.
DVDs are a completely different market, for people who want to own a copy of a favorite movie or TV show, that they can watch any time they want, over and over. And that their ability to watch doesn't depend on a web site staying in business (and everything else working just right, too, on their internet connection).
Methinks somebody is peddling snake oil.
Does MTV still play videos?
When I compare the value of CDs and DVDs - one hour of noise, vs. 2+ hours of wallpaper and noise - there's no comparison. DVDs are superior.
Will anything replace either? I use the transition from vinyl to cassette or CD, the transition from VHS to DVD as indicators. A technology has to be at least 3 to 4 times better or more convenient to be a replacement. Cassettes merely coexisted with records, since they couldn't compete for quality at first, and were tied for convenience (you can skip tracks easier on vinyl, but for travel cassettes won). However, the first time I let a friend listen to a CD on a moderately good stereo - it was a classical recording, and you could hear the piano pedal squeak - he ran out and bought one too. Who remembers hearing the sound of the needle rumbling through a groove?Dust noise?
Ditto for DVD. When I watched movies on tape, the concept of letterbox escaped me. Why???? Having seen DVDs on big-screen TV, letterbox is perfectly fine.
DVDs can go anywhere, play anywhere. They already compete effectively against a broadband downloading medium called "Television broadcasting" (plus VCR). One of the big surprises of the last year is how well box sets of old (old!) TV series sell. Who'da thunk "Green Acres Season 1" or "Jetsons" would be a passable seller after 40 years of reruns? People prefer the tangible, even if it's "Gilligan's Island".
But then we reach the "law of diminishing returns" limit. How much better than CD can sound get? Newer formats are still "boutique" formats that only a few fanatics use. MP3s are just as popular at 128K despite fantics' insistance that it is "not good". DVDs are plenty good for anyone who doesn't have high-level home theatre equipment. Will the average consumer pay double, or even a dollar more, to get "better than DVD" 1080p signal? (Hah! Betcha they try to market "720i" as "High Definition"!)
As for "feed" rather than "disk" - unless the feed will allow download to portable medium - burn a CD, write a SD card - who will prefer that? It better be cheap and easy. Movies are pushing the $10/DVD (unlimited play), and a 2-week rental less than $5 (unlimited play); a download better be able to play forever, carry around, take to a friend's place, etc. - or else it WON'T COMPETE.
Anyone had to use the idiot tube as a babysitter? Kids will DEMAND to watch the same video 100 times... What'll that cost on broadband?
How much can Hollywood expect to charge for the service? Assume the most fanatical consumers spend $100/month at Blockbuster. What's that going to buy you in downloads? Pay-per-view is not competitive price- or convenience-wise with DVD rentals, do you expect broadband to be better?
Since when does the rest of the world listen to Paris based forums?
something should be here besides this dumb message
I don't see bandwidth as the main problem here. Sure, lots of people don't have enough internet bandwidth now for this kind of service, but that will likely change over the next 20 years or so.
What won't change is peoples' preference for owning their favorite content, rather than renting it. If the on-line music battles have taught us anything it is that renting content is fine some of the time, but people don't want to have their collection suddenly stripped from them just because they stopped paying for their subscription service. For most people their selection of art is a personal statement and they aren't comfortable with the thought that it doesn't belong to them. That's one of the great aspects of iTunes and similar services: you pay for your music, you keep it, and you can even burn your own copy onto a CD. Within some fairly acceptable restrictions, you can do what you like with it.
The DVD itself is just a storage mechanism, like the cassettes and 8-tracks and vinyl platters before it. When it is replaced it will be by something that offers cheaper, more convenient storage of more data. It will NOT be replaced by what is essentially a rental service, delivered by broadband internet.
Not all random numbers are created equally.
Broadband may weaken the DVD rental market, but will not kill off the market for people wanting to "own" a movie or TV series in their own personal collection. I see broadband competing with the on-demand cable channels for movies that people would like to see. It'll have no effect on those who want to keep the movies they want to watch over and over again. I think it's the same argument that killed DiVX (the Circuit City rental program). I know I want to have the movies I really care about available to me whenever I want them, and I don't want ot have to ask for permission to watch them. No-one is predicting that on-demand cable will supplant DVDs, so why should broadband do the same?
Predictions like this tend to the absurd notions that technologies somehow have to dominate and destroy other technologies that are similar, when the reality of the marketplace allows for technologies with similar goals to coexist nicely.
DVD's are permanent ( well for the most part, I realize they will degrade in time ) but a 'service' is not. You end up continually paying to watch your stuff.
Your DVR's HD crashes.. You may be screwed, especially if you recorded/bought/leased some obscure item
---- Booth was a patriot ----
(Love that Avery Brooks - Best. Commercial. Ever.)
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
"The problem is that there just isn't much good music left; almost all music produced lately is crap."
Guess that means all those P2P networks are saturated with quality music then.
Some here have stated the media doesn't matter, it's the data, while others are firmly attached to physical media. Whichever is important to you, the real underlying issue is control of your data. You want to control what you see, the circumstances under which you see it, and when you see it. You also want to control the price.
What the big media companies, up to this point, have always controlled is the formats. It started with phonographs, along the way we had reel-to-reel, cassettes, 8-track, and finally CD. For video we had VHS, Beta, laser disc, video disc (remember those?) and now DVD.
What's changed is that the final (as of now) formats are all digital, and have converged with PCs so that now, finally, YOU have much more control of not only where & when, but also the format itself. A computer with the correct inputs/outputs give us control over the media - we could even stick digital video/audio back on VHS or cassette if we choose. The media companies fight that with the DMCA & the labels of piracy in an effort to retain that control. Why? Because every format change (in the past) allowed them to automatically generate new revenue not based on new products and content, but the re-selling of old. It's cheaper to recycle old ideas than to come up with new. Even better (for them), they soon will not only charge for a new format, but literally charge you every time you watch something. Despite being called dinosaurs, they see ahead and this is what they want.
And then you have guys like this Alcatel guy saying "No, DVDs aren't the new media, it's the internet!" This guy really isn't saying anything new because many of us are already familiar (thanks largely to Napster) with moving audio/video over the internet. Our computers are small internet hubs whereby music/video files are moved to other devices as it pleases us.
Really, the cat's out of the bag with digital content. The question is control: The media companies want you to have less so they can charge you more (on a per-view basis instead of a one-time charge), while people like us want more control because we have the capability for the first time to use it as we really want to.
All this Alcatel guy is doing is trying to insert himself into the food chain by getting a piece of the media conglomerate action.
Band name!
You haven't bought a book lately have you? Last time I spilled water on a book numerous pages were rendered unreadable and the glass was almost empty.
What kind of shitty books are you reading?
I've spilled (full) glasses of water on several of my books. (Actually, the cat was responsible for most of them.) At worst, the pages get stiff and wrinkled and the cover gets a little loose. I've never had a book become "unreadable" because of a glass of water.
I live in the Pacific northwest. People around here walk around reading books in the rain (with no umbrella). It's just water, dude.
Let me pull out my crystal ball...
It is 10 years in the future and the density of storage media has kept up with its own version of Moore's law. I have a device the size of an iPod that can hold over a terabyte of data. What can I do with this? I could hold hundreds of movies in HDTV format.
Another nice thing is my iMoviePod can be carried anywhere - which means my kids can watch any movie in the car that they want, and when I go on business trips I can bring my movie collection with me.
All this is due to the Hollywood Movie Company, Inc. which bought the rights to every movie they could get their hands on - and created a new format that would play on their new super-HDTV plasma-projecting Super Sound(TM) video systems. Sales weren't keeping the company afloat until Bob in Marketing had the idea that you could sell TVs and other hardware devices at a huge profit if you could include massive amounts of free entertainment. Everyone agreed (since the company was going bankrupt anyway) and boom sales took off.
While the company had to spend a lot to get the rights to the older movies, it was well worth it - the people with the most spare money were older and LIKED the older movies and were disappointed they couldn't get them at the Holly-Buster Video store down the block.
Seriously though - as storage gets more dense new formats are going to show up. If an optical disk ends up being able to hold over a terabyte of data, what are you going to use it all for? A movie with extras in any format will take up maybe 10-20% of the storage, so what is the rest for? We'll see smaller disks or more movies per disk. Maybe not new movies, but you could get all of the Tremors movies on a single disk. (Did anyone else know there was a Tremors 4?!?)
I don't see downloading of movies being a reality until there is REALLY scary bandwidth on the planet. Think how many copies of The Matrix were bought on the day that it released - or any Harry Potter movie. Even with intelligent forwarding and caching it would overload whatever network is in place. Oh, and would you want to wait an hour or two while you and everyone else in your neighborhood download the same movie? No - I want to wait in line at watever store and get my copy at midnight so I can watch it before anyone else. This attitude might be rare, but it exists.
So, I for one welcome our (perhaps old) optical storage overlords.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I think (or rather I like to think) that the "winning format" will be decided by something else entirely, namely how it will be controlled. I'm not one of those who stopped buying CDs just because I now have a truckload of MP3s and an ipod (hehe, just kidding), I just buy different CDs, and I check that they are real CDs before I buy them (Liam Lynch comes to mind. Nice music, chose to release them on an un-CD which is unplayable on everything I play my CDs on, so I didn't buy it).
So, as long as DVDs are "protected" by easily avoidable encryption they have any right-to-live they want. If the encryption gets tightened so people have to buy DVD players from the same company that releases those DVDs, they are doomed. Likewise broadband video, as long as they come as more or less clean MPEG streams it'll have a chance. Add DRM, or even just the need for a certain OS (no, not only Microsoft makes these mistakes), it'll die before even reaching momentum.
By the way. having just had to use some real videoconferencing equipment (which is very nice and dandy) over a lossy network (read ISDN through a noname-piece-of-crap-PABX) I can tell you the days of uninterrupted media streaming are not here yet by far. Now don't tell me your ADSL (or whatever) service is any better, because it isn't. So ask me again in five years or so :)
Oh, and can't forget piracy. Piracy is a) not an argument, since piracy will exist anyway, and b) not only unavoidable but in certain cases even wanted by the corporations who make the products being pirated. You hopefully don't really believe Microsoft got where they are today by way of making superior products :)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.