Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
I have to agree with this. My cable supplier (Comcast) has On Demand. While it is nice to catch up on Monty Python when I feel like it, only a few episodes are available, and I have no idea if one day they'll drop it as a choice.
I like a lot of foreign and art films. Even for a director like Alfred Hitchcock, there are a lot of his films I can't get from On Demand or haven't been shown on cable (unless hacked up and notably abridged on commercial networks) in years. I'll keep buyin DVDs as long as I can get films like "La Strada" on DVD, but have trouble finding it on cable. While this may be a small market, I think the overall idea is a reason why people will always by some type of physical media, even if it's a memory stick with music or video on it. If you buy it, you've got it forever, and aren't dependent on a cable system or other content provider for it.
A few years ago, Hurrican Isabel hit and many people in our area had no power for 2 weeks (it was 9-10 days for me). I spent a lot of time doing yard work I hadn't had time to do (I do programming at home, as part of my own business, so my hours are funky), and in the evenings I'd go out to bookstores, just so I could go some place with lights that felt civilized. For me, being able to put a CD in my boom box during the day and hear music I liked was a small part of what kept me sane. If I had only downloaded music to my hard drive, I would have had a much smaller selection to listen too.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I know I really like having a physical media that my music and movies are on, so I can play what I want when I want.
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.
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.
So, it'd probably be more accurate to say that Blu-Ray will kill off DVD Players, but not DVDs themselves.
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
There are people today that watch "live" TV through their ADSL connection. Forget about downloading, or waiting minutes. This is an Mpeg-2 stream, at a few Mbit/s, except it's true video on demand over ADSL.
DVD will survive for all the portable applications mentioned above, but if you look at how many people just want to watch movies from the comfort of their living room, that's the ADSL market.
The funny thing of course is that for whatever obscure reason, the ADSL bandwidth in the US is capped and you can't stream live video, but it doesn't mean other countries can't. That explains why 90% of the posters on that thread laugh about the French comment, when actually the rest of the world is laughing about slow ADSL in the US.
Alain.
Ever heard of movielink.com? I can rent a movie with decent picture quality and start playing it 5 minutes after I click download. And no, I don't have an ultra fast connection, just 1.5 Mb. Sure, it's not as good as DVD quality but its a heck of a lot better than vhs. Jobs seems to think that any movie worth watching is going to be 4 GB in size. With wmv video a 650 MB 2 hour movie is extremely watchable, and the ~1200 MB enhanced quality movies approach DVD-quality. The main thing that they lack is 5.1 sound. Just cause Jobs said it doesn't make it true.
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.
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
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.
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.
Ralph Maccio's apocalyptic guitar-off against satanic Steve Vai must sit on the shelf and gather real physical dust
:)
The funny part is that it was actually Steve Vai versus himself. The karate kid knows neither karate, nor shredding.
Why do I know that? Probably for the same reason you own the damn movie
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.
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.
I need something to burn my videos on after all.
CDs (and DVDs, for that matter) do not last forever, even if used. Optical media is subject to a decay called "CD Rot", which essentially means that it has a shelf life of ~10 years.o t.htm
Better start backing up your 1991 CDs.
DVD Rot Info: http://www.mv.com/ipusers/richbreton/m/files/cd_r
don't buy CD's
don't buy CD's
"CDs".
> We don't have enough bandwith to do that yet.
In France, thanks in particular to Free.fr, broadband ADSL access is now very common and efficient.
For instance, with the Freebox you get 10Mbps (Down), 1Mbps (Up) (really!) + TV (MPEG2) + Free IP phone to every "fix" French number. The cost for that is 30 euro/month (around $39).
I would like to be able to read a newspaper on the bus without having half the broadsheet flopping onto other people.
Either (a) learn how to read a broadsheet on the bus (it's not difficult), or (b) lobby the publishers of your paper to make a tabloid edition available; it's worked for every paper that's tried it, to the extent that some have abandoned their broadsheet editions altogether.
Me, I prefer physical papers to reading web papers on my laptop because nobody's going to mug you for a 50p newspaper, but a £2000 laptop is rather more likely to attract undesirable attention.