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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?"
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.
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.