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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?"
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.
I do however, know plenty of people (my parents included) who don't see a need for board band, but still go to blockbuster to rent a dvd every once and a while.
DVD's aren't going anywhere.
sorry 'bout the mess...
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.
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Since mp3's got popular, I barely buy any physical CDs anymore.
Hmm, this seems to go against the Slashdot dogma that MP3 downloads increase CD sales.
Yeah, and I'm sure they won't do that whole "watch once and pay to reuse" bit... Thanks, I'll stick to buying a hard copy I can library... just like I still do with my music. Of course, I'm into movies (and music) that is interesting for more than a brief time. I'm sure everyone d/l'ing Britney on Itunes will be fine getting their copy of "Crossroads," or whatever other piece of crap, this way.
Send whiskey and fresh horses!
"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."
Not if its RAID-ed across the 'net.
It doesn't have to be stored in one single place.
You could have clusters of servers across the internet and any, say 4, of which can give you your data.
Given enough redundant servers and its safe until the Big One.
Privacy?
You have your private key locally, don't you?
The datastream could be encrypted right to the point where your viewing whatsit has your keyring plugged into it. Or your finger, or whatever.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I'm the exact opposite. I stopped buying CD's years ago. I stopped burning my MP3s to CD when I bought my Rio Karma. I don't buy DVDs either. Thats what DVD mail rental is for. I do buy books though, so I do agree with you. Why would I pay 8.00 for a paperback I know I'll probably only read once and then stick on a shelf or on a pile, when I can probably borrow the book for free from the Library? Psychology is fascinating...
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
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
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.
Yup... DVDs will be gone right after the books!
Actually, I don't think it's physicality that's stopping books from going, but: * DRM (I can lend a friend a book, I can't lend a friend an e-book (without breaking TOS))
* e-book readers at a decent size (the small screen of a PDA is somewhat disuasive)
* cheap e-book readers
* Cheaper e-book prices: Why should I pay the same for an e-book as a normal book? It doesn't cost the same to make.
* Availability (more and more books are being offered as e-books, but many books also aren't).
Having said that, when available, I buy the e-book.
As a librarian we're often asked about books and their demise.
This is far from true.
If you consider all forms of human communication, over 80% of it is in written form.
Also consider the pro/con of books.
easier to read
lasts much longer than most electronic media formats (cds, dvds, hdd, etc...)
you don't need a computer to read it
durable
cons:
takes up space
not as portable
not easy to access
There are obviously more pro/cons than this but consider the fact books are here to stay for at least another 10-20 years. I hope E-ink makes some significant headway and the huge NYPL digitization project (which will take 10 years to complete)
will make electronic formats more popular.
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.
No one is going to go back to VHS quality just because they can download it faster over the Internet.
Maybe I'm unusual but I'm perfectly happy with download-quality video for most movies. When I rent something and don't watch it before I return it, I'll sometimes copy it to CD until I get the time. It seems fine to me on my mid-range gear. For the kinds of things where picture quality really matters (like, say, a Peter Greenaway film) I'd rather see it in the theater anyhow.
What I really want is a cross between a theater, a bar, and a video store. Imagine a place with a variety of different sized rooms, from 2 seats to 30, all of them equipped with kick-ass AV. Up front, they have beer on tap and good stock of movies and console titles. There's no way I'll drop a few grand on a system I use five hours a month, but I'd happily rent out a room so I and a dozen pals can do a movie night.
Nope. You are an idiot and that guy is a chief executive of Alcatel. His job is not looking out of the window and saying "DVDs are popular". No, it's about looking 10 years into the future, realising that communications in 2015 are going to be very different from what we have today, and then steering the company into that future, using the opportunities and avoiding the threats to maximum shareholders' satisfaction.
Consider this. Whenether any technology is relatively unpopular (aviation in 1899, video downloading in 2005, personal computers in 1970), asking an average person about its prospects is futile. The person is likely to reply with "noone will ever use it, don't you see that is so popular?", which is expected, but totally wrong.
So the fact that most people think DVDs will rule the earth for millennia to come and broadband will never be all that important, doesn't change the fact that those people are shortsighted morons and the fact that the future will be widely different from today.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
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.
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?
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 :)