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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.
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 guess it's "hip" to try to be a visionary by predicting an early death of something.
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.
...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
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
DVD players can be had for under $40. I doubt mass produced BluRay or HD DVD players that still play regular DVDs would cost much more, so people will probably end up buying a dual format player and slowly migrating to the new formats. Discs with entire seasons of shows would be cheaper than the current ones, and thus those discs will probably kick-start the higher def format sales.
I agree that most people would be loathe to replace many DVDs with HDTV format ones, except their very favorite ones.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
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.
"If given the choice to pay for and download movies online, I'd be all over it."
And I suspect that the movie companies would be all over you too, or would that be own you, as you would be one of the first to accept the fact that on-line movies will have DRM written all over it....
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? ---
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
they come on a spindle...
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?
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
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.
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 :)