Why HD-DVD and Blu-ray Are DOA

mikesd81 writes "Slate has up an article on why both new DVD formats are effectively dead on arrival. Article author Sean Cooper cites internet movie and cable on demand services, the price of new hardware, and the inexpensive cost of newer hard drives as the reasons behind his argument. The article goes on to say buying movies online isn't there yet. Titles in standard-def are few, in hi-def fewer still. With five times the visual information of a standard-def flick, an HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection. But consumers are demanding change, and change will happen fast." From the article: "On iTunes an album costs about 10 bucks--as much as $8 less than some CD retailers charge, partially because of the reduced cost of getting music to buyers online. Look for the same savings when it comes to downloading movies. And then there's the fact that hard-disk storage capacities are pushing ever upward while size and price drop. In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing on a drive the size of a deck of cards rather than on 45 DVDs in a box the size of your microwave oven." Phil Harrison is already saying the PlayStation 4 won't use discs.

Comments

Vongo

[eldavojohn]

The article goes on to say buying movies online isn't there yet.

I whole heartedly agree with that.

Disclaimer: I haven't tried online videos through iTunes or any other service but I am a user of Netflix.

I was watching TV the other day and saw a commercial for Vongo. It almost seemed too good to be true. And it was.

The commercial lead me to believe that I was going to open an account on a site and that I would be able to pay $10/month and download any movie I wanted to my hard drive. What a naïve idiot I was.

The problems I had with Vongo:

• They needed my e-mail address just so I could download the client. So even if I didn't like it or join their service, they still had contact info.
• You'll notice their site is in complete Flash--so is their client. And, much to my chagrin, all the movies are viewed through Flash & it's required. I had problems accessing the site with mozilla.
• Not only are the files encrypted (this was expected) but they're of Flash quality meaning that they're bulky and low quality.
• You don't get any movie you want, you get to pick from a selected list. But be careful, only some of those titles are free.
• Of those select titles, the only one I wanted to see was The Devil & Danial Johnston. But when I wanted to download it, Vongo wanted $4 USD for it.
• Two hours later, after D&DJ was finally on my laptop, I tried to watch it only to have a warning pop up informing me that once I started playing it, I had 24 hours to watch it before it deleted itself.

I could continue bitching but I think you get the idea. I was dissatisfied with Vongo & and heavily recommend everyone to stay away from it. The fact that I have to read the fine print in order to understand how their service works should have been a big warning sign. But in my opinion, the free 14 day trial isn't even worth it.

Oh, and one more thing, there was a freaking client application that was set to default start when Windows starts as a service on my laptop. Annoying and invasive.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[drinkypoo]

Just as an aside, if you discount dialup, the average downstream speed is WAY higher than 1.5Mbps. The slowest cable modem services are around 768kbps (not even sure if any of those are still active) and everyone and their mother that's using DOCSIS seems to give you at least 4Mbps now, typically 5Mbps. Satellite is from about 512kbps up to about 1.5Mbps (peak.) DSL is frequently 3Mbps (or more!) now and is pretty much always at least 1Mbps.

HDs vs Optical Disks

[TubeSteak]

Hard Drives have moving parts
Optical Disks don't
Which is more reliable?

That said, the summary is a bit misleading.
Here's the full quote:

"In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing on a drive the size of a deck of cards rather than on 45 DVDs in a box the size of your microwave oven. If you think that sounds far-fetched, consider that shortly after releasing a comprehensive, eight-DVD New Yorker collection (since updated to nine discs), the magazine released the same collection on an (admittedly expensive) iPod-sized hard drive. Which would you rather have, especially once the price of hard drives sinks even lower?"

By "admittedly expensive" they mean $299 for an 80GB drive + all the New Yorker issues... compared to $59.99 for 9 DVDs. I could buy the DVDs, buy a portable hard drive and still have ~$150 to spare.

Why would content providers ever bring the price of a HD based product anywhere close to that of a comparable bundle of optical discs? My answer: They wouldn't. It'll always be a premium product, even as the prices of HD-DVD/BlueRay & HDs drop.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[AKAImBatman]

His prediction is 5 years too early

Not really. iTunes television is taking off now. The technology may not have fully emerged yet, but it is being adopted by the public at an incredible rate. (I actually submitted a story about how "The Office" was saved from cancellation by the iTunes sales. Predictably, it was rejected.) Apples does not provide exact numbers on their TV and movie sales, but it's a pretty good bet that iTunes growth is outpacing Bluray and HDDVD adoption. Given that it took about 5 years for DVDs to replace VHS tapes, it wouldn't surprise me at all if online downloads end up being the unexpected competitor in this round.

Well I think they may be dead

[Sycraft-fu]

But just because they don't offer enough extra. I have an HDTV and really, it's amazing how good DVDs look on it. I have HD cable so I've seen full HD content. Is it better? Yes. Is it an amazing step up? Not so much. Regular DVD movies look pretty good. Well, that's really all that they have to offer.

When DVD came out, it's easy to see why it took over. Not only is the picture better, and even on low end TVs, but the sound is better and supported surround, you can seek instantly, quality doesn't degrade over time, there are extras, the disc is much smaller and so on. Basically DVDs provide a big upgrade to anyone. Even if you are watching an an old 20" TV, DVDs provide extras and a picture that doesn't get worse, in additon to a better picture quality to start with.

Well the HD formats offer none of that. They can, in theory, offer better sound, but only if you have a system capable of the new formats (and I've yet to see a compatible receiver) and only if the disc has it and many don't since Dolby Digital and DTS are the formats that are actually used in theatres. So really you are down to better picture, and only for those that own HD sets which is still a small number of people.

I just don't see there being the reason to upgrade. I'm not going to. Sure an HD picture is nice but really, I'm not unhappy with DVD. It looks good on my HD set. So I can easily see the formats failing for the same reason DVD-Audio failed: lack of interest. I mean DVD-A is better than CD in terms of quality. It's higher sample size and rate, as well as supporting surround sound. However do most people give a shit? No, not worth it to them. To the extent they replace CDs it's with MP3s which, while lower quality, are more convenient.

Re:Well I think they may be dead

[Fezmid]

"They can, in theory, offer better sound, but only if you have a system capable of the new formats (and I've yet to see a compatible receiver) and only if the disc has it and many don't since Dolby Digital and DTS are the formats that are actually used in theatres."

This is not true. I can't speak for Blu-Ray (because I don't have one), but I do have an HD-DVD player and love it. All HD-DVDs have Dolby Digital+ which is better than regular DD. In addition, many HD-DVDs have "TrueHD" audio which is significantly better than DD.

Since the decoding is done in the player (not the receiver), all you need is HDMI 1.1 port to get the audio (it's sent via a PCM stream to the receiver, where extra processing is done for speaker distances, etc). In addition, if you don't have HDMI you can do the same thing with the analog outputs on the player - connect them to the analog inputs on your receiver and the same thing happens. The low end 2nd gen HD-DVD player will not have analog outputs, so if you want the cheap HD-DVD player with analog out, you need to buy it now.

The audio improvements are very good, but probably only if you have a decent setup (ie: "Hoome theater in a box" probably won't notice much of a difference).

I don't think HD-DVD/Blu-Ray will go the way of DVD-A/SACD like a lot of people predict. The sales of this new format completely dwarf what the audio format was selling (well, maybe not Blu-Ray...) http://www.thedvdwars.com/index.cfm

The way I look at it, I can get a player for $350 that makes my current DVDs look better than a normal DVD player and lets me buy new HD-DVDs. I don't need to replace my extensive collection with HD-DVDs unless I want to, and Netflix offers most/all HD-DVDs so I can rent 'em instead of buying if I want. Seems like a no brainer to me, but YMMV.

Music drove the broadband revolution

[PFI_Optix]

It was Napster that really drove broadband adoption for the masses. The ability to download a song in minutes instead of an hour put DSL and cable in high demand.

Will HD video drive the next step and bring the US back into the lead for home internet access? IPTV and HD-on-demand will help drag broadband into the rural areas and increase connection speeds everywhere. Here's hoping he's right and the new HD discs are doomed to fail in favor of digital distribution.

Not all HD programming is real HD

[DG]

One of the things that surprised me when I upgraded to an HD connection was just how much "HD" content was really just upconverted "regular" video.

There is very little programming that is really honestly truly 720p/1080p - but the stuff that is, is spectacular.

I agree with you that a 480p DVD looks pretty damn good on an HD screen, but real shot-in-HD content is a whole lot better.

What I'm afraid of with Blu-Ray/HDVD is a similar problem - is the content actually generated in higher resolutions, or is it just a really good upconvert of lower-res source material?

DG

It's boring is the problem...

[Quiet_Desperation]

...and not worth the effort. 720p this. 1080i that. LCD. Plasma. DLP. Which one looks better. Which one has video lag. Is there still burn in. Who wants to deal with that to buy a fricken' TV set? I'm a technophile, and I can't be bothered with it unless my old, venerable 36" Wega CRT dies tomorrow. I hear people who say things like "standard DVD isn't good enough for MEEEE!" and I ain't gettin' it. It's your own fault if you've trained yourself to see the tiniest video artifacts. You've become the typo Nazis of the video world. Ah, who cares...

Thumb drives and Blockbuster

[gelfling]

What it will evolve to is Blockbuster simply copying a movie to a USB drive and lending you the drive. That way the store doesn't have to actually have any physical inventory at all. You bring the thumb drive home, play the movie - accounting for whatever DRM etc etc etc and then you bring the drive back to Blockbuster for wipe and a new movie. That way the bottleneck is eliminated.

Re:I don't see anybody "demanding" faster connecti

[MBGMorden]

I'm all with ya on the "down with DRM", but you can't take a DRM high-ground whilst proclaiming the superiority of your DVD copy: DVD's have DRM too. Maybe not as strong as the new formats, but it's still present.

He's Right, but his reasons are all wrong.

[MrCopilot]

HD-DVD, BluRay Media & Players
New Consumers, the ones who don't remember The Format Wars of Yore(TM) and who happen to be affluent, will pickup these devices and media but not in enough numbers to save the format. Kind of like the people who bought the UMD concept not remembering MiniDisc travesty.

PS enthusiasts will buy the PS3 but not many movies. PSP rerun

DVD is "good enough" for most consumers. Plus the selection will be 2 million DVD titles to 50 hdDVD and 100 BluRay.

The only thing that may save them is the universal players that the 2 big players don't want.

I have a 15yr old 32" TV and a 15 yr old 27" (oddly enough both Sony) in another room. One has a DVD, One has GameCube (soon to be replaced with a Wii) Both have cable boxes.

On Demand Cable, On demand Gaming, On Demand DVD. Hmmm do I really need to overspend on a new HDTV and expensive as hell player plus overpriced new media, No thanks, If I want high definition I turn on the PC. where the HD media lives anyway.

Here's hoping for a slow and painful death to both new Formats and perhaps one of the producers.

What could have been...

[Kadin2048]

Not only can Xvid/ffmpeg allow you to take that whole box set of The West Wing on a 2.5" laptop hard drive, if you want, it could just as easily give you high definition movies-on-disc, using the DVD technology that we have around right now.

The studios want everyone to believe that to get HD, we have to mess around with an entirely new disc format, but that's bogus. Using the much better compression technologies available today, we could squeeze a highdef movie onto a dual-layer DVD.* Heck, with some DVD players, it would probably just require a firmware reflash to be able to play them. The entirely new disc and drive mechanism is there to purposely break forwards-compatibility.

But, because such a format wouldn't offer the studios total control over your living room, it's never going to happen as long as the movie studios have any say in the matter.

* Apple's page says H.264 can compress 1920x1080 down to around 8Mb/s, so given a DVD-9 capacity of around 6.8E10 bits, that's about 140 min of video. This is comparable to MPEG-2 SD video, which is allowed at up to 9.8Mb/s by the DVD Video specification.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[doctor_no]

Not only are downloads speeds an issue, even if 100Mbs speeds were available to every single household, imagine running a server & network that is going to serve 10-15GB movies at 100Mbs to tens of thousands of households and only charge $10-15 per movie. For a 10GB HD movie, you will need 10 terabytes of bandwidth for every 1,000 people downloading. Now imagine a big release that expects sales in hundreds of thousands or in the millions in the first week.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[jmorris42]

> Well according to this link we will start seeing 100 mbps downloads much sooner than that.

Well reality says otherwise. I have 3Mbps ADSL now, can soon get 6. Period end of story. BellSouth won't be upgrading their plant here in the forseeable future. They only installed DSL because the State told them to make it available in every parish seat. Outside those towns it doesn't exist, even when towns are bigger than some parish seats. Cities do pretty much all have DSL. We also have cable modems as an option and they have at least made a big show of installing fiber around town. Pointless because they are bottlenecked at the exit to a fractional T3 from BellSouth to get out of town.

Moore's Law doesn't apply to connect speeds in the US because the limit isn't tech, it is AT&T's renewed monopoly.

Now with that reality in mind, BlueRay or HD-DVD will find a ready market because Netflix over USPS will have a better throughput than the fastest bitrate IPTV over DSL or Cable are likely to provide the average home in the next decade.

And as for the article positing hard drives for delivery thst is just daft and show someone with no knowledge of how the industry actually works. Take his example of The West Wing. 45 DVDs can be pressed and boxed for less than $30. HD-DVD is a contender for the reason it doesn't cost any more to make, only a few more patent royalties to pay. BlueRay DOES cost a little more now but won't in another year or two when it will matter, but assume it would cost $50 to put the whole series on. Exactly when will hard drives drop down to that pricepoint?

And why would they be insane enough to popularize such a format? Think about it from their POV, they don't want a format to have too much capacity, lest customers expect it to be used. The second you ship an entire series on one piece of media who will buy a season set and not realize most of the space is blank. And a series set won't be able to be sold for nearly as much as the sum of the season boxes, especially if it comes on the same single piece of media in the same small DVD case.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Steve001]

falcon5768 wrote:

YEs but you also have the fact that people are also not willing to upgrade their TVs, DVD collections, and anything else they need to either.

People tried to upgrade CDs (remember audio DVDs and Minidisk) The market said screw you and jumped to MP3 around 10 years later. I suspect the same will happen

I think another factor causing people not to upgrade to the new format is that for most people DVD is a good enough video format. Also, I think all future formats are going to be so locked down by DRM that they won't allow the relatively free use that current DVDs have.

DRM lockdown is a reason that I think that both DVD-Audio and SACD will not succeed in the marketplace. I do think they will end up occupying a niche in the market, similar to the place that open-reel tape decks occupied during the LP era. In order for these formats to succeed they are going to have to be as readily available and usable as CD is right now. Like with DVD, I suspect that for most people the CD format is good enough.

I think there were many factors which led to the lack of success of the minidisc format, including:

• The very high cost of the recorders: When I first looked for a recorder (about a year after the format was introduced) the lowest cost home deck I could find cost $1,000. At the same time I found a DCC deck for $400 and so I chose that format.
• The introduction of recordable CDs, non-skipping portable CD players, and the MP3 format: These three factors together allowed you to store much more music on a CD and take it with you. Minidisc was limited to 80 minutes of compressed audio on a disc and I think the introduction of HD-minidisc was too late for the format.

I think a mistake that was made with the attempt to introduce a successor to the CD format is that it was not done as part of the DVD format. If the audio industry had got together when the DVD standard was being established, and established a single audio format as part of the standard that could be played on all DVD players it might have succeeded.

Current BD vs. HD-DVD Numbers

[larryj]

Current numbers for Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD sales are available here.

I have no idea which of the two will survive (or if either will). It will probably be Blu-ray since I bought the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 this past weekend. I have a Panasonic 50" plasma (not 1080p, it's scaling to 720p/768p) but HD-DVD movies still look MUCH better than standard DVD. If it does die out, at least it was only $200. I'll enjoy Netflix HD-DVD rentals and a few purchases in the meantime.

I've been doing some research the last few days. My understanding of the history is that HD-DVD was released first. Blu-ray (commonly referred to as 'BD' which is short for Blu-ray disc I suppose) has more storage capacity and everyone expected the picture quality to be better. But that didn't happen. The initial BD releases were very disappointing and many people felt that HD-DVD looked better. New releases are apparently equal in picture quality. I think a lot of this has to do with the available drives as well as the mastering process. HD-DVD jumped out to a pretty big lead (not that either has sold a lot) but with the PS3 coming out tomorrow, there will be a lot more Blu-ray owners.

I'm curious to know how many 360 HD-DVD drives have already been sold and how it will continue to sell.

Who here actually owns a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD?

[MrJynxx]

I actually just picked up an HD-DVD for the 360 on Tuesday. So far on my 47" old HDTV(purchased in 2003) it is displaying the movies beautifully!

King Kong that came with it was pretty good. I REALLY noticed a difference when the scenes were in the forest or something with a lot of color. The colors and the brightness in the picture is much better. But I picked up Fast and the Furious Tokyo drift (ok ok, I know, terrible movie but the scenes in Tokyo was great) . And I could see a noticeable difference with the picture quality especially the reflection in the cars, etc.. It was like I was watching the movie through a window in Tokyo.

And to think, I think my HDTV is kinda shitty now compared to what's offered now (projection, doesn't look as good as my other friends tv's)

I want 2160p60+ format

[Skapare]

But that's going to require a disk with 100 to 300 GB of data. Well, for movies I'll settle for the frame rate being exactly what the original film was shot at and let my display up-scan it to some integral multiple over 60 Hz. of course this means I'm going to have to find a display that good at a decent price.

Sure, 720p and 1080i are a good notch above 480i. But it's not that good that I would be willing to buy into an HD media format for higher than what DVD costs today. When the HD media format gets down to this price, then why not. But until then, it's just not really worth it.

But a 25 GB optical disk would be nice to hold a kick ass Linux distribution and a whole lot of music.