Lessons From the HD Format War

mlimber writes "The New York Times' Freakonomics blog asks a panel of experts, 'Is the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray really over? What can we learn from it?' The panel suggests, among other things, that Sony achieved a Pyrrhic victory because high-def DVDs will be outmoded before they reap enough profits to make up for what they (and Toshiba) paid out for both product development and bribes to win the support of content providers."

Comments

Lesson #1

[morari]

No one really cares.

Re:Lesson #1

[jollyreaper]

No one really cares. Agreed. Doesn't really matter what source it was ripped from, so long as the torrent's seeded. :)

uh

[Brian Gordon]

do they read slashdot? bluray is out of production.

Re:uh

[Constantine XVI]

You're either confused or a troll. It's HD-DVD that's out of production.

What I learned

[Naughty Bob]

The lesson I draw is that content providers are wholly opposed to consumers interests, and that open, collaborative standards are the only healthy way forward.

Re:What I learned

[RingDev]

content providers are wholly opposed to consumers interests I wouldn't go quite that far. I would say that content providers are wholly interested in making a profit, and the consumers have a strong interest in getting the greatest possible value for their money.

-Rick

Re:What I learned

[gstoddart]

The lesson I draw is that content providers are wholly opposed to consumers interests, and that open, collaborative standards are the only healthy way forward.

Of course, it should be noted that the media companies who will be giving us content on these things are not going to participate in "open, collaborative standards" -- it's just not done.

There will be one, if not two, iterations of the "next next generation" of this technology before you get one that gets adopted as widespread as DVD was. The amount of people with next-gen displays is too small, and too many people are now leery about the next "new hotness" that they'll stay away even more now.

I'm not saying you don't make a good point. Just, they're not really looking out for your interests here, and they figure they can get everyone to buy a new generation of technology every time they think it's due. Once they come up with the next direction, they'll still change it to &^%& often.

Cheers

Re:What I learned

[Naughty Bob]

Of course, it should be noted that the media companies who will be giving us content on these things are not going to participate in "open, collaborative standards" -- it's just not done.

And up until now they'd have gotten away with it. But computer and internet technology is proving to be a great leveler. As humanity find its feet in this brave new digital age, we will find that these middle men are as anachronistic and obsolete as the proverbial buggy-whip makers of a hundred years ago.

Unite, comrades! (sorry, carried away...)

Re:What I learned

[gstoddart]

And up until now they'd have gotten away with it. But computer and internet technology is proving to be a great leveler.

Sadly, so is the ability to lobby for copyright extension, have that written into international trade agreements, and argue that police should use the pretense of stopping piracy to combat terrorism when they don't have enough real evidence for a warrant.

The internet may have a natural tendency to push us towards an equal playing field and the like, but the ability to get the lawmakers to entrench your business model seems to push back against that.

But, me, I'm just cynical about the whole damned thing nowadays. The future is not utopian ... it's far more dystopian than we've hoped. :-P

Cheers

Re:What I learned

[Firehed]

True. But most consumers are also mind-bogglingly stupid, so the greatest possible value can be just above zero (in this case, improved picture and audio quality wrapped with a ton more DRM at a much higher cost than the alternative) and they'll still buy it.

You don't need to have much value, just more than your competition; lazy start-ups, take note.

(also worth noting is that you just have to convince them that value exists; it doesn't have to actually be there, you just need a plausible argument and to omit any counterpoints)

Re:What I learned

[Cajun Hell]

I would say that content providers are wholly interested in making a profit,

This isn't clear. With music, DRM is just about dead now: the content providers are really focusing on creating usable/buyable products. That is, they are trying to maximize their profit, rather than, say, Apple's or Pioneer's.

With video, though, DRM is far from dead. They are still trying to lock people into using specific players and monitors. This is perhaps a move to maximize profits, but not necessarily for the content providers. When you have big players like Sony, who sells both media and the equipment to view that media, things get complex. It looks like there's an effort to maximize profit for the equipment manufacturers and proprietary software companies, rather than the content providers.

It's accepted that you can now listen to music on whatever you want. (If I sell MP3s or CDDA/wav, I don't have to worry about who can buy it.) But with movies, there's still a fight over what customers should be allowed to watch the movie on. They're still acting like they don't want a free market in playback devices, even if that costs them content sales revenue.

When the content providers start moving to maximize their own profits (or the profits of their content division, in cases like Sony), you'll know it. It'll be about selling bytes to as many consumers as possible, instead of limiting their sales to the subset of movie watchers who have bought the "right" player products.

Re:What I learned

[Naughty Bob]

Sadly, so is the ability to lobby for copyright extension, have that written into international trade agreements, and argue that police should use the pretense of stopping piracy to combat terrorism when they don't have enough real evidence for a warrant.

All true, but everything you say is a short term, political-climate oriented problem; here at the moment, but not necessarily in the future.

Our killer new technology is going to persist, becoming ever more accessible and advanced. We will win, we're only discussing how long the corporations' treasure will last in forestalling the inevitable.

Re:What I learned

[gstoddart]

All true, but everything you say is a short term, political-climate oriented problem; here at the moment, but not necessarily in the future. ...snip... We will win, we're only discussing how long the corporations' treasure will last in forestalling the inevitable.

*laugh* Well, you have to pass through the one to get to the other. So it's got to clear that hurdle without getting waylaid.

Hopefully we get something cool, instead of a Max Headroom future.

I'm hopeful, but not optimistic about that. :-P

Cheers

Re:What I learned

[Naughty Bob]

Also-

The future is not utopian

Agreed, utopias were always an ideal, rather than a realistic goal.

... it's far more dystopian than we've hoped.

Disagree- look around you. We (those with access to slashdot) life in paradise. Actual, here-right-now paradise. We live a life undreamed of by, as far as we know, every instance of sentience that ever existed. Not perfect, but, when viewed without the encumbrances our healthy cynicism generates, shockingly beautiful.

Re:What I learned

[ccguy]

Sony, who sells both media and the equipment to view that media, things get complex.

You are forgetting the equipment to _copy_ the media and the _blank_ media. Basically with 100% sony stuff you can make a copy of a DVD you buy from sony pictures and still hear them complain about piracy and them not getting enough money.

Re:What I learned

[DrgnDancer]

While there may be an argument that the "Music Industry" is at least partially redundant, and that the ability of everyday artists to sell themselves in a brave new digital world will eventually weaken or even kill the record company's strangle-hold, I feel this is much less likely with movies. There are two points to consider:

1) While it is possible to make a pretty good audio recording in a basement with a laptop, and possible to make a studio quality recording for a few hundred bucks of rental time in a studio, it is nearly impossible to make a movie with anything less than hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's for an independent film made on a shoe-string. For a studio quality movie, you're talking a few million minimum. People don't have the money to make video "content" without the backing of large studios. This isn't going to change, these expenses aren't (mostly) going to be affected by technology. They're related to the inherent expense of getting a lot of people and equipment together in one place, feeding them, paying them, making costumes for them, etc. Even if Apple announced tomorrow that it was offering free Power Macs with Final Cut Pro to movie producers, and special effects costs dropped to zero over night, it would still cost millions to make a good movie. Studios are more than middle men, they financiers.

2) Unlike music, which existed before the modern age, and has business models that could survive an EMP taking out every piece of electronics on the planet; movies are a whole cloth product of the "middle man" era. The studios "own" movie making in a way that the record industry can never "own" music making. I can go to a local bar an see a decent unsigned band, I could learn to play an instrument and make my own music if I wanted. I could never do this with movies (at least beyond the "slightly edited home video" level"). Even "independent" film makers are the owners or employees of studios, just smaller studios. The entire process of making movies, from the production to the distribution is tied to the studio model.

I just don't see "content" being separated from the "middle man" in this particular industry. At least not any time soon.

Re:What I learned

[Naughty Bob]

For sure, movies will be harder to extract from the grip of these parasites than music/books/etc. But this is peculiar to the medium, and less so every day. Many great films are already made independently of the blockbuster machine-

The last good film I saw, No Country For Old Men, could easily have been made on a budget. Only the hangover effects of the insidious status quo (essentially, distribution and credibility) prevented the Coens from doing this entirely independently.

Re:What I learned

[SanityInAnarchy]

That's assuming it works. There was a story sometime about a Sony DVD player unable to play certain Sony "DVDs" which had broken the spec, in an effort to not be playable or rippable on PCs, while still being playable on hardware players.

You'd expect them to have tested it, and I'm sure they did. But you'd also have expected them to test it on their own player.

So, basically, I'm no longer convinced there's an intelligent business decision being made anywhere.

Re:What I learned

[rdebath]

I don't agree

Movies are about telling a story; storytelling is a old as music perhaps older. Now while it costs money to have a thousand anonymous faces (I just watched V for Vendetta) or well known names or locations a good story can often be told without it.

With modern computers crowd scenes can be faked anyway if live scenes would be too expensive.

One of my favorite movies of all time is "Arsenic and old Lace", with modern equipment, it could easily have been filmed as a small club project.

Now blowing up lots of stuff; that might be expensive! But that's what animation is for... perhaps the next release of "poser".

Re:What I learned

[donaldm]

You are forgetting the equipment to _copy_ the media and the _blank_ media. Basically with 100% sony stuff you can make a copy of a DVD you buy from sony pictures and still hear them complain about piracy and them not getting enough money. That equipment is a DVD burner/player and software. Just because a DVD burner/player may be integrated in a Sony PC does not mean that it is anything special in that it's firmware is more DRM laden than any other DVD device. What really allows you to copy or play DVD's is not the hardware but the Software and I think you need to ask were does that software come from and what is the main OS that software runs on.

Re:What I learned

[SpooForBrains]

2) Unlike music, which existed before the modern age, and has business models that could survive an EMP taking out every piece of electronics on the planet; movies are a whole cloth product of the "middle man" era. The studios "own" movie making in a way that the record industry can never "own" music making. I can go to a local bar an see a decent unsigned band, I could learn to play an instrument and make my own music if I wanted. I could never do this with movies (at least beyond the "slightly edited home video" level"). Even "independent" film makers are the owners or employees of studios, just smaller studios. The entire process of making movies, from the production to the distribution is tied to the studio model.

You're forgetting about the theatre. If there were a permanent global electronics outage, people looking for their video fix would be going to the theatre, in the same way that people looking for their audio fix would be going to live acoustic gigs.

Re:What I learned

[ichigo 2.0]

1) While it is possible to make a pretty good audio recording in a basement with a laptop, and possible to make a studio quality recording for a few hundred bucks of rental time in a studio, it is nearly impossible to make a movie with anything less than hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's for an independent film made on a shoe-string. For a studio quality movie, you're talking a few million minimum. People don't have the money to make video "content" without the backing of large studios. This isn't going to change, these expenses aren't (mostly) going to be affected by technology. They're related to the inherent expense of getting a lot of people and equipment together in one place, feeding them, paying them, making costumes for them, etc. Even if Apple announced tomorrow that it was offering free Power Macs with Final Cut Pro to movie producers, and special effects costs dropped to zero over night, it would still cost millions to make a good movie. Studios are more than middle men, they financiers.

I agree, hiring actors, crew and other people required in modern filmmaking costs a lot. This doesn't mean that technology won't solve this problem though. After a couple of decades real actors will become as anachronistic as real special effects are today.

Re:What I learned

[DrgnDancer]

I'm sorta-kinds in industry (I work for a facility that offers general High performance computing services, one of the things we do is post processing for small movie houses), and I get to go to a few small scale premiers here and there. One in particular sticks out in my mind. It about a young man, who, in a fit of post-college "OMG I'm Broke" goes to work with his uncle doing insurance adjustments in Post Katrina New Orleans. The thing was filmed literally in a couple weeks wandering around New Orleans in public places (and a few bits of abandoned private property that they "borrowed"). The actors worked for food and a share of the hopeful eventual profits. This thing was as on the cheap as possible. It was an enjoyable film, but also one that felt like it could have been a lot better if there had been money to do it "right". The director himself admitted this. It cost a couple hundred thousand dollars.

This tells me that for even a really professional job, even with special effects or any strange "extras", a movie done "right" is a million dollar project. The Coens might be able to make movies with this kind of price tag, or even a bit more, on their own (though they'd be taking a big risk with their own money), but movies would become a rich man's game. Only people with a few mil to invest in a project would be able to make the simplest movies. You'd need to put together a conglomerate of investors to make a "Lord of the Rings". Trust me, add the cost of sets, costumes, make up, cameras, camera rigs, film (not so much any more), editing time, simple effects generation, actors, lighting, techs, food for all of these people (you can't just have them all go to lunch from noon to 1, you have to feed them) on location travel, etc, and even the most simplistic "this could have been made on a budget" movie costs millions.

Re:What I learned

[DrgnDancer]

See my reply to the above comment. You can keep costs down, but even the simplest movies cost a fortune to make.

Re:What I learned

[DrgnDancer]

Theater and movies are separate art forms. Movies are as much about post-processing and the directors vision as they are about the production itself. Watch a video shoot of a play sometime, even a really good one. It's nether as good as a movie or a real play would have been. The two don't mesh. You are right that if movies suddenly all went away (as in my fictional EMP), people would start watching plays instead; but short of such a disaster, one is not going to replace the other.

Re:What I learned

[DrgnDancer]

After a couple of decades real actors will become as anachronistic as real special effects are today.

I hope not. Even animated movies benefit from the personalities installed in the characters by their voice actors. The total removal of acting from the process of movies making would make it an entirely different art form.

Re:What I learned

[mrdjames]

Let's talk about the conflict of interest. Sony makes the players, is a movie producer, and a music label producer. They exist purely on the fact that at some point it was TOO expensive to go in and edit a film or cut an album yourself. You needed their help. Now you can pretty much produce, edit, and distribute content as long as you have a computer with the right software and an internet connection. At some point, the DISTRIBUTION channel will be the internet, and all videos/mp3 will exist in a NON PHYSICAL space, meaning you can't really touch it. This may be our last physical media discussion. The next one will be how you pull the media off your internet pipe and create physical media yourself at your house.

Re:What I learned

[ichigo 2.0]

If it looks like a real actor and sounds like a real actor, then how is it any worse than a real actor? Real actors might have more personality, but if you'll be able to get an actor that is 95% as good as a real one and costs 5% then most movie makers will opt for the CG ones.

lesson 2

[OrochimaruVoldemort]

stay out of the format wars unless you can profit it either way

Re:lesson 2

[gnick]

[troll]
Simple solution: Just end the format wars for good. Merge all the large corporations into one huge conglomerate. The only risk would be that they may not have the best interest of the people at heart... Solution: Have the government run the new corporation! And, to avoid foreign influence competing with our new utopia, close all foreign trade except for raw materials. I've just fixed society! What could possibly go wrong?
[/troll]

Re:lesson 2

[Amouth]

What could possiably go wrong?

5$ says it takes them longer to figure out what to name the damn thing than it takes the land to emplode on it's self

it just woln't work.. everyone will want to call it something diffrent - there will be mass confusion

Re:lesson 2

[OrangeTide]

You jest but people think think that is a good idea do exist, and some of them we've actually elected to office. I don't understand the minority that thinks the government can be operated to benefit citizens. That's not how governments work in America at least.

shhhh

[clusterlizard]

Yeah, Brian, so now that the war has ended, go and buy that hd-dvd player you've been wanting! Don't forget to pick up a car load of hd-dvd movies while you're out!

Lesson?

[kellyb9]

I think the major lesson is, if you have a large pool of huge companies supporting you, your format will win. I can think of two reasons off the top of my head why Blue Ray won - Blockbuster and PS3.

Re:Lesson?

[OrochimaruVoldemort]

a better example would be wal-mart and netflix

Re:Lesson?

[yo_tuco]

"a better example would be wal-mart and netflix"

An even better example:

• Disney (Buena Vista)
• Fox
• HBO
• Lionsgate
• MGM
• New Line Cinema
• Paramount
• Sony Pictures
• Universal Studios
• Warner Bros.

Re:Lesson?

[Phroggy]

I'd say WalMart, Blockbuster and Netflix were more influential than the studios. Most people don't care what format the studios are releasing in, they care what format their retail store of choice is selling.

Re:Lesson?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but those retailers wouldn't have anything to push if the source didn't create it.

Re:Lesson?

[Phroggy]

Maybe, but those retailers wouldn't have anything to push if the source didn't create it. True, but as long as some of the major studios are releasing BluRay movies, if WalMart exclusively carries BluRay, many consumers will buy a BluRay disc from WalMart rather than going elsewhere to find a movie that WalMart doesn't sell.

Re:Lesson?

[AHumbleOpinion]

An even better example: Disney (Buena Vista) Fox HBO Lionsgate MGM New Line Cinema Paramount Sony Pictures Universal Studios Warner Bros.

To be honest, if WalMart had said we will only carry HD players and HD discs those studios (except maybe Sony Pictures) would have abandoned BlueRay exclusivity, maybe even BlueRay entirely. You can be sure that their lawyers/execs would have had some sort of escape clause based upon such a scenario in their agreements with Sony. "Material adverse change" type stuff.

Re:Lesson?

[kellyb9]

It wasn't that MS wasn't big enough to make a difference. It was that they were largely indifferent. They weren't at all invested in HD DVD's.

Re:Lesson?

[Wdomburg]

The main reason is much shorter - Sony. By bundling into their gaming platform they got millions of adopters for free. And their ownership of two movie studios (Sony Pictures, MGM) guaranteed them a content advantage as well.

And Paramount and Universal didn't annouce Blu-ray support until after Toshiba announced they were dropping the format, so including them on your list is highly disingenuous.

Re:Lesson?

[nuzak]

> J.K. Rowling took the idea of Voldemort from the same lore Orochimaru was taken from.

I severely doubt she ever read it. It's not like even the likeness of Yamata no Orochi is exactly "original" unless you're saying the Greeks copied the Hydra from them.

Manga otaku get worked up over the silliest things.

Re:Lesson?

[westlake]

An even better example: Disney (Buena Vista)

HD-DVD was on the road to nowhere without Disney on board. I'll take the odds that your kids are being drawn into a local production of "High School Musical." That "Ratatouille" was the only Oscar winner to sell out at the multiplex.

Re:Lesson?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Hang on -- I wasn't paying that much attention, but I thought Universal was HD-DVD exclusively? I know Warner was the one that switched...

you crazy commie bastard

[Reality Master 201]

Consumers' interests? Pfft. We're talking IP protections here!

And finding a reason to sell millions of people new DVD players.

simple

[ILuvRamen]

If someone would have made a cheap combo player fast enough that could play both formats, they could have both been making profits instead of one losing money and the other probably still losing money from so many bribes. It's sort of like a betting on a drag race and then spending $20,000 to upgrade your car while the other guy spends $25,000 and the bet is only $1000 so that's all you win. By the time they start turning a profit on blu-ray, the next format will be released.

Re:simple

[businessnerd]

But having one player and two formats is just so damn wasteful. If we are treating both as if they are one format, why have two in the first place? All it does is create confusion. Us nerds may be fully aware that our player can play both, but Joe sixpack is sitting there not buying one or the other because he doesn't realize there's no difference (player-wise). Both should have agreed on a common format from the beginning, then they would all be making lots money off of hardware sales, instead of one making some money while the other looses it all. The fight was pointless anyway. By the time Blu-Ray becomes profitable, donwloadable movies will have become worthwhile (I hope).

So here's a lesson to all of the downloadable movie providers. Cater to what the customer wants. Customers didn't want a format war and I'm still not sure they even want a new format to begin with. So here's what we all want out of a downloadable movie: STANDARD OPEN FORMAT. This pretty much covers all of the problems with downloadable movies right now. I want my movie to play on any OS. I want it to play as many times as I want. I want it to be able to transfer to any device. I want to be able to make a backup. I want it to be as good if not better than DVD in overall quality. Right now, what we have out there is one company who has it sort of right and a bunch who don't have it right at all. Once again, the sort of right company is Apple. As far as I know, the video works much like the music. I download a physical copy (not streamed), I can move it to other devices (but only Apple devices). I can play that file multiple times (not sure if its infinite). Some of my other points, I'm not sure if Apple covers or not. I know the quality is nowhere near DVD, so that sucks. Apple at least is trying to solve the "last ten feet" issue of getting the video in the living room. As I said before, it only works with Apple devices like the iPod or the AppleTV. Portable's nice, but I want to choose the device. Apple also uses some DRM, but like the music its manageable. At the end of the day, I want it on my home theater. The others out there are just awful (Netflix I'm looking at you). They are either streaming the video (means low quality to deal with the bandwidth) or they use pretty awful DRM that requires Windows Media Player 11. You only get a small window to watch the movie, or you only get a restricted number of plays. That's fine for "rentals" but what if I want to own a copy? The downloadable movie market is looking just like the downloadable music market looked five years ago. A handful of companies who just don't get it, and Apple who gets it, kinda, but still wants some control. I'm hoping Amazon can come to the rescue again on this.

Re:simple

[BootNinja]

Netflix is actually doing it pretty well. Granted, I hate that it is a WMP11 plugin, so I can't watch in Linux, but most plans now have unlimited online viewing, and if you have decent bandwidth, the video quality is at least as good as DVD. Overall, the only thing I'm really terribly disapointed in is the selection, but that's getting better all the time.

Re:simple

[ppanon]

The other thing is, of course, that all these "incentives" for the studios are going to have to be recup'ed from player sales and licencing, delaying the drop in price that would normally happen from production efficiency improvements and economies of scale as the technology matures and gains customer acceptance. That could wind up biting the studios as well because, without enough mass market penetration of BR players, disk pressings will be smaller and disk authoring and pressing costs will have to be spread over a smaller customer base, thus keeping BR disks much more expensive than DVDs as well. So well said, Pyrrhic victory indeed.

As a customer, the only winning move is NOT TO PLAY.

Apart for those Pixar (and older Disney) cartoons that kids insist on watching over and over again, don't purchase any movies and just rent DVDs for the next few years. There will be a point where the BluRay cartel will either have to write off the payments to the studios and start selling cheap players (so that the price of media can come down as well), or you can just skip this whole technological dead-end for its replacement in a decade.

Re:simple

[hazydave]

The existence of a few cheap dual-format players wouldn't have been enough. That solves today's issue: "I can't get film X on format B because they're only supporting format H". But it doesn't itself solve tomorrow's problem: can I play all of my discs on a typical player of 2012? If the format war could have lasted long enough to ensure dual-format was the defacto standard (like DVD-R vs. DVD+R), this could have happened. The problem is, the format war limited the growth of both formats, and thus, the money available to invest. It also didn't help HD-DVD that they only had Toshiba in their camp... both dual-format players came from the Blu-Ray side of things. That was guaranteed, since Tosbiba was selling at or below cost, thus preventing any other CE company from entering the HD-DVD only business.

But the worst problem was the need to have dual sets of hardware royalties on a dual format players. Most of the hardware's the same, and while you need extra work and perhaps two blue laser heads on a dual format disc reader, that's a small thing, comparatively. In time, prices fall, but it's nearly impossible in this kind of war, because it's the popular adoption of a format like CD or DVD that turns your $1000 player into a $20 player... and that won't happen when most consumers are waiting for the end of the format war. Even cheaper dual format players doesn't guarantee that dual format becomes the standard... only absolute success of both formats could have done this.

So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[mozumder]

Players that aren't "PS3"?

Toshiba is right: the physical disc is dead. No one is going to buy Blu-Ray players like no one bought HD-DVD players. Everyone is going to download their HD movies onto servers.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[ivan256]

More standalone BluRay players sold than standalone HD-DVD players. Not counting the PS3 at all. So, yes.

As for downloads, they are currently a fantasy. Downloads could succeed if there were an outlet for downloaded movies similar to online MP3 stores. Download from a vast library covering a huge portion of recorded video, and keep the file to watch as many times as you'd like essentially forever... But no such thing exists on a large enough scale. Most content that is available is for limited time use and a restricted number of viewings, and the availability of titles is small. BluRay has nothing to fear from download competition until this is worked out, and there is no sign of progress.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[CambodiaSam]

As great as that sounds, I'm not downloading anything other than rentals.

I rarely watch movies more than a couple times, but for music or some movies, I'm buying it on physical media. Why? Because like most of the populace, I don't have a server or the organizational skills to keep up with a media collection. Hard drives die, Windows needs to get reinstalled (again), or other catastrophic events tend to reduce my collection of MP3s and videos. If I have it in the closet on a disc, at least I can pop it in again whenever I want. Plus, I don't have to fight the DRM restrictions as fiercly.

In my own fantasy utopia (at the risk of getting Trolled), I would buy a license for the bit of media that I want and the distributor would allow me unlimited playing rights on any device. If I lost a copy of the media, I could download it again. After all, I own the license, right?

But no, media companies are obsessed with reselling the same content as many times as possible to the same people. How many special basement-THX-director's-cut-lost-hidden-import-bootleg versions of Blade Runner do I need?

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[thewils]

I'm waiting until they can beam movies directly into my brain. Servers are for wusses.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[Anonymous Coward]

But no such thing exists on a large enough scale. Are you sure?

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[MozeeToby]

I just don't buy that people are going to download HD content. You can't really compress it any more than it is on the disk without having lossy compression, which kind of negates the whole "HD" concept. I think people tend to view downloads differently from disks. They expect to be able to go online, find a movie, download it and watch it almost immediatly. I have a 5 Meg connection, which I will grant is pretty typical right now (yes there are people with more, but there are a lot of people with less). In reality, my 5 meg connection actually gets about 1.5 megs/s on a good day which means that for a 20 gig movie, it will take just about 4 hours to download, which means that I can't start watching the moview for about 2-2.5 hours. And that assumes current usage by everyone else thats sharing my cable bandwidth. If you have every household suddenly downloading 100+ gigs a month in movies, the current infrustructure will collapse. You'll be begging the ISP's to manage the data and bandwidth which will just give the the opportunity to manage for everything else while their at it. Ask yourself, do you really see every household in america paying for a 15 meg connection ($100+ in my location) just so they can watch movies? Or do you think that the telcos will suddenly decide to upgrade thier infrustructure, not just to your neighborhood but also to every rural area in the US (still more than 45% of the population). Throw in the fact that you physically have the disc. That you can take it easily to a friends house or let them borrow it. Not to mention how few people are really prepared to buy/build/maintain a dedicated media server in their home. I just don't see HD downloads as viable withing the next 5 years, probably not for the next 10 with the speed the infrustructure is being upgraded.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[ivan256]

I actually consider the selection of actively seeded torrents on The Pirate Bay to be pretty poor. New releases are popular and easily available.. And a few classics... But other than that it's fairly weak.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[Klaus_1250]

Everyone is going to download their HD movies onto servers. Slashdotters may have (media)servers, most people don't. But even if they did have, there is still the issue that many countries don't have a decent fast broadband infrastructure. Even if you can get a 20Mb/s+ connection (which would be needed for streaming HD or decent downloading), that line is still overbooked xx times; it's not going to work if people start renting/buying movies online en masse. And I doubt that all ISP's are investing in backbones that are capable of handling such a large amount of traffic that will ensue if digital delivery takes. They are already complaining today about p2p.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[mea37]

"Everyone" will download their HD content? Well, that may be the future, but not the near future. That's the one point where I think the cited experts are off -- they mostly seem to assume that download / streaming services are already knocking on the door, whereas I'd say the market for physical media still has some running room.

Enough to make a profit? Don't know -- they did spend a lot of money on this war. But, sunk costs are sunk costs and can't be wished away; I'd rather be Sony than Toshiba in this situation.

Don't get me wrong; the technology moves fast. Someone "could" set up a download-based video store today -- though I'm not sure how well it would scale on the various network infrastructures they'd hit today.

But the technology isn't the only thing that has to move. The businesses have to move. Oh, they're making their plays, but they're not thinking big just yet; and they seem a long way from the insight that profit is not maximized by making the customer into the enemy.

Also, the public has to move. You may think that downloading a video is so easy anyone could do it; but even though you're surrounded by people like yourself, you are in the minority when it comes to the market of movie-watchers. A lot of people still have a VCR, with a clock that needs to be set manually, which they can't set. A lot of people don't have a PC with a broadband conection.

And of the people who "could" move to all-downloads-all-the-time, not everyone will; not right away, anyway. I'm not treating a subscription to a video stream as "equivalent" to a physical disc; I've watched how companies will leverage central storage and on-demand distribution into control and, eventually, extra money from your wallet. Or, the movie you want to see isn't popular to keep in live storage any more, so too bad for you. I'm also not putting up with extra "protections" that providers like to put in place to offset the perceived risk that I'll pirate the video (apparently if it's on a disc I'd probably be honest, but if it's pre-ripped that'll just push me over the edge...) -- or more likely just to again squeeze more money out of me for the same thing I was already getting.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[Klaus_1250]

5 Meg(abyte per second) = 40Mbps. Not sure where you live, but (FTTH/ETTH/VDSL/Docsis 3) not typical in most countries (yet).

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[Cecil]

The same is true of almost any genre of stuff you can find on TPB. It is the way it is because it's a public tracker. Private ratio trackers have more incentive for people to seed older stuff.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[Tetsujin]

But no, media companies are obsessed with reselling the same content as many times as possible to the same people. How many special basement-THX-director's-cut-lost-hidden-import-bootleg versions of Blade Runner do I need? If you're gonna use something like Blade Runner as an example, then you need to consider that they're happy to sell you as many copies as you're willing to buy. If people weren't buying the redundant editions they wouldn't sell 'em...

Far more insidious IMO is when one is sold a defective product, like the badly-translated Zeta Gundam or a DVD with marginally defective encoding - and thus they make another sale by fixing the problem and releasing a new edition...

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[Cal Paterson]

Firstly, paragraphs make things clearer.

Secondly, 720p can be done at about 2000kbps with x264, and easily lower than that. A 720p feature length could be done between 2gb and 3gb, and easily than that. Pirates are forging the way in this respect, as a quick google will show. The rest of your conjecture is of even lower quality than your "20gb" number.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[trenien]

So there's a market.

Well, as soon as you can convince the producers they'll make more money selling downloaded version with no DRM for $1-$2.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[poot_rootbeer]

Slashdotters may have (media)servers, most people don't.

A set-top DVR box IS a media server, albeit one that's been crippled to only offer content specifically allowed by the cable provider.

It won't be long before someone opens these devices up to the Internet-at-large and regular customers discover, and ultimately take for granted, the ability to obtain and view digital video content whenever they want, from wherever they want, in whatever format they want.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[MozeeToby]

Well in that case why are we bothering with HD media at all? Why not just put HD content onto a regular DVD at higher compression? Could it be because quality goes down?

You also can't tell me that the current infrustructure can support every HD home downloading HD content on a regular basis. For example, everynight at midnight, my cable company's cable box downloads the next days schedule.

The internet crawls to a halt for almost a half hour while all the cable boxes get updated. This is probably a 1 meg file to each of their customers. Compare that to even a small percentage of people trying to download an HD movie on a saturday night, even at the 2 gig figure that you claim.

And finally... sorry about the lack of paragraphs, forgot to switch it to Plain Old Text.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[rrkap]

Firstly, paragraphs make things clearer.

Secondly, 720p can be done at about 2000kbps with x264, and easily lower than that. A 720p feature length could be done between 2gb and 3gb, and easily than that. Pirates are forging the way in this respect, as a quick google will show. The rest of your conjecture is of even lower quality than your "20gb" number.

um, yeah, you can. Just like you can fit a 480 line feature on a 650MB disc with ok results. Heck, if you wanted to, you could make a 300MB file. If you did so, you would sacrifice quality which is only sorta related to resolution. Movie studios have already felt the need to release more expensive dual layer blu-ray discs that also use modern codecs (H.264 and VC-1 are part of the Blu-ray standard) because they couldn't fit everything onto a single 25 GB layer. If you don't care how good a film looks and just want to see lots of pixels then, yes, you can get a 720p feature under 4 gigs, but your quality won't be much better than a 9 GB 480 line mpeg of the same film.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[AxelTorvalds]

Toshiba is right: the physical disc is dead. No one is going to buy Blu-Ray players like no one bought HD-DVD players. Everyone is going to download their HD movies onto servers.

What's the compelling HD download service? I mean this sounds good and all but it also sounds like what the HD-DVD people are just saying because they got beat. Is there anything that really suggests more contents is being downloaded than people will buy yet? Or is that just the sort of thing you say as you tuck your tail and walk away?

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[king-manic]

5 Meg(abyte per second) = 40Mbps. Not sure where you live, but (FTTH/ETTH/VDSL/Docsis 3) not typical in most countries (yet). He likely means 'meg'abits/s.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[sanosuke76]

I can store 80 gigs of data. 160 if I use a doubler. I can only hold three movies, and I had to give up my childhood memories... just to store the Lord of the Rings trilogy? I wish I had just bought Blu-Ray discs.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[shmlco]

"You can't really compress it any more than it is on the disk without having lossy compression, which kind of negates the whole "HD" concept..."

First, the content on the is already compressed in a lossy format, so now, to paraphrase the punch line to an old joke, we're just arguing over how much.

And file size and bit rates are only a good indicator when you're comparing identical codecs. The H.264 codec Apple uses, for example, is far superior to the mpeg2 compression technology used in DVDs, so a 1.2GB file gives you a video that's "near" DVD quality, despite not being anywhere close to 4GB in size.

Also, just to touch on another point, Qwest is promising to upgrade our neighborhood this summer from 1.5 to 15... for the same price. They're trying to stem the flow of people moving to IP-over-cable.
Downloadable HD movies, at 720p, obviously aren't quite as good as Blu-Ray, but do manage to beat out "high-def" content delivered over cable or on-demand.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[Klaus_1250]

my 5 meg connection actually gets about 1.5 megs/s on a good day which means that for a 20 gig movie, it will take just about 4 hours to download Do the math, it is megabytes he's talking about. Downloading a 20 Gigabyte movie (on par with the average size of a Blu-Ray) in 4 hours: (20*1024)/(4*60*60)= 1.42 MB/s

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[the eric conspiracy]

Online album sales are minuscule. CD sales outside disposable pop music is actually increasing.

My bet is that a movie is a heck of a lot more like a music album, and anything that you can take from online music sales is not going to apply to movies.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[SanityInAnarchy]

And this is exactly where music was, not so long ago. Just you wait.

And there are some fairly large libraries of movies out there, though most of them in crappy quality (DRM'd, too) and/or of questionable legality.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[ivan256]

Perhaps you missed ITMS becoming the second largest music retailer behind Wal-Mart?

The whole debate is moot though. None of the studios are interested in the ITMS model for HD movies, and consumers have shown over and over that they are unwilling to move their dollars from a physical media to pay-per-use media. Downloads may kill the rental stores, but not the DVD market.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[ivan256]

It's hard to see the parallels.

The quality of movie downloads is poor and almost certainly isn't cutting into DVD sales, where the quality of downloadable music was high. Pay-per-listen and limited time music downloads were never the choice of the industry (though they did try subscription models).

The fact of the matter is that studios are positioning downloads to grab the profits of the rental stores, and not as serious option for movie buyers. It may happen one day, but it isn't even on the industry's radar right now, much less the consumer's radar.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[GamerCowboy]

That's the same way online music started out. Now it's a proven business model. Even the often-cited poor quality of torrented movies is a moot point because the people downloading them are usually looking for "good enough" quality and not HD. Eventually, the quality will catch up the same way that we started off with 96-128kbps mp3s and moved on to 256kbps tracks virtually indistinguishable from CD quality.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[ivan256]

I've already commented on this particular argument in other parts of this thread.

And that's before you take into account the fact that, in the US at least, it will be 10 years before the infrastructure is sufficient for widespred download of HD content. Or even DVD quality content. 3, maybe 4% of people are doing it now, and ISPs are already bitching and throttling...

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[Ang31us]

"Download from a vast library covering a huge portion of recorded video, and keep the file to watch as many times as you'd like essentially forever... But no such thing exists on a large enough scale."

Sure it does; it's called the BitTorrent protocol. That reminds me, I missed the last two episodes of the new Knight Rider in HD.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[ivan256]

Better get 'em quick, because once they're old they won't be seeded..

See the problem?

You're not the first one to suggest that, either.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the future, I reccommend you use the units "MB/s" or "Mbps" instead of "M?/s". You know, the ? can really make a difference. Also, the norm for measuring bandwidth is bits per second, not bytes per second.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[SanityInAnarchy]

The quality of movie downloads is poor and almost certainly isn't cutting into DVD sales, where the quality of downloadable music was high.

Actually, it was piss-poor, for awhile, just not enough people noticed or cared. Even then, dynamic range compression had killed enough of it.

Pay-per-listen and limited time music downloads were never the choice of the industry (though they did try subscription models).

Perhaps, but consider also that it's not generally possible to buy just one or two episodes of a TV show you want to try out, unless you're already subscribed.

It may happen one day, but it isn't even on the industry's radar right now, much less the consumer's radar.

Neither was YouTube, or Napster, before they happened.

One more parallel: We're getting more and more mobile devices on which we can watch movies. This means that anyone who wants to watch a movie -- or a TV show, or any other video clip -- on their iPhone, or PSP, etc, already has a copy in their computer. Same with the early mp3 players.

Oh, and of course, piracy is beating the studios to it.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[the eric conspiracy]

I am sure ITMS does fine as a means to enable sales of iPods. But I don't think they sell much besides top 40 singles. It is not a model that is applicable to movies.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[Ang31us]

Actually, I tried to find episodes 2 and 3, but could not; I could only find the pilot/premiere episode...I guess that people are not that interested in the show and NBC does not have it available on their site...grrr.

Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players?

[donaldm]

I use torrents (pirate bay included) to download some TV shows which I have missed although I don't download movies since you could be waiting hours for a 1 GB file to download if not months. It really depends on how popular the show is and how many people are seeding. This is not what I would call downloading on a massive scale. Some of the shows I download look fine on a small screen (15" to 22") but look awful on a 32" and above HDTV. Surprisingly if I play the file (I normally download "avi" or "divx") via my PS3 the output on my HDTV looks reasonably good due to the PS3 upscaling but it is not as good as a DVD or normal Standard Definition TV show.

I personally find it better to just go to my video store and rent the movie I want rather than attempt to download it. The Blockbuster store I go to (2 minute drive or 10 minute walk) has Bluray movie rentals at the same price as DVD rentals, so why would I want to download HD movies (even though it is illegal) which could take many hours or even months on a torrent just to save $5.00?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What?

[longacre]

Is the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray really over?

January called, it wants its question back. Also, streaming video is the future, but the distant future. Until the cable companies begin delivering libraries of 1080p on-demand content through their set top boxes, Blu-Ray will pull in plenty of cash.

Re:What?

[Lumpy]

Why? just because some over zealous luddites want 1080p content does not mean the bulk of the Tv viewers do. 720P is more than enough to make people really happy. Hell most customers oooh and Ahhh all over their new 720P set watching Comcast HD signal that is so compressed it looks bad. but it looks way better than they know.

They can stream 720p highly compressed video right now. They can deliver this right now. and guess what the bulk of tv viewers will find it fantastic with only a itty bitty tiny percentage that want 1080p at full bitrate and least compression.

Consumers want better than what they already get. A good upscaling DVD player makes 90% of the people out there very happy with their HDTV set. And the costs of BluRay along with the overpricing of the discs is making many people look at DVD on their HD set and say, "looks good! I'll stick with this."

Re:What?

[fragbait]

Until the cable companies begin delivering libraries of 1080p on-demand content through their set top boxes, Blu-Ray will pull in plenty of cash. 2004 called and wants its reality back? Granted, it might be 720p, but it is still HD. I watched Order of the Phoenix this past weekend.

-fragbait

Re:What?

[Gulthek]

just because some over zealous luddites want 1080p content does not mean the bulk of the Tv viewers do.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means. In fact, it means the exact opposite of what you think it means.

Also, everyone I know who has seen real HD content (either HDDVD or Bluray) agree that DVD pales in comparison. My wife and I bought 'Hot Fuzz' on HDDVD and watched it about 3/4ths of the way through when we ran into disc corruption problems. While we, of course, got the disc replaced, to finish the movie we flipped it over to the DVD side. A huge drop in quality was quite apparent. Ditto for a straight up DVD version of the movie.

Re:What?

[bickle]

just because some over zealous luddites want 1080p content does not mean the bulk of the Tv viewers do.

You might want to check the definition of 'luddite'. Unless we're talking about something like people holding on to 1080p in the face of 4320p. It sounds like you are using it to refer to a minority of people that want advanced tech, but it's generally used to refer to a group of people that want to cling to obsolete tech/discourage the use of new tech.

Re:What?

[MaximvsG]

Agree. It will take a while for dish/cable/consoles/etc. to offer 1080p on-demand to a vast majority of consumers. Saying Blu-Ray may have won the battle but overall lost the war is incorrect. HDTVs are selling at an exponentially higher rate during the last 12 months and will continue to do so. This bodes well for Blu-Ray. I'm guessing Blu-Ray will be around for the next 5 years or more. To quote Bill Gates (one of the few quotes I'd ever use of his) "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." Blu-Ray is here for the foreseeable future.

Re:What?

[Scootin159]

While I'm not sure if it's 720p, 1080i, 1080p, or even 480i (hard to tell on my 720p TV) - it is at least labeled as "HD", but Time Warner offers this already. It's about the same price as a regular DVD rental at Blockbuster, and has a reasonably good selection (maybe the most popular 60% of Blockbuster's "New Releases"). Biggest advantage though is that I don't have to drive to Blockbuster (about 40min for me), and I don't have to return it.

Re:What?

[amRadioHed]

You say the DVD side was a huge drop in quality, and yet that's the side you ended up watching? Does actual usability factor into your quality assessment somehow?

Re:What?

[WarJolt]

Please consider the draw backs of on-demand. Blu-ray will always be able to provide you with a higher bitrate and subsequently a high quality picture when compared to on-demand. After working with video compression technologies closely for many years, I've never been impressed with what cable, broadcast, or satellite companies consider "high-quality". Most people don't realize how bad their MP3s sound until you let them listen to the real thing. Most people don't realize how bad their picture quality is until you point out the compression artifacts.

The only advantage On-demand has is convenience.

Re:What?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

While we, of course, got the disc replaced, to finish the movie we flipped it over to the DVD side. A huge drop in quality was quite apparent. Ditto for a straight up DVD version of the movie. I don't know about that title specifically, but there is a lot of suspicion that the studios have been releasing deliberately crappy DVD versions recently. Some people are convinced that the recent Harry Potter sequels and the recent Pirates of the Caribbean sequels look significantly worse on DVD than the first movies in each franchise do - despite having the benefit of new and improved mastering systems.

The conspiracy theory is that the studios have been doing that specifically to boost the perceived improvement of the HD releases of the sequels and figuring that the people who are DVD-only will never notice the difference because comparing different movies is subjective anyway.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people when they get "HD" are getting a crappy as hell signal. CableTV Hd channels suck, Sattelite HD channels suck. My OTA local PBS station kicks the crap out of the HD channels on Cable and sattelite because it's full scale 1080i signal without extra compression. Cable has to compress the crap out of it so they can fit an extra 35 Shopping channels on your lineup. Sattelite is bandwidth handicapped and will not be decent until the new HD mpeg4 systems get lit up here this year.

People in general only want "better" and honestly a highly compressed Mpeg4 720p streamed online looks damn good compared to HBOHD off of my cable tv box.

dude. People want mp3's that suck in quality over CD. they will be happy as hell with highly compressed 720p online. nobody but the overzealous wants 1080p.

Re:What?

[Lumpy]

All I know is my superbit version of the Fifth element looks as good as the HD version on a 50" set. It surprised the hell out of several people.

Re:What?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Which HD version? The bootleg MPEG2 with DTS, or one of the BLU-RAY releases?
That also might an indictment of your 50" tv's quality rather than anything in particular about the movie.

Re:What?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Not all mpeg2 encoders are created equal, nor is it as simple as saying that encoder A is always "better" than encoder B. So comparing an HD re-encode with a retail disc doesn't necessarily say anything about the retail disc.

The most surprising thing

[edwardpickman]

The best format doesn't always loose out. Check out the history of NTSC vs PAL and VHS vs Beta.

Re:The most surprising thing

[spaceyhackerlady]

Apples and oranges.

NTSC came first. PAL was developed afterwards, once people saw how NTSC worked and thought of ways to fiddle with it. There was no real battle; TV systems in new countries tended to be NTSC or PAL or SECAM according to which country gave them the best deal on TV gear.

I have multi-system video gear (unusual for Canada) and routinely watch PAL tapes and DVDs. The video quality is indeed better, but I'm not sure it's that much better.

...laura

Re:The most surprising thing

[JTeutenberg]

The NTSC vs PAL example doesn't work (assuming you mean that PAL is the superior format).

Where I'm sitting I see PAL DVDs, and it appears that most of the world are in the same situation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PAL-NTSC-SECAM.svg. PAL won.

Re:The most surprising thing

[Qender]

Not only was there never an NTSC vs PAL war (each country has a different standard and neither one would be able to change to the other). But VHS won because it was superior in the ways that count. Betamax, as high quality as it was, had tapes that only lasted 90 minutes max. that means a 120 minute movie needed the tape changed halfway through. a VHS could fit a whole movie on one tape, and that made a huge difference to consumers.

Re:The most surprising thing

[Qender]

HD content such as blu-ray or HD-DVDs are all considered NTSC. TAKE THAT!

Re:The most surprising thing

[evilviper]

I have multi-system video gear (unusual for Canada) and routinely watch PAL tapes and DVDs. The video quality is indeed better, but I'm not sure it's that much better.

To be fair, you will see almost none of the advantages of PAL (vs NTSC) by comparing digital videos. The only difference there is resolution and frame-rate.

To really see a the difference, you need to view a broadcast signal. An (analog) VHS tape will, to a lesser degree, also show some of the differences.

It's still true that the improvement isn't huge, and indeed due to having been developed later. And in 10 months, it becomes moot, as NTSC becomes ATSC, digital broadcast HDTV.

Toshiba is right?

[geoffrobinson]

Then what exactly was Toshiba doing this for?

One answer that I've heard was that they didn't care, but they were helping Microsoft out. Microsoft wanted HD-DVD because it would cause Windows Media codec to be standards.

Re:Toshiba is right?

[squiggleslash]

That would be bizarre, because the same suite of codecs is used for both Blu-ray and HD DVD. Including Microsoft's VC-1.

The conspiracy theory, that never made any sense, was that Microsoft wanted to create a war to prevent both formats from succeeding before downloads became available. It didn't make sense because the work they did on HD DVD genuinely made it two years ahead of Blu-ray, which has yet to catch up. If Hollywood had switched to HD DVD, the format wars would have ended and Microsoft's work would have made HD DVD a superb contender.

The other conspiracy theory, which makes slightly more sense though it's somewhat overstated, is that Microsoft didn't like the fact that Blu-ray used Java technology, which it does both in its interactive content system and in the BD+ access control system. Even that seems a tad silly, it wasn't as if Microsoft was pushing .NET on HD DVD; the HDi system it co-designed with Disney and Warner Brothers (heh. The two studios whose rejection of HD DVD caused the most damage. How ironic is that?) was essentially XML, JavaScript, and generally standards based, very transparent. And it offered it to the Blu-ray people, who turned it down.

In the end, it's not clear why Microsoft got involved, but the the Windows Media thing is obviously nonsense, and the Michael Bay "divide and conquer" crap makes no sense at all.

Re:Toshiba is right?

[king-manic]

The line about them wanting to put a thorn into Sony's game division sort of panned out though. It certainly made the 'Blu-Ray' feature moot at launch. However now it's a selling point. MS might not have banked on HD DVD early demise.

Re:Toshiba is right?

[Westacular]

Microsoft sees itself competing with Sony for the living room: the PS3's loss is the XBox 360's gain. I'm not sure what Microsoft's long-term expectations were, but for the past two years it's been apparent that the longer that HD DVD remained viable (or, rather, the longer Blu-Ray failed to "win") the better the XBox 360 could compete the PS3 in the long term. And in the off-chance that HD DVD did win, that would be a huge blow to Sony and the PS3 -- and a gain for Microsoft, by default. Blu-Ray, having won, now makes the PS3 look a fair bit more attractive than it did a couple months ago.

I've heard that in general the licensing money Microsoft gets from HD DVD is not all that different from Blu-Ray (i.e., once you ignore the fact that all of the early HD DVD titles and none of the early Blu-Ray titles used VC-1).

I think it's fair to say that Microsoft's motivations were neither to see HD DVD specifically succeed, nor to see both formats to fail. They hedged their long-term bets on all sides (including the eventual streaming/downloading possibilities) and then saw that their best short-term strategy was to casually undermine and hold off Blu-Ray's domination. So: promote and contribute to HD DVD, but only in ways that don't cost a lot of money.

And these are experts?

[hedwards]

Why is it that the move to digital only for movies is considered a forgone conclusion?

I understand that all the cool kids are badmouthing physical media, but we aren't there yet. Full DVD quality movies aren't commonly available for download through licensed stores. It still takes a relatively long time to download the movies that are available. And services like netflix aren't doing a lot of streaming compared to the number of customers that are eligible for service.

We aren't yet to the point where we, at least Americans, are considered to have the right under the doctrine of fair use to put all of our movies, songs, etc., onto a single device at home, let alone streaming it over the net to just the person that paid for the files.

The way that things are moving, I hardly think that we've gotten to the point where Sony and the Blu-ray camp can't turn a profit on the format. Sure they can't turn the profit that they would have turned had they been able to settle this quickly, but I see no reason to assume that they won't manage to turn a profit on it.

There isn't any real reason why people need more resolution than either format provides. The only reason to have more resolution is to view it bigger at a closer distance, and with current HD technology, the size of the room required to properly view are getting ridiculous.

Re:And these are experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that the move to digital only for movies is considered a forgone conclusion?

Because analog is nearly completely off the market. Walk into your local video store: do you see much VHS or laserdisc? It's all DVD and Blu-Ray, and downloads are getting more popular too.

The move to digital literally is a forgone conclusion. It isn't something people are predicting; it already happened, past tense. The lone exception is TV itself, and even that will be settled by law in the US, in about a year.

Re:And these are experts?

[Eravnrekaree]

Even at close distance the improved resolution is noticeable, so youre wrong. It is worthwhile but not worth $400. I do think that it would be nice to have when prices on the players come down quite a bit. I do agree as well we are a way from digital downloads of movies, maybe for low quality video, but I think there are those who want the higher quality video as well which can take up 50 gb. Even once you gave them downloaded, you will want a disc drive to store the movies on, since having hard drive space for all of those movies would cost a fortune! One of the biggest applications we are overlooking od blu ray is for computer data storage. The format was designed from the beggining with record support so hopefully we will see reasonably priced drives soon.

Re:And these are experts?

[The-Bus]

Because it's happened to music? Convenience trumped quality. I still prefer to buy CDs as opposed to buying them on iTunes, but that has little to do with the "new format" and more to do with my problems with the iTMS. When I buy CDs, I rip them, organize them on my computer/player, and put the CD away.

Now, movies are much less portable. (Note I'm saying "movies" here, not video). Sure, some people like to watch movies on portable devices, but those people are "being cheated" out of the experience. When you watch Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone you're missing out on a lot. If you're listening to a song at the gym, you're probably not missing out on as much (as opposed to listening to it on your stereo).

There's two hurdles to streaming video: technology and price. The former will be fixed, and fixed soon. In a decade, portable storage will be measured in terabytes. Bandwidth problems will be solved, one way or another.

The question is price. It's something music companies still haven't completely figured out. Ten dollar DRM-laden downloads are not the answer. We'll see if someone comes up with something better.

Re:And these are experts?

[PrescriptionWarning]

on a separate, but very related issue about the disc versus download:

As a PC gamer for years I have collected a ton of games on CDrom and DVD. Doubly so with Xbox, PS2, and the 360. But in the last year or so every PC game I have purchased (ok maybe 90%) have all been purchased online either through Steam, Direct2Drive, or EA online (guess they choose not to play nice with others). This is actually very preferable to me however because not only do I not have another useless CD i have to keep putting in when i want to play a game, but I can't lose my CD rom! There are other benefits, too, like I can legally make backups of the setup files, and if the authentication servers for these ever die I can probably find a way to hack the game installation so I can play it years down the road.

Now apply these same concepts to permanently owning a digital copy of a movie, without any of this ridiculous digital renting crap, and the future looks good because you can't lose your DVD, you can't damage it beyond use, and in some cases if you lose the softcopy you can simply get it again via download or P2P.

Re:And these are experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he was actually referring to downloads when he said digital.

Re:And these are experts?

[tfoss]

Full DVD quality movies aren't commonly available for download through licensed stores. It still takes a relatively long time to download the movies that are available. And services like netflix aren't doing a lot of streaming compared to the number of customers that are eligible for service. I used my appletv to rent a movie for the first time just this past saturday. Was slick, very quick to start (5 mins), and looked very good at 720p. Netflix's streaming sucks due to difficulty in watching on a TV (or a non-windows computer). It will be interesting to see how apple does in this market. For my $, their setup seems as good as exists currently, rent from the TV, watch on the TV, HD available, selection is limited (subject to the studio's whims), though that is the easiest to fix.

-Ted

Re:And these are experts?

[hoppo]

I've almost completely abandoned physical media for music, but I think we're still pretty far off from me being able to do it with video. I had no problem ripping all my CDs into iTunes, and putting them into storage. I hear about how the quality is "crappy," but it's good enough to make a worthy benefit out of the 8-10 cubic feet I've gained from all my discs being put into storage. Plus, 500+ CDs only takes up about 25 GB on my hard drive. I can very conveniently keep that on my laptop drive, as well as perform regular backups.

Video is an altogether different beast. If I were to rip all my DVDs, that would require around 1.5 TB of storage. It's not so convenient to back up, and I'd have to keep it all on a NAS or a PC. Every NAS I've tried has been loud and hot, and a PC takes up nearly as much space as my DVDs do. And that's just using regular DVDs as an example. Bluray discs would be... what... 3-5x the size? Is it even more? I don't know.

Lesson #2

[Anonymous Coward]

The merits or flaws of either side can be overcome by paying people off

Re:Lesson #2

[kylehase]

Not just paying people off but politics as well. It could have been that Sony simply had better connections or called in a lot of favors owed to them by other companies. Not to mention they own a movie studio and produce a popular game console. Toshiba as far as I know does not.

Re:Lesson #2

[ozmanjusri]

The merits or flaws were always barely relevant.

Forcing early adopters who guess wrong to buy two versions of the same generation's hardware and content can be profitable for manufacturers and media producers alike.

That's why they'll keep doing it.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[ePhil_One]

Frankly, I think it's WAY too early to be replacing DVDs--presently, only about 15% of U.S. households even own an HDTV!

Yes, but the percentage of that 15% who will be interested in Blu-Ray is perhaps 30-40%, which gives you 5% of households today that are interested, a very good sized market. And the penetration of HDTV will continue to grow, with many sets already below $1,000 and several approaching $500, only kids/kitchen TV's will be 480i in the next few years, and given the size/weight/power advantages, I imagine 5 years from now we'll see even those turn.

Early Adoption

[DrWho520]

1) If you have not figured it out yet, early adoption can bite you is the ass. (Just wait for DR-DVD v2 to render every player but the PS3 obsolete.)
2) If you shell out enough cash to content producers during early adoption, the market never has a chance to affect the outcome.
3) Giving away the razors (PS3 compared to vanilla BR-DVD player) and selling the hell out of the blades is still a viable business model.

The only thing that remains to be seen is whether on-demand streaming content will come to market soon enough and be enticing enough to defeat BR-DVD before Sony sees a return on its investment.

Re:Early Adoption

[Doctor_Jest]

DRM or no, I'd rather have a physical copy than streaming it.

I think content providers are going to find that I'm not in the minority with this opinion either. (Besides we're not at bandwidth levels to do this widespread yet... heh.)

The surest way to stop me from "consuming" their content is to prevent me from watching it when and where I want (a physical copy does that... BR is a bit more restrictive on _what_ I can watch it on, but not when and where... like streaming or "d/l" content...)

The blades/razor model works for everything now... how well that maximizes profit is another matter... (It's the de-facto standard to avoid technology sticker shock.)

Re:Early Adoption

[DrWho520]

If it streams, you can catch it.

Re:Early Adoption

[Doctor_Jest]

No doubt. Plans in place to prevent that are always thwarted... but on principle, it's the physical media that will take quite a while to dissolve out of the great unwashed.

I for one would rather it not become such... and allow the current model to continue, where I buy what I want... I rip it... and I play it on what I want, where I want, when I want... and I don't have to pay for the "privilege" each time I do.

Streams of movies and "DL" content simply invite the pay-per-view universe that we all know gets the MPAA/RIAA wet in the nethers.

Will it ?

[aepervius]

When I was young, the number of people which did not have a TV was very small, and mostly it was due to economic reason. Now I don't have one, I know a few people which don't have one (colleagues, friends). Mostly due to lassitude reason (nothing worth to watch), some of us due to more ideological reason. Me I just did not watch it anymore. Entertainment ? I get a better quick "just" hanging out with friends. it is as time consuming but far funnier. Films/series ? Download or rent from video-club. Information ? TV is more biased than any other source, and nowadays the net fulfill that better than Tv will ever do. And I see an increasing number of people joining our rank. TV don't cut it. Internet replace it. TV might never totally disappear but it is getting less relevant as the central "point" of the family.

So when you say QUOTE "There will be one, if not two, iterations of the "next next generation" of this technology before you get one that gets adopted as widespread as DVD was. The amount of people with next-gen displays is too small, and too many people are now leery about the next "new hotness" that they'll stay away even more now." ENDQUOTE
Well I disagree. I think new generation teck will NOT bring anything more than DVD brought us. And if it will, it will be at a great loss of liberty (DRM) from a format which for all purpose can be considered to be DRM free so cracked it is... No what i think is that next generations will increasingly go toward the net and drop tv more. IMHO on the "film" playing device field, DVD is the last usable format, and HDDVD/Bluray was the last war. Unless a leap in TV teck happens (3D for example) there won't be any incencitive to really enhancethe format more.

Re:Will it ?

[edwdig]

TV is more biased than any other source

Try listening to AM radio some time.

Re:Will it ?

[techpawn]

nformation ? TV is more biased than any other source, and nowadays the net fulfill that better than Tv will ever do

Here Here! I Unplugged the idiot box and have actually become better informed. Between my downtime at work and drive to/from said employment I get a lot of information not presented in the regular infotainment.

Besides, gave me time to catch up on my reading

Re:Will it ?

[gstoddart]

Download or rent from video-club. Information ? TV is more biased than any other source, and nowadays the net fulfill that better than Tv will ever do. And I see an increasing number of people joining our rank. TV don't cut it. Internet replace it.

I don't disagree that within some segments of the populace, the TV is trending down. But, more people have TVs than have computers and broadband connection, let alone the savvy to use them for that. It's going to take a long time for that to tip over.

Between the media companies trying to make sure you'll be able to do less on your PC, and the sheer advantage TV has in terms of installed base, we might eventually get where you're describing, but I see that as being a slightly longer term view than what happens with TV and formats.

Well I disagree. I think new generation teck will NOT bring anything more than DVD brought us. And if it will, it will be at a great loss of liberty (DRM) from a format which for all purpose can be considered to be DRM free so cracked it is... No what i think is that next generations will increasingly go toward the net and drop tv more.

Well, again, I don't think that any new format is going to catch up to DVD in terms of installed base. But, I also don't see as wholesale a shift towards internet as a medium. It's gaining, but a lot of people can't afford computers/don't know anything about them. The TV has such an overwhelmingly huge install base as to put it way out front in terms of what any new technology will have to catch up to.

I don't see that we're fundamentally disagreeing -- I see your vision of moving towards the internet being a more central part of everything happening in parallel to whatever is happening in the TV world. A lot of people in North America still live and die by their TV, and a computer isn't even an equation.

In either case, the media companies will try to assert greater control over how we use the stuff they sell us. They're going to try to reap as much payment from every time we're exposed to it as they can. And, they're going to try to tell us what it is we really need next so we'll be good little consumers and go out and buy their stuff.

Unless a leap in TV teck happens (3D for example) there won't be any incencitive to really enhancethe format more.

Never underestimate the ability of a marketing department to try to convince us we need the next incremental change as much as we need air. :-P But, since I'm ignoring the whole HD thing, I agree 100% with that statement.

Personally, I find myself moving away from both the TV and the internet as forms of entertainment as time goes on.

And, if either of us could really meaningfully predict how technology will evolve, we'd be getting paid too much money as consultants to post our WAGs here. ;-)

Cheers

Re:Will it ?

[DrEldarion]

You sound familiar.

Re:Will it ?

[Don853]

Or reading Slashdot.

Re:Will it ?

[PoliTech]

We watch less television now than when (as a kid) we had only five channels. Up until recently the TV was all but abandoned in my house too.

At least this was the case until I got a High Definition LCD TV, and connected my gaming computer to it. Now I find that although we watch almost zero television "programming" on it, the device itself gets much more usage than the tube TV it replaced.

Once you attach a computer to your big screen LCD and watch a movie or play a game, why would you bother to watch any "programming" at all, let alone programming with commercial interruptions?

Movies on demand? Simple! Click a link on TPB or NNTP or even GooTube and watch a movie almost instantly, or download it in about an hour (maybe several hrs for 1080p content). Music? Same thing. Games? Same thing. News? Better! I can check the weather, read headlines, watch news clips, and best of all I can even comment on it or rank it!

Is Optical media dead? Not as long as the baby-boom generation keeps buying "wax" disks. Optical media is as good as dead for many of us post-boomers, the younger the crowd the less likely they have any practical use for it either. Heck, I don't even own a standalone CD or DVD player! I Rip and store media on disk, and consume it when it's convenient for me .

IMHO disk based media already too obsolete to use, (as designed - in disk players) even if the content providers were to give it away. I never buy optical media unless it's the only way I can obtain it. Once obtained, the content is transferred to Hard-disk where it can be of some use.

The funny thing is that I'm more than willing to pay for all of my media. Just on my terms, because I'm the one with the money! I already pay for all of my games. Why? Because I can download them, and the publisher will generally add value like game servers, ranking and records, updates, and free stuff like wallpaper and screensavers.

I want to buy music, I want to buy video content ... but there is no added value for me if I pay, and currently I actually lose value by paying because the only time I am restricted in my usage is when I hit a DRM wall.

No one seems to want my money badly enough to actually work for it.

Re:Will it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Groklaw. Slashdot looks positively ecumenical compared to that echo chamber.

Re:Will it ?

[OrangeTide]

NPR is on AM radio do you think that is biased? And Bill O'Reilly is on TV and AM radio, and I think it's fair to say he's equally biased on both mediums.

Re:Will it ?

[king-manic]

Is Optical media dead? Not as long as the baby-boom generation keeps buying "wax" disks. Optical media is as good as dead for many of us post-boomers, the younger the crowd the less likely they have any practical use for it either. Heck, I don't even own a standalone CD or DVD player! I Rip and store media on disk, and consume it when it's convenient for me . I have a very large collection of optimal media. I'm a post boomer. It's called video games. I have a massive library of plastic disks.

Re:Will it ?

[PoliTech]

I have a very large collection of optimal media.

To me Optimal media is not optical, but magnetic! (I keed I keed). I didn't mean to make a blanket statement, just a broad generalization with obvious exceptions.

I was trying to make the point that the baby-boom generation will continue to purchase familiar formats more out of habit than practicality.

In regards to Video Games, I generally copy the media to hard disk and store the original media in a safe place, (or simply download it to begin with if available). Sometimes I need a "No CD" crack, but that is less and less often.

Re:Will it ?

[king-manic]

The PC market has shrunk. I used ot do the same things. sort of. I used daemon tools and disk images to get around that and play some games which checked the hash of the exe like bnet games. Actually valve, bioware and blizzard are the only PC studios I still buy. I tend to find most other content lacking. Most of my games are console games. It's cheaper then keeping up with the upgrade cycle and console games tend to be a more complete package (a large portion of PC games are shipped broken!)

Re:Will it ?

[edwdig]

NPR is on AM radio do you think that is biased?

NPR is on FM by me (NYC area), so I wasn't counting them.

And Bill O'Reilly is on TV and AM radio, and I think it's fair to say he's equally biased on both mediums.

I'm sure he is equally biased on both. But Fox News as a whole almost does look fair and balanced compared to the stations O'Reilly's radio shows are aired on.

AM Radio as a whole has devolved into extreme right wing talk broken up Traffic & Weather updates and sports broadcasts. TV is dominated by entertainment oriented programming with the more politically influenced stuff pretty far down the list.

Re:Will it ?

[hb253]

NPR is also available on AM in NYC (WNYC), I think it's at 820.

Re:Will it ?

[OrangeTide]

I can tolerate the insane right wing bias better than goofy progressive bias. I never use my FM band on my radio because the DJs and music are mostly crap.

I view listening to right wing maniacs as a full contact sport. Feel free to shout at the fat heads while you're listening. I think AM radio gotten all political because TV and FM radio has gone too mainstream and commercial to bother with an old fashioned past time of armchair politics.

I generally prefer the times when the hosts with their odd ball extreme views let people call in, and they show that there are indeed people more stupid than the host out there. Or they get into a big shouting match and cut the caller off. Once in a while a rational moderate will slip in and make a few important insights, but that's not really the point of talk radio.

Also Art Bell is on AM, so not all AM is bad :)

Re:Will it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the old "tv is too idiotic for me" thing...

Go to youtube and tell me that TV is more of an idiot box than that flash player.

I believe I saw a bit of news about you the other day...

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694

Re:Will it ?

[rarity]

Films/series ? Download or rent from video-club.
And watch them on..?

Re:Will it ?

[sandmaninator]

You've exposed the reason why right-wing radio and TV programs are so bad for your brain :
They exist solely to hold listeners interest. They do it by creating an emotionally charged atmosphere with informing the listeners being an afterthought (at best). It is entertainment only but is dangerous because it deals with policy issues and other important topics that require serious consideration and analysis in an environment that is not emotionally charged.

Re:Will it ?

[OrangeTide]

I fail to see the connection on how it is bad for your brain. It certainly is not a good way to get informed on a topic. But I don't think you can make the connection that listening to a right wing talk host harms you mentally somehow without also admitting that video game violence is also harmful.

Calling it "dangerous" is an exaggeration. Most people know Rush is not a news program, and there is no fixing the ones who haven't figured that out. I guess at least they aren't listening to garbage perverted shock-jock DJs on FM. (if you want to talk about things that are harmful to your brain).

Talk radio is roughly equivalent to talking politics at the bar, a bunch of people throw out their non-expert opinions and we get exposed to a bunch of different ideas. Even if some of the people aren't really qualified to have an opinion.

On the other hand talk radio, even with its extreme bias, has exposed me to many topics I might not have otherwise known about so I could investigate it further.

TV news is pretty crummy too. It's all sensationalized garbage. It's not informative or entertainment.

(left wing, as in the New Left, programming is probably equally "bad" for your brain as the neocon right wing stuff). sometimes I feel like my choices for representation are fascist-socialism or fascist-theocracy. As if they are even opposites.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[Sancho]

People like to hold things in their hands. We're already seeing people who bought into digital downloads losing "their" content due to hardware failure and distributor's inability to allow re-authorization, as well as services simply closing down. Microsoft is in the former category (if your Xbox 360 dies, you will experience problems trying to play downloaded content on your replacement) and Google is in the latter (they closed a video download service, though at least they refunded people their money eventually.) If companies manage to address these issues, great. Until then, I won't be "buying" content online.

Apple's done a reasonable job, though you still have to authorize your account online. Once you authorize a computer, you never have to be online to play your content. You can easily back your content up and play it on any authorized computer. The only way this can really be a problem is if they stop authorizing computers for some reason (either they go out of business or decide to force people to upgrade in some way.) It's still a not-so-happy proposition, but it's a compromise I'd be willing to make for extremely lower prices. In addition, for their music at least, you can burn it to a non-DRM format, which means that even if the above situations happen, you won't be completely out of luck.

Outmoded?

[GroundBounce]

CD's were outmoded 10+ years ago but are still the dominant format for music distribution. Likewise, standard DVD's will be around for a long time to follow. The large installed base of players and other equipment will ensure that any format that gets widespread adoption will remain in use (and presumably profitable) long after it is technically outmoded.

Re:Outmoded?

[twitchingbug]

I don't believe the DVD will be around as long as you think it will. The one problem with introducing another music format, is that you can't improve on the audio quality of a CD. It's at the highest human-detectable sampling rate! Whereas, people can definitely see the difference in resolution between Blu-Ray and DVD.

plus in 2 years, when walmart is selling a $50 Blu-Ray player. Are you really going to still buy DVDs? Even if you have an old TV?

Lesson #3

[tomhudson]

Lesson #1

Nobody cares.

Lesson #2
The merits or flaws of either side can be overcome by paying people off

Lesson #3 - Re: Lesson #2 - see lesson # 1

And while we're at it, and before it gets out of hand ...

Lesson #4 - Re: Lesson # 3: see "recursive"

Re:Lesson #3

[Anonymous Coward]

Lesson #4 PROFIT!

Re:Lesson #3

[LordVader717]

Lesson #5: Lesson #4 doesn't apply.

So annoying...

[wamerocity]

I get really annoyed every time this gets brought up with the claims that any benefits Bluray gives will soon be overshadowed by HD download services. HD download services are great, except I see a few problems with it.

1 - Heavy DRM - Yes Bluray has DRM too, but you can TAKE IT WITH YOU. The technology is still prohibitively expensive to start making portable bluray players, and in dash bluray players for cars, but there is NO HD download service I'm aware that lets you burn the files and keep them forever to watch. They are mostly rental services - basically you download them on your Apple TV or computers, watch it in a 24 hour period and its gone. In time, those devices will be made cheaper, and will become reasonably priced.

2 - Downloadable content doesn't look nearly as good a trueHD stuff does. I realize that for many people it doesn't matter, because the majority of TV's that were purchased early on (and therefore a big chunk of the ones in households) are only 720P. But 1080 displays are becoming the new standard and fewer 720 displays are being made. a 3GB 720 file doesn't offer much more clarity than just a standard DVD. Yes I know, many people are going to shout that DVD's are GOOD ENOUGH. Fine. VCR tapes were GOOD ENOUGH too. So are YouTube videos for some people. Big whoop. Watching low quality 720p on a 1080 display just doesn't look as good as a true 1080 picture with 25-35Mbit quality.

3. To get a decent quality picture, you need to have download a big file, and that requires fast internet connections. American download speeds are pitiful compared to the rest of the world. If you wanted to download a 5GB movie, that's going to take you SEVERAL hours to complete, as opposed to just driving a few miles to the nearest blockbuster r RedBox (which WILL be getting bluray discs inevitably)

4. Bluray adoption has taken off faster than DVD adoption did. I somehow doubt people are going to give up on buying discs they can KEEP and watch OVER AND OVER, with a download service that offers inferior quality, short watching time, and long waits to watch. But who knows, maybe in 2 years from now I'll be eating those words, but I doubt. Anything you can say about HD downloads applies to SD quality movies as well, and DVD sales aren't really being eaten into like people predicted it would downloadable content. Begin modding me down...NOW!

Re:So annoying...

[D4MO]

1. The rental services will come, quicker than bluray in dash players for cars. Until then, renting\buying DVD's that you can TAKE WITH YOU and will work in all that hardware that people have already invested money in will remain the status quo for some time. Expect amazon to build a kindle for movies.

2. Yes they are GOOD ENOUGH. TruHD does look better, but not BETTER ENOUGH. People don't really care. I don't really care if I watch Lost at 480p, 720p or 1080p, and I'm not mr.average.

3. There are solutions to this: The 360 will allow you to play the move while it's being download. Sky+ allow you to record a program via your phone, so expect ways to tell your provider to start content delivery so it's there when get home. Also expect them to be Tivo like and pre-deliver content based on your preferences. The top 20 rentals may already be downloaded. Episodes may already be download as soon as they are reldased. I hope to be just sitting there and a message pops up on my TV - "Latest episode of Top Gear ready for viewing". I imagine the content delivery will come from caching service on ISP's own network too. Downloading 5GB is already faster than buying from an online store and waiting for it to be shipped. Alternative is to get in the car and go to a store that may not even have it, and anyway I couldn't be bothered getting off the couch when I can order it with my remote.

4. Adoption for new tech is much faster now than in 1995, the lauch year of the DVD. Most people didn't have internet connections then. Information flows faster, people are more informed. The movie ownership facility will come too, just like MP3 stores today with no DRM.

New physical media and new hardware for digital distribuion will have a very short lifespan.

(Why can't I just download new 360 games? Because MS doesn't want to sour releationship with retail channel who are pushing the hardware, god damnit.)

Re:So annoying...

[SpartacusJones]

You said something that gave me a flashback. Remember back in the day the guy on the street who had the big bucks and bought 2(!) VCRs, then rented videos and played them on one and recorded them with the other?

Could the old VCR have a role here again? Is there a reason you can't record a ideo on a VCR you are watching with Apple TV or a similar product? Sorry for my ignorance about this, but since it's a magnetic tape simply recording what's on the screen, would it record in the high def resolution?

Re:So annoying...

[GroundBounce]

"a 5GB movie, that's going to take you SEVERAL hours to complete"

At the speeds I get where I live, a 5GB download would take over 10 hours, and during that time, my connection would be very slow for anything else. With a service like Netflix, I can keep disks coming almost as fast as I could download them without even having to leave the house or honk down my connection. Granted, they are still rentals and you can't (legally) keep them, but you will still get the quality advantage.

Yes, in urban areas where 6Mb/s connections are common, downloads may be practical, but there are still large service areas that can't yet get those speeds.

Re:So annoying...

[wamerocity]

VCR have an old-school DRM chip in them that can tell when the composite cables are plugged into anything that's not a TV that will cause the brightness to go up and down the entire movie, which is really annoying (it even does it on TV's that have a VCR/DVD built in). The point was to make it so annoying that it wouldn't be worth it.
Rather than record it to VCR, you can record right to a TV capture card at SD, or a really nice one that records composite cables to get a better picture (harder to find). Or you can just break HDCP (already be done) or AACS (already been done) and on some discs BD+ (in the process) and take the raw video and rerip it to whatever device you want. However, it does take a LONG LONG TIME, even with a REALLY fast processor to re-encode these videos.
Stripping the DRM from downloadable videos is harder, because each company has it own format, and if there is just one unified DRM scheme (like in BLurays) people concentrate more on defeating it, than all the smaller companies..

Re:So annoying...

[gstoddart]

Yes I know, many people are going to shout that DVD's are GOOD ENOUGH. Fine. VCR tapes were GOOD ENOUGH too.

Generally, I agree with your post, except for the above.

On the exact same TV, the difference between DVD and VHS was directly apparent; the picture quality was way better, and very obvious. IMO, that's why it became adopted so widely -- you could get a noticeable improvement on the same display. Eventually when a DVD player was $40, everyone upgraded. But, I'm going to do what you said someone would do and say: DVDs are good enough, for me, for now.

Updating the technology and all of that has a large cost associated with it, so there will be resistance. I've already spent money on a big screen that isn't HD, and I'm not in a hurry to replace it. I bet the overwhelming majority of people with TVs aren't really ready to step up to HD gear just yet, so there's already a smaller market for the high-def DVDs.

As to file size and download time and DRM and all that stuff, I think you're bang on.

Cheers

Re:So annoying...

[amRadioHed]

Yes I know, many people are going to shout that DVD's are GOOD ENOUGH. Fine. VCR tapes were GOOD ENOUGH too. DVDs are good enough for most people. VCR tapes aren't instant access. They wear out and lose quality over time. They are much bigger and harder to store than DVDs. These are the reasons why people would never give up their DVDs for tapes again, it has little to do with resolution.

Bluray OTOH has nothing to offer but resolution as reason to upgrade from DVD and that's not enough for me and many other people.

Re:So annoying...

[GrayCalx]

Just to chime in with your post I wanted to add that not only are some people's ISP speeds very slow but some of us are restricted because of Fair Use Acts to how much we can actually download.

I just moved to a more rural area to live on a farm. Being a web developer I had to have a high speed internet connection. Alas the only options were satellite and wireless. I ended up going the wireless route because it had some benefits, but both of them because of Fair Use Acts limit the amounts I can download per month. Currently I'm allotted 10gigs. I can also pay extra so that i can go over, but now when you're talking about streaming/downloading a 3g file, on top of the fee to download I need to add in another few dollars for the actual download. Add to that the time for it to actually download and the fact that I'm a movie lover and watch a lot of movies in a given week, its just not a practical solution for me.

Now I'm in no way saying that downloadable content/movies aren't going to take off, quite the opposite, but there will ALWAYS be a softcopy (hardcopy? I don't know what to call it now) available to the public.

Re:So annoying...

[steelfood]

Yes I know, many people are going to shout that DVD's are GOOD ENOUGH. Fine. VCR tapes were GOOD ENOUGH too. So are YouTube videos for some people. Big whoop. Watching low quality 720p on a 1080 display just doesn't look as good as a true 1080 picture with 25-35Mbit quality.

It depends on what the subject matter is, and the medium upon which the media is being viewed.

For most things like shorts, some TV shows (game shows, reality tv, etc.), etc. youtube quality is indeed good enough. It could be better, but most people don't care. They're not watching for how nice the cinematography is or trying to count how many needles are stuck up someone's ass. The viewer is concentrating on the point or purpose of the video.

For certain movies and big budget shows, most people will want to go to HD. The thing there is that one, they're not going to put money into things they already have, and two, the price to entry into HD is still too high to justify, especially when their DVD player and discs still work perfectly fine. If they don't have the ability to get the whole HD setup in one go, most people would rather just buy a DVD and get that instant gratification.

As for VHS, well, VHS is difficult to compare to. It loses quality on playback as well as on backup, its media is relatively fragile, and so the advantages of DVD over VHS were much greater than the advantages of HD over DVD.

Re:So annoying...

[SpartacusJones]

>VCR have an old-school DRM chip in them that can tell when the composite cables are plugged into anything that's not a TV that will cause the brightness to go up and down the entire movie

Even the old ones from the 80's still sitting around in mom's basement? My parents have a VCR we got in 1988 or so that still works fine.

Re:So annoying...

[king-manic]

HDMI makes that hard. It handshakes with the player and TV. Someone might make an intermediary but the format was made to make intermediaries expensive. Just wait another month while DVD jon breaks BD as thoroughly as he broke DVD. The weakest link in DRM is that the person you are keeping out has both the key and the lock under his physical control.

Re:So annoying...

[wamerocity]

I think it started in 1985. Check the section out called "Copy protection for Videotape" here. It also depends on which one is doing the playing and which is doing the recording...

Re:So annoying...

[SpartacusJones]

Thanks for the link!

Re:So annoying...

[inasity_rules]

"American download speeds are pitiful compared to the rest of the world. If you wanted to download a 5GB movie, that's going to take you SEVERAL hours to complete.."

You can pry my 33k modem from my cold, dead hands...

Re:So annoying...

[anti-pop-frustration]

NO HD download service I'm aware that lets you burn the files and keep them forever to watch Ever heard about p2p ? Yes, it's illegal, and yes only a minority of people are actually downloading ripped HD content, but it's what people want. The video situation is what the audio situation was 10 years ago. Just like mp3 and DRM free music, people want DRM free downloadable HD content, they don't know it yet because they haven't had a taste. The true early adopters aren't blu-ray customers, they're people who torrent HD content and watch it in their living room.

a 3GB 720 file doesn't offer much more clarity than just a standard DVD Bullshit. A 4.3 Gig MPEG-4 AVC 720 file is already in a completely different league than standard resolution dvd.

Quality and Marketing

[whitelabrat]

Two things are going to make Blu-Ray successful. Picture quality, and Marketing. If you own an HDTV, especially a 1080p model, you want Blu-Ray. Sure standard DVD's look pretty darned good, but if you didn't care about quality you wouldn't have bought and HDTV in the first place right? Everyone else are just suckers for good marketing. I'm talking about the folks who really can't tell the difference between analog NTSC broadcast and ATSC 1080i. They are convinced that if they don't buy a 42" HDTV they won't be able to watch their Rosanne reruns when in fact all they need are cheapo DTV converter boxes. Likewise Blu-ray. It's new and your DVD's are poo so you'd better upgrade... like going from Windows XP to Vista. You need it! You need it! Now quit whining and give in! Arrrrrgh!

Ahem. So who exactly is going to stream 50GB of video over the internet? Uh... Yeah. I can see it happening just like the ignoramuses who think that mp3's are high quality and the obsessive compulsives who insist on 24bit/96KHz audio. Sure you can stream a movie over the internet... love that 320x240 picture full of artifacts and such. Do you really think the ISP's aren't going to flip us over and do us dry? Sure we'll have streaming, but you'll pay their Super Ultra Premium Video plan prices first. I think Blu-Ray has a strong case for many years to come.

Re:Quality and Marketing

[squiggleslash]

A Blu-ray or HD DVD movie generally weighs in at around the 10-15G mark, when compressed with VC-1 or MPEG4, the two decent codecs both formats support. So the answer to the "Who's going to stream 40G" thing is "Not many."

Now, you probably are about to question that. "If that's all, then why do some movies come on dual layer Blu-ray discs" you may ask. And you'd be right. And the answers are:

1. Most movies come with several sound tracks, including, usually, a Dolby TrueHD track, two or three regular Dolby 5.1 track (one for each language), plus the director's commentaries, etc.
2. Early Blu-ray movies were compressed with MPEG2.
3. Some movies are more than two hours long.
4. Most HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs have some extras on them

Now, if you want, you can halve the video data just by putting out 720p instead of 1080p. That's what Apple is doing with AppleTV. The vast majority of people who own HDTVs do not own TVs that are either large enough or close enough to their seats to see any significant difference between 1080 and 720. Indeed, the majority of LCD TVs for under $1,000 have only 768 lines. So this compression is actually more than acceptable. Restrict yourself to a single Dolby 5.1 soundtrack, and bearing in mind the Internet does its own extras - you don't need to send them - you can deliver HD content over the Internet in nice, easy to swallow (well, easier to swallow) 4-6G pieces.

Apple needs to market the hell out of AppleTV. Microsoft has Xbox Marketplace, with HD content, and now's the time for them to market the hell out of it too. Amazon needs to upgrade their Amazon Unbox system and do the same with HD TiVo.

And bear this in mind: virtually all the content delivery companies - Comcast, Dish Network, et al - are experimenting with video on demand systems of their own. My new Dish Network VIP622 (an HD DVR) does VoD over the Internet. Meanwhile, a DVR will get you high quality, widescreen, movies watchable on terms you're happy with from outlets like HBO and Cinemax - things you'd not have considered in the past as being a better option than DVD, because DVD's quality was so superior to NTSC.

Against this background, a format whose players are currently not even viable, and are stupidly expensive, is going to have severe problems making headway.

Physical Media

[MURPHtheSURF5]

Physical media is on the verge of becoming obsolete. Downloadable content is cheaper and easier, and will inevitably replace 90% of just about all media.

Re:Physical Media

[Eravnrekaree]

you are totally wrong. First off, when you download all of that content, where are you going to store it? On physical media. It would get very expensive doing so on your HD so, i suppose you would want a disc drive. Blu ray will be very useful for cheap storage of media and data content for such purposes. As well, I do not think that this sudden surge of downloading is going to go over well with ISPs, the internet infrastructure might be a bit to go before it can handle 50 gb downloads of HD movies. Eventually downloading of movies will become more common but even then you will want a physical medium to store it.

Re:Physical Media

[TrancePhreak]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822144080

The power of 20 single layered Blu-Ray discs at half the cost and much faster transfer speeds.

Apple pushes forward

[Kev647]

I honestly think that we are moving away from CDs and DVDs in general, and all the effort here was wasted. Apple sees the future and has pushed it. They got rid of technology and invented new ones time and time again. And because they get to create the hype, people jump on the wagon and go with it...software, movies, games, they are all moving forward to wireless stores online. I am sorry that these companies had to spend so much money on technology that will only last another 5 to 10 years. These are my predictions, at least.

Who cares about HD movies? We need data storage.

[200_success]

This format war was fought through movie studios, but interestingly most consumers don't really care what discs their movies come on. Whether on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the movies play essentially the same way. Hell, DVDs are good enough for movies -- the resolution is good enough, and the run-time of a DVD is longer than the length of time that you can sit still on your butt.

On the other hand, DVDs will soon become obsolete as a data storage medium. Remember when an entire OS came on a CD-ROM, and you could back up your hard drive onto a couple of DVD+-R? Now operating systems come on DVDs, and only sane backup medium for most consumers is another hard disk. For that, I'm glad that the higher-capacity Blu-Ray standard won, and hopefully Blu-Ray burners will be cheap enough by the time the need arises.

I wouldn't be surprised if Blu-Ray movies never replace DVDs, but Blu-Ray burners become standard on computers.

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!

[snarfies]

The most famous is never get involved in a format war in media, but only slightly less well-known is this: Never go in against Microsoft when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha *thud*

But seriously, I had zero intention of buying EITHER format until it was all sorted. My XBox buddies ran right out and got themselves HD-DVD. Foolish, but then again, the fact that they owned Xbox 360s already proved that. Now I'll CONSIDER a Blu-Ray player - if the prices drop sharply, and if I can find one that will let me play both my R1 and R2 DVDs.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

presently, only about 15% of U.S. households even own an HDTV!

So the egg has been laid (pun intended for the HD-DVD crowd), now we just wait for the chicken to hatch.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[damn_registrars]

Apple TV?
That would be an exceptionally well-played business move on the part of Apple, considering they are one of the companies that collaborated on Blu-ray.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[DrXym]

Apple TV?

Until such time as everyone has unlimited fast broadband and the wherewithal to set it up, I don't think physical media has much to worry about from Apple TV or the other similar services.

If VOD is to succeed it will have to become a no brainer to set up and install by mere mortals. It's going to have to be installed by a service provider and the bandwidth / service guaranteed by the service provider.

Even then I see VOD more suitable for rental. I have to wonder why anyone would actually *buy* digital movies for DD while there are so many issues about doing so. e.g. Why should I buy a movie from iTMS if its locked and only plays on Apple devices? The same goes for all the other fiefdoms that are popping up around Tivo, Sony, Amazon, Microsoft etc. The industry really needs to sort itself out and either adopt an industry wide DRM or do away with it entirely so that people can play their files wherever they like.

SECAM

[PCM2]

Interestingly, SECAM is still currently used by Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Libya, most of the countries of the former USSR ... and France. Coincidence? I think not! Note that one of the first benefits of the U.S. military action in Iraq has been to liberate the country from the grip of SECAM and migrate it to PAL. I rest my case.

Re:SECAM

[CharlieG]

You know what the 3 standards stand for, right?

NTSC = Never Twice the Same Color
SECAM = System Essentially Contrary to American Method
PAL = Perfection At Last

Re:SECAM

[spaceyhackerlady]

For the sake of completeness:

People Are Lavender
Séquentiel couleur avec mémoire

PAL has its critics, but I'm not one of them. Is it possible to be a fan of SECAM? Inquiring minds want to know.

...laura

The next big technology?

[hrieke]

Interesting that most of the economists talked about downloads as if they would slay Blu-Ray.
Until Comcast allows me to download 50GB of data in 5 minutes, Blu-Ray (along with Netflix and the USPO) wins.
Not to say that streaming isn't nice, but until hiccups in the delivery system are ironed out, along with some ownership rights, physical media will always win over electronic media.

Re:The next big technology?

[MightyYar]

Your point is completely valid, but don't you mean download enough of the movie for a comfortable buffer in 5 minutes? It only needs to be streaming at about real-time speed.

Of course, that works out to roughly 54Mbps, so unless you have 50Mbps FiOS you are out of luck :) Even with FiOS you'd have to wait a few minutes before watching the movie, since you'd need about 10% of it to buffer... that could be as long as 20 minutes for one of these 3 hour movies Hollywood has been putting out.

Digital downloads? How?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Tell me please exactly HOW digital downloads are going to happen. There is a reason a new disc was needed for HD, movies take up a LOT of space. Even recompressed a HD movie is several GB, how are people going to download this when there are plenty of ISP's that limit you to several GB per month? That's right, thanks to our ISP's we could MAYBE just download a SINGLE movie before being cutoff. What about the speed? What if I got only a work laptop? Meaning I can only leave it on for a couple of hours when I am home? Do you think your average ISP connection is fast enough for that? Where do I store it all?

Oh sure DESKTOP HD's are getting bigger all the time but what is a blue-ray or HD-DVD movie, 40-50 GB? That means a large HD can only hold 10 movies. Not much if you consider how many DVD's movie BUYERS got. Some people I know got large enough collection to stretch the capacity of pro-sumer level NAT storage, how the fuck are they going to find enough computer storage to store all this in HD?

Then offcourse you need to hook up this storage to the TV, how is this done?

Oh yes, there are solutions and workarounds a plenty, but I don't see any it being adopted anytime soon, just as MOVIE projectors BEFORE VHS were NOT popular.Oh right, some of you younger ones may not know this. No VHS did NOT mean the start of the movie rental business. It was available LONG before. You could always just rent a projector and some movies and real enthousiats had their own setup. But it was far to much of a hassle for the general public.

VHS made it easy NOT just to record your own shows, but to simply pop down the corner rental story, rent a movie and watch it.

This lead to a huge boom in the industry for a bit with countless stores opening.

It lost its luster a bit, partially because many more TV channels became available all catering to their own crowd. Simply watching whatever the tube feeds you after all is still easier.

But watch HD movies from a PC, that is a lot of hassle, NO, we on slashdot CANNOT judge this. People who compile their own kernel are naturally going to be a bit more inclined to be tech savy then those whose VCR has a blinking clock.

iTunes? iTunes is a joke, its sales are pathetic if you consider the market it operates in. Do the math, how many BILLIONS of consumers does it reach and how many SONGS (SONGS! Not full albums) has it sold? iTunes is the biggest online store, but compared to offline sales it just doesn't compare.

There have been several attempt at on-demand and download services and THEY ALL FAILED.

Don't get me wrong, it is OBVIOUSLY the future, but the future ain't here yet. At the moment we just don't have the tech to handle that amount of content without a shiny disc to put it on.

What people tend to forget is how slow things really change. DVD's didn't replace VHS for years. LP's sold for ages beside CD's. Digital download has been a dream for as long the internet came into existence and it just isn't ready yet. Just ask youtube why they don't serve all their vidoes in HD. Their servers, would choke and it would mean you would have to pick your movie now if you want to watch it over the weekend.

And then their is that shiny Blu-Ray disc in a store or rental place, you can pick it up, slot it in and watch it. No PC whining, no ISP complaining, no harddisk screaming for mercy. It just works.

I think downloads are going to have to wait a bit until those parts of the world who are willing to pay for their content can get their downloads as easy as a disc.

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[D4MO]

I imagine when you buy (not rent) a movie through a service you can download it whenever you want, like Valve's Steam game download service. So you'll only need enough space to store whatever content (not just 1080p HD movies) you currently want to watch. There is a content delivery battle going on, and 1080p movies are just the high end part. People want a unified service.

Storage connected to the TV is achieved by, TiVo, Xbox360, PS3, AppleTV, your own HTPC, Sky+ or any number of cable setop boxes that are on the way.

it was far to much of a hassle for the general public What is easier? ordering content via remote for immediate delivery or ordering online and waiting for it?

Things change much faster now, technology is moving at a faster pace.

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[Sloppy]

Tell me please exactly HOW digital downloads are going to happen.

Here's something to think about: it's already happening, right under your nose.

Go to anyone's house who has a HDTV, and turn it on. You'll see that countless gigabytes of high-definition video are pouring into that house, 24x7, either through an antenna, or through a cable.

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[SeaFox]

Tell me please exactly HOW digital downloads are going to happen. There is a reason a new disc was needed for HD, movies take up a LOT of space. Even recompressed a HD movie is several GB, how are people going to download this when there are plenty of ISP's that limit you to several GB per month? That's right, thanks to our ISP's we could MAYBE just download a SINGLE movie before being cutoff. What about the speed? What if I got only a work laptop? Meaning I can only leave it on for a couple of hours when I am home? Do you think your average ISP connection is fast enough for that? Where do I store it all?

Oh, don't worry. The way companies keep merging and getting bought up the distributor of the movie online most likely will be the same company providing your internet connection. They just wont count the bandwidth used for the movie downloads against your total usage. Now if you want to use another service, you're fucked. Isn't provider lock-in great?

But it's okay for now. After all, first a movie studio and a cable company and an ISP all have to merge into one company.

Oh, wait...

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[qoncept]

This was all just incredibly short sighted.

1) Internet connections get faster over time.
2) You aren't going to hook your computer up to your tv. You're doing to hook your onlinemoviebox to your tv.

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[zullnero]

Then offcourse you need to hook up this storage to the TV, how is this done?

Easily done. I've been doing it for years.

Cheapest way I know of is with good ol' s-video. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Video

Then, there's composite or VGA, if your TV has the ports. S-Video cables are relatively cheap (though the ultrashielded gold plated cables can cost a bit) and work with most TVs out there today. Adding that functionality to a small fileserver with a TV card is a pretty fun, quick project, though depending on the codec you use for movies, you may wish to put a stout processor and plenty of RAM in the box.

But yes, until we've got a stouter network backbone in the US, physical media is going to be around. Though I know a couple people who work with Netflix streaming media's tech callcenter, and they do get plenty of business RIGHT NOW. So it's up to how much you want to pay for broadband...I'll advise you to stay away from Comcast connections though if you want to do streaming media, at least until real Net Neutrality legislation is passed.

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[murdocj]

What is easier? ordering content via remote for immediate delivery or ordering online and waiting for it?

The trick part of this statement was immediate delivery. As the grandparent poster said, for many/most people, downloads are slow, not fast. I have a DSL connection, and it would be many, many hours for me to download a hi-def movie. And I wouldn't be using my network connection for that time (and neither would my wife, which pretty much settles the issue right there).

So to rephrase/answer your question: which is easier? Dropping a DVD in the mail in the morning and getting one the next day, or tying up my computer and network for hours on end? Either way, I'm not going to see more than one movie a day... so the mail / disk approach wins, hands down.

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[SuperKendall]

I imagine when you buy (not rent) a movie through a service you can download it whenever you want, like Valve's Steam game download service. So you'll only need enough space to store whatever content (not just 1080p HD movies) you currently want to watch.

Would anyone really consider that buying though if when the company you got it from vanishes you can never obtain the movie that you "bought" again? Not to mention, when exactly do you expect companies to even offer that model as an alternative? Have you really "bought" something you cannot even loan?

For the foreseeable future, the only way to buy a movie is on physical disc.

What is easier? ordering content via remote for immediate delivery or ordering online and waiting for it?

Going to Netflix and getting a disc a day or two later is far, far easier for most people than setting up an internet connected box in the home theater area. On top of that Netflix is currently cheaper than any online rental, and offers a far vaster selection of content -both in HD and non HD.

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[bommai]

For music, iTunes is the 2nd largest store in the US. Not just online but online+offline. By the end of this year, iTunes will become the largest store by displacing Walmart. For TV shows and Movies, iTunes is not a big player, but it can become a big player in the rental business by positioning the iTunes/iPod model as well as the AppleTV model. I have an AppleTV and love the new software update. If marketed correctly, AppleTV sales can sky rocket. More movies are rented than bought. So, rentals are ideal for online downloads. I don't recommend online downloads for buying movies though.

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[Citizen of Earth]

I don't think it'll be downloads. I think it'll be pervasive high-bandwidth wire-ful and wireless on-demand access that will replace discs. I've been binging on Stargate Atlantis season 4 for the past couple of days. It's available on-demand from my cable provider on a pay-TV channel, with some of the episodes available in high-def. This arrangement works fine and I probably won't be buying it on disc. I don't even have to get off my couch to change discs; I just surf through some menus on my cable box and it starts playing immediately.

The extra features aren't available, but I think that within a single-digit number of years, the cable/satellite/phone/whatever companies will have a library of every piece of recorded entertainment ever made available in high definition with all the extras for an almost-reasonable price. Why bother collecting a bunch of discs that you probably won't really watch that many times when you can access whatever you want any time you want?

I think the future will be on-demand, not downloaded or disc.

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[renoX]

>Tell me please exactly HOW digital downloads are going to happen.

Agreed, for a long time, digital download will be limited to a small percentage of the population due to bandwith issue, even when this is solved (could take a *long* time) many will still prefer a physical item.

But a next generation format such as flash could overtake Blu-Ray: it's very likely than in a few years 50GB of flash 'cards' will be available for a very small price..
Of course, it's not sure at all that content provider would allow it: the replacement with flash could already be done for audio CD, but it's not happening..

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[D4MO]

I don't necessarily mean hi-def movies, which yes will take ages. 40min TV shows generally weigh in at 350MB (if the BT sites are anything to go by) so delivery is minutes, not hours. I do mean instant delivery, but not instant consumption.

My router does QOS so that solves problems when using the network on other devices. And then when you are not using it when you are asleep at night, in work the next day etc, the device can use all available bandwidth. What I'm saying is there are plenty of ways to set it such that other network uses are not affected.

And remote control is definitely easier ;)

Re:Digital downloads? How?

[GWBasic]

Tell me please exactly HOW digital downloads are going to happen. There is a reason a new disc was needed for HD, movies take up a LOT of space. Even recompressed a HD movie is several GB, how are people going to download this when there are plenty of ISP's that limit you to several GB per month? That's right, thanks to our ISP's we could MAYBE just download a SINGLE movie before being cutoff. What about the speed? What if I got only a work laptop? Meaning I can only leave it on for a couple of hours when I am home? Do you think your average ISP connection is fast enough for that? Where do I store it all?

Whoa! Technology really doesn't move as fast as we think it does!

People began talking about television in the early 1900s, because image transfer technology for Newspapers was getting faster. Television didn't take off until the 1940s, even though there were low-resolution systems as early as the late 1920s. That's right, it took television ~40 years to move into the home!

The same can be said for color. There were demonstrations of color television in the 1930s, but it didn't take off until the late 60s.

I watched my first streaming video about 10 years ago... I think Netflix will keep me happy for a few more years.

LaserDisc?

[tgd]

Why do people always call that out as an example of a "lost" format war?

They were available for 20 years with virtually every movie released on them that anyone would want to own. (Keep in mind they predated the VHS/Beta "war"). The only thing that took them out was a new technology two generations removed which offered significant savings to content producers.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[Ma8thew]

Don't forget that Apple does not offer Blu Ray in any of computers yet. It'll probably end up as an option in the Mac Pro line at some point, but I think the signs point Apple betting on downloadable content being the future. They certainly have the infrastructure, clout, and history of innovation to make it happen.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[edwdig]

People tend to get at least 10 years out of their TVs, so 5 years from now is when you can expect the majority of primary TVs to be HD. Probably closer to 10 years for the trickle down to secondary TVs.

What I learned from the format war

[hudsonhawk]

I learned that the kind of insane balkanization of consumer products that we see with gaming consoles is spreading to other areas. That the us vs. them rhetoric that was once only found in the realms of religion and politics is now bleeding into online flame wars about which corporate-backed digital movie format is better.

Re:What I learned from the format war

[cowscows]

It's always been like this, for everything. You just happen to see it a lot more now because the internet makes it so easy for just about anyone to share their opinion.

People love to argue, competition is intrinsic to humanity.

Re:What I learned from the format war

[syousef]

once only found in the realms of religion and politics

Well you must be very young. This has all been going on for as long as we've had tech. Mac vs Apple. Vi vs Emacs. Brand vs brand. You name the brand, someone will be a brand zealot.

Sounds similar to...

[ficken]

the BETAMAX vs. VHS war
the DVD-R vs. DVD+R war
the LP vs. CD war (LPs do sound better!!!)

"Format" wars will happen. It's a good thing: it shows progression in technology. Get over it.

Re:Sounds similar to...

[amRadioHed]

LPs do sound better!!! Sure, until you put the stylus to them a few times.

Nobody will learn a damn thing

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Electricity wars (AC vs DC), tape wars (VHS vs BETA, 8 track vs cassette) or HD Format wars are nothing new and if nobody learnt then, why should anyone learn this time around?

Re:Nobody will learn a damn thing

[hazydave]

Well, I would claim that at least Sony DID learn from the lesson of VHS vs. Beta (or MiniDisc vs. CD/tape, or Hi-8 vs. miniDV, or MicroMV vs. MiniDV, etc), and this is a huge part of why BD not only won, but deserved to win.

For one, like or not, they did have better specs, but they were also smart enough not to get crazy on technology -- pretty much the same tech on both formats, BD's a larger disc and supports higher bitrates. That makes it potentially better for video, demonstrably better for computer use.

Unlike most prior Sony things (aside from CD, of course), they learned that it takes an industry to make a format succeed. So they managed to get nearly every CE company, and most of the film studios, as partners in Blu-Ray.

Toshiba thought you could learn instead from the video gaming market, and build a video format the way you launch a games console, subsidizing the cost of the players by software royalties. But I don't really believe anyone wanted to see the next generation video format completely dominated by one company (well, two if you add Microsoft into the mix). Most early adopters were too savvy for this. You get the low HW prices soon enough anyway, via competition, the same way originally-$1000 CD players and originally-$1000 DVD players now come free with a gasoline fillup. Meanwhile, you're not loading the software with a heavy royalty, as you have in the video games market... of the last eight BDs I bought, all but two were priced the same as the DVD equivalents, and two were actually cheaper (these go on sale too, after all).

I think if anything, both groups forgot the lesson of Circuit City's "DiVX" format -- consumers aren't idiots. And most of us realized that the cost of the players in the first year isn't important. What matters is that your software will play five years from now. When there's a format war going, you can't guarantee that you aren't the guy with the Betamax. So most of the typical buyers of hot new technology didn't buy. The reason it only took about a month from the Warner announcement to the end of the war was that everyone else: the other CE companies, consumers, studios, etc. wanted this over. Studios don't want to deal with multiple formats, but worse still for them, people weren't just not buying blue-laser discs, they had stopped buying DVDs (DVD sales fell for the first time ever in 2007, even as movie box office went up), waiting for the HD war to be resolved. I know I did. The lesson here is that, when you introduce a format that's consumer hostile, consumers will understand this, and generally not fall for it.

I

Re:Nobody will learn a damn thing

[SenseiLeNoir]

Unlike most prior Sony things (aside from CD, of course), they learned that it takes an industry to make a format succeed. So they managed to get nearly every CE company, and most of the film studios, as partners in Blu-Ray. Just a small nitpick, but Sony was also responsible for the 3 1/2" Floppy Disk/Drive, which admittedly was a huge success, but maybe because they left to to be developed by their engineers, and not their marketers!

Uhm

[Ranger]

That industry didn't learn their lesson from the Betamax-VHS war.

PS3

[just_forget_it]

The format war was evenly-matched for a while, but I think the PS3 tipped the scales just enough. The PS3 sold really well despite its high price and put Blu-Ray into over 1 million extra homes.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

We tech-types like to talk about digital delivery, and digital delivery may very well take hold eventually

Digital deliver already has so close to 100% of the market, that this just isn't worth arguing about. VHS and laserdisc are dead, analog TV will be dead within a year, and analog cable is something you have to ask for by special request. Everything's digital now. That fight is over. Digital delivery won, years ago.

Let these experts share their hindsight...

[Cochonou]

In December, one month before the Warner Bros. announcement, you could read such things:

"Both formats will be established and co-exist for the foreseeable future," said Helen Davis Jayalath, senior analyst at Screen Digest. "By 2012, U.S. high-def software will be evenly split between the two formats, where Blu-ray represents 55% of the market and HD DVD represents 45%. But high-def formats won't boost volume sales [for home entertainment] to the degree that DVD did [over VHS]. Backwards compatibility and upscaling reduces consumers' desire to replace existing DVDs."

Globally the software split will be 60% Blu-ray; 40% HD DVD, she added.

By 2012, standard DVD discs will total $10 billion in U.S. consumer sales, HD DVD $5 billion and Blu-ray $5 billion, estimates Adams Media Research, which recently became a subsidiary to Screen Media.

You may be an expert in your field, but that doesn't mean you can read into the future, as there is no such thing as a crystal ball. I am sure a lot of corporations would like experts to always make correct predictions on market trends. That would make their life much easier. But this is not really how it works out.

HDTV vs Blu-ray vs downloads

[ryanw]

To explain where I come from, I own an HDTV, have a PS3, and want an AppleTV.

I just realized something.. For YEARS TV broadcast quality was much better than VHS home entertainment. Came along DVD's and that leveled the playing field and actually made home entertainment better than broadcast quality.

HDTV is around now. Blu-ray is better than broadcast quality, but it's too expensive for the masses. The consumers of today want instant gratification and complete turnkey solutions. History shows us that a majority of consumers don't mind if home entertainment is less quality than broadcast quality. Before they would goto a video store and rent a VHS. These days people like the internet to instantly get everything. So I pick the winner as the "apple tv". I have been concerned about the quality not being as good as broadcast television, but the more and more I think about it, I don't care as much. Eventually the quality will be better.

Re:HDTV vs Blu-ray vs downloads

[D4MO]

Amen. People value convience over quality, especially with the quality is "good enough".

Re:HDTV vs Blu-ray vs downloads

[MightyYar]

All you have to do is look at the picture coming out of so-called "high definition" cable to see what kind of crap people are willing to pay for. The signal is so compressed that the grass in Comcast's football games looks like it is swimming, and every sharp edge has an artifact around it. The difference is amazing when you see an over-the-air signal of the same game.

The Reason

[M0j0_j0j0]

BluRay won the war, because the name BluuuuRay is way more cooler then HDDVD, just like pirates

HD technology does have value over DVD

[Eravnrekaree]

I do think that the reason for standards has been shown to be important. it has delayed the acceptance of HD disks by years and delayed them becoming more common. I dont think it can be argued that several competing formats is a good thing, you want a choice of players and manufacturers, a format does need to be well designed but there isnt room for many of them in this area.

I also do think HD disks due offer significantly better picture. I have seen both DVD and HD disks and the latter are much better, the difference is noticeable and very obvious to me, and worthwhile. Although this does not mean I am ready to pay $400 for one of these players. I think i would be willing to pay $100, if the players came down in price to that level I think the format would take off. Right now the main thing that is holding it back is price.

Re:HD technology does have value over DVD

[trdrstv]

Although this does not mean I am ready to pay $400 for one of these players. I think i would be willing to pay $100, if the players came down in price to that level I think the format would take off. Right now the main thing that is holding it back is price.

Which is a shame that HD DVD lost, it already had $99 players.

Whoever sells the most blank discs

[rla3rd]

HD-DVD does not necessarily have to become a niche product. I have had a DVR-R burner in my PC for a few years now, and I only use it for backing up data. I don't own a HDTV, so having a commercial HD player doesn't make much sense. Just because the major multimedia companies are all backing blu-ray does not mean that HD-DVD loses. The first format that offers me a HD writer at a reasonable cost for both the DVD writer and blank media will get my wallet.

War. What is it good for? absolutely nothing.

[techstar25]

It appears that the analysts agree that both sides lost, and that Sony and Toshiba just should have agreed to work together from the start. While they were battling it out, wasting time and lots and lots of money, their enemies got stronger (download services got better, and upconverting technology improved).
I guess, after all, a format war is just like any other war - there are no winners, only losers, but one side loses a little less.

Re:War. What is it good for? absolutely nothing.

[Citizen of Earth]

While they were battling it out, wasting time and lots and lots of money, their enemies got stronger

Your analysis of Obama vs. Clinton vs. McCain is off-topic!

Re:It's not a battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray

[GweeDo]

"no, because Blu-Ray is proprietary DRM suckage."

Yup, just the other night my 58 year old mother was telling me just that. That is why she doesn't want Blu-Ray...

Discs aren't going anywhere.

[Stopher2475]

The way these online formats are locked down, discs aren't going anywhere. People like to collect things and most of these online solutions don't allow you to do it. You get stuck on one device with no way to move it or use it how you want.

MPAA wins?

[argent]

By delaying the acceptance of these devices this means that there are fewer of the early models on the market. Since early models would be more likely to have exploitable bugs in their DRM, this may improve the average quality of the DRM (HDCP, etc) over the long term.

Winner, MPAA. Loser, consumer.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[damn_registrars]

They certainly have the infrastructure, clout, and history of innovation to make it happen.
I'll agree with the first two, though I'd say the third is a matter of perspective.

Some of us (such as myself) would argue that tracking innovation from apple is much like doing the same from microsoft. Each has released products that could be called "innovative", but if you dig further you can find that many of these supposed innovations were actually done by someone else previously, who simply lacked the clout to get it to market and make money off of it.

Lessons from the format war, Casette vs 8Track, VH

[mlwmohawk]

Having owned an 8track player and a cassette player, both were bad mediums for content. They wore out too fast. That's why CDs did so well at pushing them out of use. The same went for VHS and Betemax vs DVDs.

DVDs last longer than VHS tapes and DVDs already have a HUGE acceptance and user base. Where as Blue Ray has barely any uptake. Most people don't even have any idea what Blue Ray is. They don't want to pay $300 or more for a DVD player when an upscaling DVD player costs $39.

For the time being, an upscaling DVD player with an HDMI cable dirt cheap and HDMI cables no longer cost $60.

I don't believe it will be profitable to drop DVD support any time soon, and I don't trust that a Blue Ray bought today will work next year.

I'm playing a LONG wait and see with this.

Wait for HVD

[xquark]

Blue-ray and HD are all just fades, wait for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc this will blow
everything out of the water. I can't imagine why anyone would spend money on h/w and content in these new formats when something like HVD is about to hit the markets.

Of course "we" should win

[dazedNconfuzed]

That the us vs. them rhetoric

Funny, everyone thinks their way is right, and expects others to comply ... and when others don't, accusations of "insane balkanization" are flung, if not outright force, upon those who simply don't cooperate and have no interest in doing so.
It's reasonable to cooperate, you see...

Hey, There Are Other Uses

[Nom du Keyboard]

Hey, there are other uses for a BluRay R/RW drive beyond movies. And millions of computers might want to have such a drive, or better a combo CD/DVD/BR R/RW drive in their drive bay.

Digital downloads less useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that you can't lend nor buy used digital downloads, you can't take them to someone else's house...

Coincidence?

[zenslug]

From the article:

The lesson for vendors: a format victory does not guarantee profitability. Neither side in this fight committed a strategic error. Each hardware vendor lined up a large coalition, launched a sophisticated campaign, and fully funded their marketing efforts. Such sophistication led to large sunk expenses. That put both sides in a position to lose money unless the war settled quickly. It did not. HD-DVD had its best chance when it came to market earlier than Blu-ray. HD-DVD did not win because it did not build enough early sales to slow its competitor's later sales, which went well enough to nearly tip the market.

This eerily parallels the Democratic primaries. Just replace HD-DVD with Hillary, and Blu-ray with Barack. Adjust a few words here and there:

The lesson for candidates: a nomination does not guarantee electability. Neither side in this fight committed a strategic error. Each candidate lined up a large coalition, launched a sophisticated campaign, and fully funded their marketing efforts. Such sophistication led to large sunk expenses. That put both sides in a position to lose general election votes unless the war settled quickly. It did not. Hillary had her best chance when she came to market earlier than Barack. Hillary did not win because she did not build enough early sales to slow her competitor's later wins, which went well enough to nearly tip the market.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[RobBebop]

Blu-Ray Discs? If price is still a consideration, DVD is still king. $0.10 for GB compared to 4-6x that on the HD formats.

By the time the cost of Blu-Ray makes it cheap enough compared to DVD, I think you will see it to make more financial sense to buy one of these and get content delivery through the internet.

Thus making Blu-Ray a waste to invest in.

Re:Lessons from the format war, Casette vs 8Track,

[RoboRay]

"DVDs already have a HUGE acceptance and user base. Where as Blue Ray has barely any uptake"

Actually, the uptake of Blu Ray has been faster than the uptake of DVD.

They don't want to pay $300 or more for a DVD player when an upscaling DVD player costs $39.

And this is compared to when DVD players cost $300 and VCRs cost $39. The price of Blu Ray has dropped faster than DVD did (DVD players originally cost more than a grand, just like the first Blu Ray ones did) and it's a lot easier to buy and rent BDs than it was to do the same for DVDs this early into their life-span.

You are either very very young, or have very poor memory.

We already have (and use!) high-def downloads

[Sloppy]

Go to anyone's house who has a HDTV, and turn it on. You'll see that countless gigabytes of high-definition video are pouring into that house, 24x7, either through an antenna, or through a cable.

BTW, just to follow up on that..

I realize I'm describing a perverse situation, and it's one that a lot of people don't really want. I was just making a technological point. Immense bandwidth is already here and already being used. The client machines have already been deployed by the millions; all those early-adopter units really lack are local storage for time-shifting, and a way to say what it wants (e.g. "please send a few episodes of Threes Company some time in the next few days"). We already have the tech (except for a way to "talk back" in the case of over-the-air TV).

The trick that makes it work so well, is the power of multicasting. That's what broadcast TV and cable TV are. The only real screw-up is that it's not being done in a generalizable way (over IP), so it's limited to realtime audiovisual data. But clearly, the bandwidth is there, as is the will to use it.

The perversity is that we don't have a way to say what we want (e.g. "send Robocop") so the scheduling of what gets sent over the wire (and when) is disconnected from demand. Think about the staggeringly immense amount of data that is continuously sent over Comcast's wires, with no regard for what the receivers actually desire. Then compare that bandwidth usage, to the volume of traffic that is mostly under user control (IP packets). I do advocate multicast and some upstream discretion over scheduling; I just think the fraction is a little messed up, or more importantly: obscured and not thought about. Not seen. Not subject to market force.

Timelines

[SuperKendall]

1) Internet connections get faster over time.

Not in my experience. The fastest connection I ever had was a fiber connection to the home from WideOpenWest - ten years ago! That service faded away and I am left now with Comcast.

Internet connections get faster enough they reach a stability point for the market. I have real doubts if practical stability points that people are willing to pay for are sufficient for good home media delivery.

No more writers

[SuperKendall]

I don't think you quite understand the nature of the war. Toshiba was and is and ever will be, the ONLY maker of HD-DVD equipment.

Toshiba has stopped production of HD-DVD. That means no new players - or writers. And there were almost no writers as is was.

Blu-Ray always had the advantage that at least there were many hardware manufacturers, so if one wanted out it wasn't complete death for the format.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[shmlco]

"People like to hold things in their hands."

Actually, I'd say that "some" people like to hold things in their hands. Look at music. Some people may want CDs and covers and liners, while others are perfectly happy having their entire music collection in MP3 on their iPods. Some people print photos and then stuff them in albums and shoeboxes. Others use iPhoto and show people their pictures on their iPhones.

I, myself, am in the later category. In fact, I'd be more than happy to have ALL of my music and nearly ALL of my books and movies in digital formats. It's much, much, much easier to move a couple of terabyte drives than 50 boxes of books, CDs, and DVDs.

Chicken before the egg

[SuperKendall]

To be honest, if WalMart had said we will only carry HD players and HD discs those studios (except maybe Sony Pictures) would have abandoned BlueRay exclusivity

Be truly honest, and think of the likelihood of family friendly WalMart going with a choice like that which meant no Disney HD sales. Not gonna happen.

In a format war built around MOVIES, studios have all the power - period.

Never Even

[SuperKendall]

The format war was never even. The entire last year Blu-Ray outsold HD-DVD content 2-1 (or more) on a repeated basis.

The PS3 had a large effect. Studio support though was even larger.

Bad comparison

[daBass]

Are they really that similar?

- AC vs. DC: Cheaper and better system won
- VHS vs. BetaMax: Cheaper, worse system won
- 8 Track vs. Cassette: cheaper, better system won. (though 8 Track was so retarded, it would have been hard to lose in any case)
- BR vs. HDDVD: More expensive system won, without a real technological/quality advantage.

So what could have been learned? What sony should have learned looking at the first three is "the cheaper always wins" and they should have packed up and left. Instead, Sony made a more expensive system and clobbered Toshiba with marketing. And won.

Re:Bad comparison

[morari]

Instead, Sony made a more expensive system and clobbered Toshiba with marketing. What other strategy has Sony ever implored? Marketed lies seem to work well for Sony, which is probably the only reason they are still afloat after years and years of horrid products.

I say this as a disenchanted Dreamcast owner, not an angry HD-DVD enthusiast. Just so you know my bias. ;)

Re:Bad comparison

[suggsjc]

- AC vs. DC: Cheaper and better system won

I thought they got over their differences and started a band?

Re:Bad comparison

[slashqwerty]

You need to view it from the position of the content producers since they are really the ones picking what format they will distribute on.

- VHS vs. BetaMax: Cheaper, better system won. VHS was 'better' because the quality dropped with each copy.
- 8 Track vs. Cassette: Cheaper, better system won.
- BR vs. HDDVD: More expensive, better system won. BR is 'better' because it has an extra level of content protection.

Re:Bad comparison

[westlake]

- VHS vs. BetaMax: Cheaper, worse system won

Beta was introduced before most television sets had comb filtering or a composite video input.

It predates closed captioning, MTS stereo audio, affordable projection TV. The first Beta VCRs could not record movies or sports on a single tape.

You have to see the system and the environment as a whole.

Blu Ray entered a market where the buyer had a substantial existing investment in HD and digital audio. It began with support from almost all the major studios. That implied a major artistic and technical investment in Blu Ray content.

Blu Ray entered a market when the two-disk video or big boxed set really became popular and the 50 GB disk began to make a lot of sense and the 100 GB disk even more.

The HD-DVD video did not sell or rent at a significant discount. For the serious viewer or collector, the price of the player quickly becomes irrelevant.

Re:Bad comparison

[chthon]

In the first case, I would even say the safer system won. You are much more likely to be electrocuted to death by low-voltage DC, than by AC.

Re:Bad comparison

[daBass]

Interesting, Edison (DC) did their best to show Tesla's AC was much more lethal, even electrocuting an elephant to make his point.

But the reason DC is a lot cheaper is that electricity doesn't travel very far at low (safe-ish) voltages. AC is easily and cheaply stepped down from long-distance 10KV+ lines to 120/240 at the end of your street. DC can't be stepped down with a transformer, so the system as a whole ends up costing a lot more. There were a lot of local power plants on Manhattan to be able to get DC to customers!

Ironically, at high voltages, DC is more efficient at long distances, so you will see long distance point-to point transmission lines being done in DC, rather than AC.

Re:Bad comparison

[olman]

- VHS vs. BetaMax: Cheaper, better system won. VHS was 'better' because the quality dropped with each copy.

Puh-leeze.

VHS is the better product. Why?

Because you could record an entire movie on a single tape right from the beginning. Most people do not view system where you have to change tapes mid-taping as "better".

In what world is it either cheaper or easier?

[SuperKendall]

Downloading HD media from iTunes or Live is actually MORE expensive currently, and Netflix has a far larger selection of HD content (not to mention the even more vast library of standard DVD's on tap as well!).

Hooking up a home media center and maintaining is, for most people, far LESS easy than simply going to a Netflix web page and saying "I'll take that and that and that" and then just watching as they come.

I'm a media geek at the forefront of having my own media PC and HD DVR's and use iTunes to buy TV shows all the time. But I recognize that movies are far better done on Blu-Ray, and that everything points to that being true for at least five years or longer. Network infrastructure, is just not ready. Movie studios still have a lich-like grasp of DRM they will not shake, severely retarding the usefulness of downloading legal video online. Legal rights snafus tie up most titles from even going to online distribution.

P2P sources for HD media work, but then you have the danger of lawsuits and downloads can take longer to complete than Netflix to mail me a Blu-Ray disc! I'll go P2P for something obscure but for popular media, it makes little sense to me.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[The End Of Days]

The difference is so subtle as to be meaningless. What good is the best invention in the world if only two people know about it?

Re:Lessons from the format war, Casette vs 8Track,

[zakezuke]

Having owned an 8track player and a cassette player, both were bad mediums for content. My first car came with an 8-track, and while I had a couple of tapes that wore out, for the most part I still have "working" 8 tracks including "John Denver's greatest hits volume II. In all fairness I did have some well played ones like ELO or Moody Blues and they in all fairness did better than their cassette counterparts. The only complaint was the moving 8 track head which almost always went out of alignment so you would a neighboring track.

I'm not saying I miss 8 track. They were big, bulky, and you often had to divide up songs between tracks.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

An interesting nit to pick, but that blu-ray disc in your hands? That's not digital. And the store you bought it at? Meatspace. And (U.S. senators notwithstanding), the truck that delivered said media to the meatspace store is not a tiny digital truck driving through tiny digital tubes. We're not referring to a digital storage medium, but to digital delivery.

HD pulled me back

[suggsjc]

I'll keep this short, sweet, and full of nothing but my own opinions. I've watched more TV in the past two months than I have in probably the 6 before it combined. Why? Well, I got a nice HDTV and AnimalPlanetHD, DiscoveryHD and NatGeoHD have actually pulled me back to the TV side. Whats even more interesting is that I'm watching it live (read: with commercials) instead of with TiVo.

Its possible that the new is going to wear off after I feel like I've "got my money's worth" from my TV, but between those 3 channels listed above and Sports, I've definitely watched more TV as of late.

Re:HD pulled me back

[Gr8Apes]

...Well, I got a nice HDTV and AnimalPlanetHD, DiscoveryHD and NatGeoHD have actually pulled me back to the TV side. Those are definitely nice channels in HD. There are some good shows on those. There's also the Science, Military, and History Channels, along with some more mainstream entertainment like TMC, Universal, and HDNET which can also have some worthwhile content.

Whats even more interesting is that I'm watching it live (read: with commercials) instead of with TiVo. And then you lost me. Watching commercials? No HD DVR functionality? You post on /.?

Re:HD pulled me back

[suggsjc]

And then you lost me. Watching commercials? No HD DVR functionality? You post on /.?

Ok, before you start the petition to get my geek card revoked. I'm currently planning (read: getting parts and permission from the wife) to build a HD MythTV setup. However, with that said DiscoveryHD isn't that painful to watch commercials, as they are all in HD too and put enough meat in them to be interesting even if they are just advertising.

There's also the Science, Military, and History Channels, along with some more mainstream entertainment like TMC, Universal, and HDNET which can also have some worthwhile content.

Very true, I just named my top 3. Throw in some on-demand, hd music concerts (which will be even better once the rest of my home theater is setup), and top it off with live sports, then you've still got an entertainment resource to be reckoned with.

Hopefully with the Myth setup, I'll have the flexibility to combine both broadcast TV with internet resources to create the best entertainment experience possible even with an ever changing base of content sources (read: the internet). To get back at the GP, who knows maybe even with that setup TV will continue to lose ground to the internet and I'll eventually drop it all together. However, that day is not today even for a self-proclaimed geek.

Re:HD pulled me back

[justthinkit]

I bought our family of five a new clothes washer two days ago. We went from a worn out 15 year old top-loading Maytag truck to a front-loading top-of-the-line auto-everything "Epic", by Maytag. Yesterday it got installed and last night my wife and I watched $1,100 worth of automation for at least 45 minutes. People like shiny new things. That doesn't mean they will be watching them every night for the foreseeable future.

HDTV costs too much, requires a TV the size of a 4'x8' sheet of plywood (or what is the point?), and offers nothing I want. I'd take an HD movie if only the studios would ship one. Have a look at the file sizes on DVDs -- maybe only half the time do they actually fill a dual-layer. Ironically, Disney is rah rah on Blu-Ray, when their product could ship on a CD, contains the least amount of extras of any studio, and doesn't benefit from extras anyway.

The Corporation shipped with the movie and 6 hours of interviews on the second DVD. I think there is enough room on a DVD for pretty much any video I can think of, and if there isn't, well Lawrence of Arabia had an intermission in the theaters, why not at home?

Personally I will never even have digital TV (again). I don't want someone monitoring what I watch, the digital jaggies happened all to often, and the Outdoor Life Channel is now in the "lower 48" so what is the point?

I think the Discovery/NG channels are cow feed. Compare when the History Channel and Discovery do a subject. History, you get the facts. Discovery, you get the faux drama.

Re:HD pulled me back

[suggsjc]

I'm not sure I'm following all of your points.

Yeah, shiny new things are nice and it takes some time for the "new" to wear off. You could argue that it was a gigantic waste of money since it does the *exact* same thing as the TV that it replaced, but then again does your new Maytag do anything different than your old washer/dryer? The answer will depend on your point of view, just don't expect everyone to see things from exactly your point of view, I don't.

HDTV's do cost more but they aren't "required" to be large. However, there is some science to back up why people are buying larger TV's than in the past (other than ego).

I'm not 100% sure, but the reason that DVD isn't capable of doing HD has nothing to do with filesize, but the codecs. Most DVDs are "stored at a resolution of 720×480" or 345,600 pixels, whereas 1080p HD is 1920×1080, or 2,073,600 pixels...or 6 times the resolution. So, I think your filesize complaint is also wrong/invalid.

Don't know if you are misinformed about the fancy "Digital TV" thing either. If you have cable, then they can track what you are watching whether digital or analog. If you were referring to broadcast TV, then they can't track what you are watching whether digital or analog, PLUS analog broadcasts are going away in 2009. So your fantasy about watching non-traceable analog TV is about to crumble before your eyes.

Bottom line, you sound like you have a chip on your should and are just blabbering away on topics you have little to zero "factual" information about. I enjoy my HDTV and you are scared/angry at it. I wash my clothes and put them in the closet or the drawer, you are popping popcorn and watching it as your form of entertainment because big brother can't track you doing that.

Re:HD pulled me back

[justthinkit]

I'm not sure I'm following all of your points.

Yeah, shiny new things are nice and it takes some time for the "new" to wear off. You could argue that it was a gigantic waste of money since it does the *exact* same thing as the TV that it replaced, but then again does your new Maytag do anything different than your old washer/dryer? The answer will depend on your point of view, just don't expect everyone to see things from exactly your point of view, I don't.

Well, this here new Maytag we got does in fact do very much more. Automatic water level means less water u$ed, less waste water (costs even more to discard it than use it, believe it or not). Automatic temperature control means it can heat (or cool) as suited to load. Greater number of cycles (about ten vs two). Half the soap u$e. Better water extraction means fa$ter drying time. In short, it will pay for itself in five years.

HDTV's do cost more but they aren't "required" to be large. However, there is some science to back up why people are buying larger TV's than in the past (other than ego).

The thing is, if you get an HDTV that is say 27" in size (all we have room for in our living room), you are harder pressed to see them extra pixels. I lived with a 13" TV for some time a while back and realized that size definitely does not help TV. Similar to music, it is not the sound/picture quality but what you actually look or listen to. So why would I waste money on a "better look" that ain't even discernible at the diagonal size we trip with.

I'm not 100% sure, but the reason that DVD isn't capable of doing HD has nothing to do with filesize, but the codecs. Most DVDs are "stored at a resolution of 720×480" or 345,600 pixels, whereas 1080p HD is 1920×1080, or 2,073,600 pixels...or 6 times the resolution. So, I think your filesize complaint is also wrong/invalid.

Well, that is the raw theory. The reality, as I mentioned, is that they don't even ship DVDs at the highest quality a DVD can display, yet you don't hear legions of people whining about the lack of quality of DVDs. Even DVDs are good enough when half full, so why would I move to a Blu-Ray disc ever?

Don't know if you are misinformed about the fancy "Digital TV" thing either. If you have cable, then they can track what you are watching whether digital or analog.

How do you figure they can track me on regular cable? We have no Comcast box in the house and 3 TVs sharing the cable. How can they tell what each TV is showing? Think about.

With digital TV you get a box and commands from the remote go to the box (and back to Comcast). That is how they know you want to watch something from Channel 1, for example. You request it, they send it/unlock it/you get it. And then they know you wanted it.

If you were referring to broadcast TV, then they can't track what you are watching whether digital or analog, PLUS analog broadcasts are going away in 2009.

I was not referring to TV via an antenna. Although that would meet my privacy standard, yes.

So your fantasy about watching non-traceable analog TV is about to crumble before your eyes.

I don't think so, scooter. See above.

Bottom line, you sound like you have a chip on your should and are just blabbering away on topics you have little to zero "factual" information about.

I think you have described your "should's" situation.

I enjoy my HDTV and you are scared/angry at it.

Your adjective choices are truly high definition. I suggest you lock out CNN & Fox News, and hold the telephone a foot away from your head when you talk. Oh, and switch from robusta to arabica!

I wash my clothes and put them in the closet or the drawer, you are popping popcorn and watching it as your form of entertainment because big brother can't track you doing that.

We had no popcorn last night :-( but probably will this weekend when we go camping...in HD by the way.

DVD is "Good Enough"

[dotwaffle]

Let's look at the history of media, shall we?

People moved from watching on TV to watching the VHS because you could watch it when you want.
People moved from watching on VHS to watching on DVD because you didn't have to bother with rewinding etc, and it didn't degrade over time. (ish - most people believe their CD-Rs will last for ever, let alone DVD-R)
People moved from Analogue to Digital (in the UK) because Sky and Virgin (was NTL was whatever) gave you more channels and it was free-ish.

Why would people move from DVD to BluRay? Seriously - why? My mum watches Sky TV in a low bitrate MPEG-2 from Sky TV and can't see the difference on her 42" TV versus the crystal clear analogue signal, versus one of the HD-DVDs I have.

People don't care about quality - as long as it's "good enough". Why else would people dump CDs - the ultimate in digital formats of the 20th century, for crappy 128kbit MP3s?

Well, negating the "that's all that's available" and the "they're all that they can pirate" arguments at least.

DVD is good enough. It'll be here for a long while yet. And when it does die - we'll have storage nodes in every DSLAM to handle digital downloads of all the big films.

Let the flamewar begin.

Re:DVD is "Good Enough"

[LingNoi]

Absolutely correct, both Blue Ray and HD DVD are vaporware.

By the time Blue Ray makes any real impact at all a better storage medium will be avaliable that beats BR out of the water.

Re:DVD is "Good Enough"

[Dr. PhiI]

You do make great points, and there is probably handsome amount of wishful thinking behind the HD propulsion.

MP3 is a good example for comparison. I love quality music and would like to see it available more often on DVD-Audio, or at least on SACD but it's not happenning. The "good enough" is winning and everybody is getting an ipod.

Format "Wars" a foregone conclusion.

[Mike Buddha]

Blu-ray was bound to win this so-called format war, because HD-DVD doesn't have as good of a picture. HD-DVD can't do 1080p, and therefore was always going to be the big loser in this battle. I don't understand how anyone wasted their hard earned money on a shoddy, pseudo-HD format.

Re:Format "Wars" a foregone conclusion.

[st6787]

Blu-ray was bound to win this so-called format war, because HD-DVD doesn't have as good of a picture. HD-DVD can't do 1080p, and therefore was always going to be the big loser in this battle. I don't understand how anyone wasted their hard earned money on a shoddy, pseudo-HD format. Um, I don't know where you are getting this notion that HD-DVD does not do 1080p, but this link proves that wrong: http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/hddvd_products/product.asp?model=hd-a30

Re:Lessons from the format war, Casette vs 8Track,

[mlwmohawk]

You are either very very young, or have very poor memory.

I usually dismiss people who like to insult or guess about people. It is obnoxious.

And this is compared to when DVD players cost $300 and VCRs cost $39.
The price of the player is a concern, but not a huge one. As long as it is within the sweet spot of $100 it doesn't matter much. When DVD players were $300 most people didn't buy them.

What sold it for me and my friends was when movies weren't coming out on VHS anymore.

BR is a very inefficient backup medium

[HappyEngineer]

BR discs will be useless as a backup medium. They'll still be too expensive and you'll still need to swap discs to fully back up your hard drive.

I just did a quick search. The recordable Blu-Ray discs are 25GB and $20 each. You can get a 500GB SATA drive for $105. Right now that makes BR about 4 times as expensive as hard discs and 20 times as annoying (20 disc swaps to back up a 500GB disc). Sure, the price will go down on BR discs, but it'll go down on hard drives as well.

I bought a SATA hot swap bay years ago. One of those is going to save you a lot of money after just a couple of backups.

It has been many years since optical media was a practical way to back up large amounts of data. BR won't change that.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[westlake]

Frankly, I think it's WAY too early to be replacing DVDs--presently, only about 15% of U.S. households even own an HDTV!

"The Nielsen numbers...estimate that 13.7 million homes have HDTV and high-def tuners. That's roughly 15-16 million homes -- or about 50 percent of the 30 million homes that have high-def sets. Los Angeles has the highest penetration of HD-capable homes with 20.4 percent, followed by Washington, D.C. with 19.4 percent. New York is third with 18.1 percent."

HDTV is digital video, new display technologies, large screen, wide screen projection. Multicast video. Multichannel digital audio. That is a lot to swallow in one bite.

I wouldn't mind having a 20% share of the major urban markets.

Particularly if the product I am selling also sells the HT receiver, digital radio and surround sound audio. The premium cable or satellite service. The DVR. The theater lounge chair and the popcorn machine.

Gas is approaching $4 a gallon. Blu-Ray rentals from Netflix are $20/mo.

Solid State Memory

[Draconix]

It's only a matter of time before solid state memory (or something effectively similar) becomes cheap enough and with great enough capacity to be a _true_ leap forward. Smaller, more durable, more portable video disks, _players with no moving parts_ (a boon to portable video) and so on. DVD didn't take off because of better picture quality/more storage space alone, it took off because it's cheaper, more reliable, more durable, and more portable than VHS, and it doesn't degrade like magnetic tape does.

Re:What's going to replace Blu-Ray?

[Embedded2004]

>I think it's WAY too early to be replacing DVDs--presently, only about 15% of U.S. households [tvpredictions.com] even own an HDTV!

Why would someone buy an HDTV if there wasn't something to make use of the increased resolution?

AC with a point.

[RingDev]

how the fuck is that insightful? its a basic tenet of economics. if that wasnt true, then we wouldnt be having this discussion As much as I hate replying to an AC, you have a very good point. My post may have been accurate, but it doesn't strike me as the type of post to get +5 insightful rating.

Ahh well. Maybe tomorrow it'll turn into an Overrated +3, if not, hopefully the meta moderating will even it out.

-Rick

Forgot to define requirements

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's easy to pronounce a technology silly if your requirements are different.

Here's one: backup data, have it readable after being in storage for 15 years.

Blu-Ray: decent chance. Use FEC liberally.
Hard Drive: not betting my money on it

Re:Forgot to define requirements

[HappyEngineer]

Really? Do you have a link to somewhere that makes that sort of comparison? If the bet were between DVD and hard drives then I'd absolutely go with a hard drive. I've had plenty of DVDs which were unreadable (usually due to a tiny scratch) whereas I've never had a hard drive crash so badly that I couldn't get all the data off. Obviously it can happen, but all my hard drive "crashes" have been decays in performance (like requiring 10 times the length of time to get data off) which always allowed me to eventually copy the data off.

Are you claiming that BR will be much more reliable than DVD?

Re:Forgot to define requirements

[bill_mcgonigle]

Are you claiming that BR will be much more reliable than DVD?

Well, it has a special scratch-resistant coating, so it should be more reliable to handle than DVD.

My hope is that the chemistry has also improved in the past decade - some dyes are better than others.

But the main point is about long-term archival needs, where betting on a motor that hasn't spun in 15 years might be a risky proposition.

shelf-life of discs

[j-beda]

I'm not so certain. If shelf life is anything like for DVDs, I suspect that the HD will in general win on that front - just remember to copy your archives over to the new interface format when SATA is put to pasture and you will probably be fine.

Re:shelf-life of discs

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'm not so certain. If shelf life is anything like for DVDs, I suspect that the HD will in general win on that front - just remember to copy your archives over to the new interface format when SATA is put to pasture and you will probably be fine.

NIST estimated DVD-R's to be good for about 30 years, if well stored. I assume they used quality discs (I like the Taiyo Yudens). My hope is that Blu-Ray has benefited from some chemistry improvement of the past decade.

My point was about archival needs, though. If you can afford to keep the stuff online, go for it, that's better. But the price of keeping stuff online is still high, if done right, compared with optical media, even with multiple copies and FEC.

I don't think we have any reason to trust hard drives for archival purposes though. I wouldn't bet on a SATA drive spinning after sitting on a shelf for 15 years, though you could probably still find a few clunkers around that could read it. 30 years - man, that'd be tough.

One real advantage of keeping it online, though, is that you don't need to do the work in 25 years to re-archive the media. Heck, who knows what we'll be writing to in 25 years...

Analysts repeating the common opinion

[asc99c]

All these analyst opinions seem to be based around repeating the common mantra that soon enough, digital downloads will overtake whatever disc based format and therefore Blu-Ray will not be profitable. This is rubbish.

1) More people can see a difference between the quality of download films vs bought media (DVD or Blu-Ray), compared to audio. This means to become mainstream, downloaded films are going to have to close that quality gap. Doing that will require more bandwidth and storage space than is currently available.

2) Even now, download audio is not anywhere near the mainstream option - CDs still sell far higher numbers.

3) Films don't have the casually listen and flick between tracks aspect that music does. The big selling point of MP3 players is storing multiple albums and jumping between whatever tracks you want to listen to right now. Watching a movie is a 2 hour investment of time - you can't watch 5 minutes of Bourne Identity, then decide you'd like a comedy and watch 5 minutes of Knocked Up.

4) Lots of people who don't use MP3 players simply prefer the simplicity of putting in a CD. The benefits of MP3 are outweighed by the complexity of even the relatively easy to use PC + iTunes. These people will only very slowly switch to downloaded media.

I should say at this point I have invested about £1500 in a media centre and have all my films ripped to a server. The server has lots of hard discs, makes lots of noise and so can't go in the living room, meaning I need two PCs and a network.

I do believe when someone makes is easy enough to do something similar to my setup, downloads will become mainstream. But I also believe it will be well over 10 years before the average Joe believes it is easy enough to do a media centre setup instead of just buying Blu-Rays.

This...

[Joce640k]

The only which which surprised me was the amount of bribery and payola going around.

As for "HD"... so long as I still have to check the labels in stores to make sure it's "High Definition" I'm looking at then it really isn't. As far as I can tell it's only about 50% better quality then standard-def in real terms.

50% better quality for the price of replacing all my kit and paying double for all the shiny discs? No thanks. Wake me up when you've got something which makes me go "Wow!".

First player with .MKV + H.264 support wins

[Juiblex]

The truth is that we can skip those technologies. We only need a player capable of playing H.264 video streamed from the computer (via LAN, WLAN, Bluetooth, etc.), and with a USB port. If the Movies Industry is smart enough, it will not make the same mistakes of the Record Industry, and will sell downloadable DRM-free HD movies.

Ah the x-box

[SmallFurryCreature]

So please tell me, where is x-box core going to store it? Oh and the Wii is the console that is selling like hotcakes, it already got problems storing enough games from its back catalog. It don't even have enough storage to store a DVD, not even enough to store a decent rip of a DVD.

Instant delivery? I want your con because there is no way in hell even my pretty decent cable can deliver 40-50 gb in the time it takes to watch it. In fact I am willing to bet you that I can pop down to the local rental shop and get back before I can download a rip. If I am very lucky with bittorrent it still takes about 10 minutes to download a CD sized rip, the rental shop is a 3-4 minutes walk.

Tech indeed moves fast, that is the problem, when all this internet content started we were happy with video the size of a postage stamp and blocks all over the place. Now we want video in HD. everytime speed or size increases so do the demands on the system.

Look at youtube, VHS quality, would you watch a movie on it on your HD set?

Re:Ah the x-box

[CavemanKiwi]

Ok so you have a point you need a hard drive. I do you the Xbox 360 for movie rentals and I find it works well. I always pick the SD though as the download speeds aren't there for the HD content IMO. The movie in DVD quality is take about 3-5 minutes before it starts playing (HD seems to take over 2 hours, longer than I will wait) typically my wife and I prepare pop corn get ourselves comfortable and then it is ready to play.

I suspect the Apple TV works in a similar fashion and I wouldn't be surprised to see the PS3 have the capability as well.

I see all of these mainly targeting the rental industry just like Comcast on demand service does. I think for owning digital copies people will require a mechanism for backing up their media files.