Blu-ray Proposes Incompatible BD-XL and IH-BD Formats

adeelarshad82 writes "The Blu-ray Disc Association announced upcoming specifications for high-capacity write-once and rewritable discs. The BDA proposed two new formats, BDXL, the name given to new 100GB and 128GB discs; and IH-BD, a so-called 'Intra-Hybrid' disc that will incorporate both read-only and rewritable layers. Specifications for both disc types will be published during the upcoming months. Both formats will be incompatible with existing hardware; however, new players designed to take advantage of the new formats will be able to play back existing Blu-ray discs, which are available in both 25 and 50GB capacity points."

Comments

Designed Obsolescence

[WrongSizeGlass]

How many Blue Ray players am I supposed to buy before they stop coming up with new formats? I bet they keep this sh!t up until the next video format wars. Asshats.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Ogi_UnixNut]

But that is the point. You (as a customer) are the antithesis of what they want. The want people to keep re-buying things all the damn time, in fact in an ideal word, the MPAA/RIAA would charge you for every time you set eyes on a movie or heard one of their songs. Failing that they probably would not mind a rental modal where people pay forever to be able to access the content. As such DRM is designed to fulfil these goals, which is why it ends up being so frustrating that enough people put their heads together to break it.

Ideally they want the transition from one medium to another to be impossible. Failing that, making it so complicated that the majority of people just re-buy it all is an acceptable alternative. Once you realise this, why they implement DRM the way they do (or at all) and their general attitude make a lot more sense.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[causality]

You also completely contradict yourself. You suggest Sony is part of some massive conspiracy because it is in their best interest to have high prices, and then immediately after say it is in their best interest to have low prices.

I wouldn't call it conspiracy, I would call it collusion. It's reminiscent of the USA cellphone industry. For example, text messages cost next-to-nothing for the carrier of a CDMA network, and absolutely nothing for the carrier of a GSM network. Yet despite multiple competing cellphone networks, none of them have text message pricing that remotely reflects the actual cost of delivering SMS.

It's not difficult to understand why. It benefits all of the cellphone companies to continue overcharging for this service, and the one company that undercuts the competition and forces all of them to lower their prices is going to ruin the high profit margins for everyone, itself included. No conspiracy is required; they didn't have to get together and plan this ahead of time. Each company only has to realize that changing this status quo will result in less profit, and they can realize this independently without consulting the other companies.

Until and unless they start losing serious sales volume because customers feel that the price is too high, the movie producers have no incentive to engage in competition that they know will reduce their profit margins. Unlike the cellphone providers, they are not even directly competing with each other because of the monopoly nature of copyright. No one but Sony can produce and distribute copies of a movie for which Sony owns the copyright, so if you want a movie made by them you cannot purchase that same title from a competitor. So there is even less competition for each unique movie title than there is among cellphone providers for mobile phone services. That means there is even less incentive for any one company to rock the boat with aggressive pricing.

Retailers ultimately set prices. And most retailers are being stupid because Amazon is massively undercutting them.

If Sony's wholesale price for copies of its movies is X, then Amazon cannot charge less than X for those titles and expect to remain in business. That's why Sony's influence on the ultimate retail price is quite strong and should not be so quickly dismissed. I would venture that Amazon's lower prices have more to do with sales volume and the fact that they don't have the expenses of maintaining brick-and-mortar stores.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anpheus]

Are you serious?

No one has an answer for long term media over twenty five years. No one. CD-ROM has barely been around that long, tapes that old cannot be read in any current players, and hard drives back then used IDE, which I can still get adapters for.

The only realistic way to archive digital media is to have a planned rotation policy. So, if I were to start today I'd start with 1 or 1.5TB disks in bulk, in 3 years consolidate those 2:1 to 2 or 3TB disks, etc. And keep consolidating (reducing the number of disks while also storing the data at multiple sites) perpetually. That's the only solution that keeps your data yours, and not at the mercy of a technology that you know won't be supported in twenty five years.

And of course, just because I recommend hard drives don't mean I recommend throwing everything else out the window. Judicious use of ECC, storing archive data at multiple sites and even biting the bullet and storing data multiple times at a single site are all options that should be explored when determining your archive policy.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[WiglyWorm]

I bet you could burn an encryption key to the disk from the player itself, thereby locking it to a single player. The *IAA would gobble that shit up.

Dear Corporate Overlords,

[VTI9600]

Kudos on your selection of the term "Intra-Hybrid" (simply being a hybrid is never enough) and an acronym with an "X" in it for marketing your new products. Also, congratulations on having the forsight to not allow these new media to be played on clearly obsolete Blu-Ray players while still selling them as Blu-Ray discs. However, the following concerns me:

Specifications for both disc types will be published during the upcoming months.

Don't you realize that publishing specs hurts your bottom line?!?!