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Xbox Head Proclaims Blu-ray Dead
Blacklaw writes "Microsoft has sided with Apple in a rare case of solidarity between the two companies, and declares that Blu-ray will be 'passed by' as a high-definition format. In many ways, it's hard to disagree. US markets have seen the demand for legal digital downloads of PC games exceed sales of the physical object for the first time, and Apple famously refuses to put a Blu-ray drive in its Macs, as Jobs prefers to send people towards iTunes to download their entertainment. That said, there's an argument for physical media, too. A recent survey suggested that the majority of gamers prefer physical discs, and digital downloads have the secondary effect of entirely cutting out the popular market for second-hand films and games — a plus for publishers, but a big negative for the consumer."
I never thought I would say it, but I can now quite easily envision a day very soon when all my new media (games, movies, music, TV shows, books, etc.) will belong to studios, software companies, publishers, etc.--with me just renting it. There will be no such thing as buying a used book, or a used videogame. I will never be able to resell any media that I "buy." If the studio decides to have a moritorium on a movie (like Disney so often does), they will just be able to flick a switch at any time and turn my copy of that movie off. Publishers will be able to edit all my books retroactively. When a director decides he doesn't like the ending of his movie, he can change it and force that change on everyone who owns it. If a studio goes bankrupt and takes down their servers, all my movies from them will turn to digital dust. If a judge issues a court order, all copies of a piece of media will evaporate with a single command from a media server somewhere. And when my internet goes down, so does every piece of media I own.
I will own nothing. The media companies will control how I watch or use my media, when I use it, where I use it, and how long I use it, and even *if* I can use it. I will either be completely at their mercy, or forced to resort to law-breaking to enjoy my own media as I wish.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If it was Sony and Microsoft, I'm sure /. would call it collusion - which it is.
Microsoft and Apple aren't just proclaiming the death of Blu-ray, but psychical media entirely.
They are just using Blu-Ray as a front for that, as it's the biggest consumer disc currently.
I don't see psychical media dieing anything soon though.
I don't mind digital downloads, I see a use for it.
But I also see a use for psychical media.
Get over it, they can both be here.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
The point of HD is high quality, right?
So, in which fantasy land do these streamed or downloaded films match the 20-30Mb/s data rate of playing a film off Blu-Ray? Or have they managed to invent some magical new codec that's ~10x as efficient as what you find on disk without losing quality?
Enjoy downloading your high resolution but blocky and fuzzy mess. I'll stick to a high quality, sharp picture thanks.
You know the story of the frog in the cauldron, right? If you put a live one in a cauldron with boiling water, he will leap out as soon as he touches the water. But if you put it there and slowly heat up the water, he won't notice until it is too late. Guess what the content owners are doing to the consumers.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Or he thinks we do.
"CD Quality" is dead, to be replaced by downsampled and compressed mp3s
"Bluray Quality" is dead, to be replaced by downsampled, compressed iTunes downloads, streamed netflix/comcast, Hulu etc..
Hell, even the stuff on TV that is claimed to be "HD" is compressed by your cable provider. It's a shame as a Bluray just provides that much more content than some compressed/re-encoded file. While it's not as easy to tell when watching "HDTV" on a iPhone or iPod. When you have a 50in TV and a 5.1 stereo, you can tell.
Steve Jobs' motto should be, "Compressed media, through earbuds, it's good enough."
I have an installer, I have the game files
The installer requires a connection to a server that Activision Blizzard can shut down at any time.
If you so desire, you can burn everything that you "do not own" over to a disc and voila! you now have a physical representation of your ownership.
How does this store the state of Internet activation of the copies that you own?
Technically, the guy says that he predicts the format is dying (i.e. bluray is currently in use but he forsees the day that his approach, downloads, will overtake physical media). He doesn't actually say that it's dead (past tense) like the headline states.
But "Xbox Head Proclaims Blu-ray Dying" doesn't rhyme...
We've got three XBox 360s in the house, and we buy a lot more Bluray movies than we do XBox games. So much for how the physical media balance out. As for streaming, we only stream when we *can't* buy, because the quality is never even close to that of Bluray, and of course, if the connection goes down, as happens from time to time, you're screwed.
It seems to me that between the cost of the high speed connection, the cost of the rental, the fact that it's gone after you watch it, the quality is lower, you can't lend it, you can't significantly time-shift it, and the fact that it can and does fail... that if you do prefer streaming, you're simply not a very picky viewer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I mean DVDs are still being sold by the millions so why I believe BlueRay fills a needed market, that market is just shrinking like crazy.
Blu-ray isn't selling well because it's too high priced. I can get brand new DVDs for $5 at Wal Mart, the cheapest Blu-rays are four times that, and new releases are twice what a new DVD release is -- for a piece of plastic! It doesn't cost much if any more to manufacture a Blu-Ray than a DVD. And there are still more low-def TVs out there that Blu-ray will look identical to DVD on than there are hi-defs. I don't know very many people at all with hi-def TVs, while I know a LOT of people still watching CRTs. Hell, I paid $1,000 for my flat 42 inch CRT eight years ago, and I'll watch the damned thing until the tube burns out.
DVD was a clear winner over VHS; far better picture even on the lowest end display, better fast forward/rewind, jump to scenes, etc. The hardware wasn't much more expensive (and just as cheap later on) and the media was priced the same. Not so with BluRay. In fact, someone with a CRT who buys a blu-ray on the promise of a better picture is going to badmouth it to everyone he knows, as well as the people without BluRay players who buy BluRays not noticing or knowing it won't play in their DVD player.
To shell out twice what I paid for my TV for a TV with a smaller screen, even though it has a sharper picture, seems pretty dumb to me. I actually have to work work for a living, and beer ain't cheap either.
Free Martian Whores!
I just purchased my first HDTV and Blu-Ray player a couple of months ago, and I had always thought that Blu-Ray wouldn't stick around long. Now I feel differently. While streaming video à la NetFlix is convenient, the quality is just not there. There's no 5.1 audio from NetFlix, for example, and the video quality depends way too much on the quality of the internet connection. I have decent quality cable internet service, but my Blu-Ray player still chokes on HD NetFlix streams, leaving me with an HD resolution video that's compressed so badly that its quality pales in comparison to SD streams.
A lot of the USA has much worse internet service than I have. I know that things will continue to get better on that front, but I think it will be quite a while before streaming media has enough quality for enough people to make them want to abandon the security and reliability of physical media.
Also, The streaming model works fine for shows that you'll only care about watching once, or for discovering new shows that you wouldn't otherwise take the effort to buy/rent the disc for, but I think people are more inclined to buy movies that they really like. If you're a huge Napoleon Dynamite fan, or if your daughter loves a certain Disney princess movie, you're not going to want to pay $3 to "rent" the movie every time you want to see it (or see a part of it), and you don't want to depend on Netflix or Hulu, since their streaming catalogs are very limited, and some shows come and go.
I love Blu-Ray. I love having a physical copy of my movies, that have a higher bitrate and quality than those sent via Net Flix and iTunes.
I will ALWAYS side with owning a copy on disc, as long as the disc contains a superior quality product, and I can own my disc.
Be it movie, or game.... I want a physical version that I can load or unload onto my own media server as I see fit, or sell to someone else on a whim etc.
Downloadable services have their place, but none of them include ownership of the films. Games yes, but games are a complex issue as many of them require online servers to play. Unfortunately many games do not provide you with the server code, or the match making applications used by the game companies networks. This hurts classic gaming.
"All that being said, I'll agree that Blu-Ray is likely the last (or the second to last) optical media standard that will ever hit mainstream status."
Doubtful, I don't know how much storage is required for a holographic two hour presentation, but I would guess a hell of a lot more than 50GB. Physical media has always been a magnitudes faster than downloading for consumers, technology pushes both every year and will for the foreseeable future, until we can download a lifelike experience in a matter of seconds, we will have physical media. Since we don't even have close to the technology to even display it yet, the death of physical media is many years or perhaps decades away.