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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.
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. -
Eventually, yes...but I think optical media will still be around for a while.
Purely from a gaming perspective, it will be interesting to see if Microsoft includes Blu-Ray in its next Xbox. I doubt the next Xbox will be far enough in the future to support only digital downloads (due to ISP bandwith concerns), they won't be able to just stick with DVD9, and they would be pretty stupid to try to release their own optical format.
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.
Living With a Nerd
It's one step closer to the pay per play model. If people can't sell or give away their old titles, everyone will have to cough up.
Jobs obviously has a shitty home theatre if he believes the "HD" crap in itunes is acceptable on anything other than little screens, with low-fi sound systems.
The sales figures for blu-ray seem to indicate otherwise. Sales are up over 68% year over year, marketshare has nearly doubled year over year (2009 to 1020).
Of course there are dynamics at work outside of the straight consumer choice angle. There is the control afforded the media companies via downloadable media to consider as well. That may be what these guys are relying on for their opinion. The question then is whether the sheep are willing to follow where they are being led.
Now I can finally get of the fence and order my new HD DVD player! Awesome.
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?
Why get Civ 5 on Steam? You can just activate it on Steam once you buy the physical copy.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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.
Why not order it off fry's and put the key into steam?
"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?
I worked as a consultant primarily with small and medium sized production houses who were transitioning from other editing platforms to Final Cut Pro and from SD to HD. They would ask, "Should I invest in Blu-ray or HD-DVD?" My answer would be neither. Those of us in the industry saw that by the time one format won out, it would remain dominate for 18 - 24 hours before everything went Digital Download anyway. And this was back in 2004. The only question would be the method of digital content delivery. Would it be a store like iTunes, would it be streaming through set top cable boxes (On Demand), or would it be some kind of web streaming service like Youtube or Hulu? Or would it be a combination of all? So far it's a combination of all.
I can't remember the last time I used my DVD player. I bought a Mac Mini in 2005 and hooked it up to my TV's DVI port and attached a 320 and now 1TB external harddrive to it. At the time, the apartment I lived in didn't have SciFi as part of the basic cable package. I purchased season 2 & 3 of Battlestar Galactica and quickly figured out for 2 months of the TV/Internet/Phone bundle I could buy all the TV programs I watched off iTunes and download them the next day . And the Quality of picture was good enough on my 32" TV.
That's what I did until Hulu came along. Then I just started watching the shows I wanted on it.
Most videographers I know are still creating regular DVD's and then if a client wants their movie in HD, they save it as an H.264 file onto a thumb drive or have the client provide an external HDD.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
If your house burns down and destroys all your DVDs the store you bought them from isn;t going to let you replace them all for free -
This is tangentially related to the story topic, but I have definitely had physical media replaced. It wasn't through the retailer though. One instance I recall was that I accidentally dropped one of the disks to C&C Generals and rolled over it in my office chair. Totally ruined it. I wrote a polite letter to EA Games, included what was left of the original media to prove I wasn't trying to scam them, and they sent me a replacement disk.
They weren't obligated to do this by any means (that I am aware of). But they did. That was good customer support.
Of course I never expected them to do this, so by the time I received the replacement disk I had already gotten a pirated copy and was playing that. It was so convenient to use the cracked version that I just kept on doing so. But I felt righteous knowing that I also owned a usable physical disk.
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 think Blu-Ray will get passed by. Sony's crybaby bitchy attitude killed the last HD optical possibility. Their format war postponed the inception of HD optical media too long, and prices have been steadily too high for movies ever since because they are trying to make up the costs of this war (you don't think it really costs that much more to make a Blu-Ray vs DVD?). Now, hopefully we will move to solid state media storage, such as Secure digital ROM or some variant, where the physical media size is much smaller and more robust. I still think people want to own physical media, just not in $25-$30 optical formats.
in other news the sky is blue and water is wet.
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.
It doesn't cost much if any more to manufacture a Blu-Ray than a DVD.
Well, maybe not for large runs, but apparently the AACS yearly license fee's can exceed the cost of the disk duplication for small runs. Originally this was one of the HD-DVD advantages (used existing DVD replication lines, with minor upgrades, rather than replacing the duplicators). Apparently the cost difference vs DVD is still fairly significant for DL BR's (>$1) (someone has to amortize the cost of buying the duplicators). This may not seem like a lot if the movie is selling for ~$20, but it makes a diffrence if your selling in the walmart bargin bin for $4.
Still, the studios always use the lure of new technology to raise prices. They did the same thing with DVD vs VHS, and CD vs tape. Initially they were just "passing on additional costs", but the price hikes stuck long after the new technology became mainstream.
Other than that I generally agree with you.
I picked up a 42" 1080p HDTV (60fps) for $700 earlier this year. The prices have dropped astronomically in the past two years, and the quality remains high. Avoid unnecessary extras like 120 / 240 hz, any sort of BS color correction, etc, and you can get a great looking screen for quite reasonable amounts these days. This is especially true over old CRT's, that had issues with color blur, "bending" the picture when things got bright, colored fringes around spots of light or dark, and weighing a bloody ton. If you're happy with your screen, by all means hold out until it breaks: the prices will be even lower later. But the screens coming out now are a quite nice upgrade.
DVD's were far more expensive than VHS tapes when it first came out. They weren't more expensive to manufacture, they were just sold for more. As the market matured, they became the same price old VHS tapes had been in their prime. The same is starting to happen to Blu-Ray. You can get The Dark Knight off Amazon for 6 dollars on Blu-Ray, along with lots of other great movies. They were gouging, but the prices are starting to return in line with reality. I've seen double-packs of older Blu-Ray movies at Target for $10.
And I have to say, while I never originally intended to pick up a blu-ray player, the quality is significantly higher on HDTVs. DVD's are fine for 640x480 interlaced content, but they really start to show their age when you stretch them to 1080p. It just looks really blurry. And as pretty much all TV's being sold these days are either 720 or 1080p, that difference is likely to start becoming significant to people as their old CRT's burn out. Add in that most DVD's don't handle widescreen displays quite right, and Blu-Ray seems like it will be around for quite some time.
The ______ Agenda