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With Cinavia DRM, Is Blu-ray On a Path To Self-Destruction?
suraj.sun tips an article at AnandTech about a Blu-ray DRM scheme called Cinavia. The author makes the case that software like Cinavia is hastening the death of a Blu-ray industry already struggling to compete with online media streaming. Quoting:
"In our opinion, it is the studios and the Blu-ray system manufacturers who have had the say in deciding upon the suitability of a particular DRM scheme. Consumers have had to put up with whatever has been thrust upon them. The rise in popularity of streaming services (such as Netflix and Vudu) which provide instant gratification should make the Blu-ray industry realize its follies. The only reason that streaming services haven't completely phased out Blu-rays is the fact that a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection. Once such connections become ubiquitous, most of the titles owned by consumers would probably end up being stored in the cloud. ... The addition of new licensing requirements such as Cinavia are preventing the natural downward price progression of Blu-ray related technology. Instead of spending time, money and effort on new DRM measures that get circumvented within a few days of release, the industry would do well to lower the launch price of Blu-rays. There is really no justification for the current media pricing."
I didn't know conglomerates were charities? Why would they lower their prices, unless forced to?
Proof bluray is dead, bought a laptop for 800 bucks last week, still no blu ray drive, only high end carry one....
If "software like Cinavia is hastening the death of a Blu-ray industry already struggling" how is that a "path to self-destruction"?!
The only reason that streaming services haven't completely phased out Blu-rays is the fact that a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection.
Also the fact that Netflix and Vudu is only available in the USA. The rest of the world still rely on physical media.
We are the people our parents warned us about.
They're the one pushing this audio watermark in their movies. Piracy has nothing to do with it, they want to license this crap to others and get a Sony tax on every audio track and device that supports this offensive DRM (playback will stop if the source is from an unregistered device, so forget legal rips).
That's a big leap. Countries with high populations densities, such as those in Europe and the Far East, will have a much easier/cheaper time of building out the infrastructure for reliable high-speed internet to a vast majority of their population. Here in the US, however, it's a lot more expensive. Simply hand-waving the "once such connections become ubiquitous" ignores the cost of installing that infrastructure, and the time required to extend it to enough households.
Besides, a 1080p movie is going to suck a lot of bandwidth, and I'm guessing most people won't want to pay for a connection fast enough when they can save a few bucks with a slower connection. Not to mention the whole throttling/bandwidth cap issue.
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You pick a movie on netflix, 5 seconds later your watching it. You download a pirated movie, open it and 2 seconds later your watching it. You put a blu ray in, you wait a minute for it to pass the security check, get notified you need to download a firmware update for your blu ray player, get that done, be forced to watch the fbi notice, non skippable studio notices, skip past the previews, get to the overly animated menu and have to wait 20 seconds before it get to the play / select chapters buttons.
I have always wondered how much money the studios have spent (wasted) on copy protection and huge legal teams over the years. Just lower the prices, when people walk by the 5$ dvd bin at walmart, they stop and grab a few. Bring down prices across the board and sales will go up. Also, start making better movies people want to watch more than 1 time.
Our house is rural, we can only get verizon 3G internet, with 5GB per month, we cant do any streaming. No cable, no dsl. We still need netflix (by mail) or download movies someplace else and being them home.
Redbox has shown people are more than willing to pay for physical movies,well, upto 1$ or a bit more for blu rays.
The only reason that streaming services haven't completely phased out Blu-rays is the fact that a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection.
To be honest I don't see that changing very much in the next 5 years. ISPs will continue to throttle the crap out of a user's connection. Does Netflix etc. only stream movies, or can you download them to watch later?
Summation 2
All the video stores - I mean all but three in a city of 1.1M, none within many miles of my house - have closed. And I don't get streaming, in every sense of the word "get".
In Canada, at least, Netflix recently reduced it's bandwidth again, down below 1Mbps - sub DVD, much less Blu-Ray. Why bother having HDTV if you use it?
I've become a steady browser at the library, where they have more DVD titles than any video store - but for anything popular, put the disc on a hold and wait 3 months, and all Blu-Rays (about 5% of the collection) are out all the time. And, no, I'm not paying $29.99 for "Contagion" to watch it once, possibly twice ten years later.
The rental people had about the right number - $5 for an evening for something quite popular, a little less for the older ones. And there are few movies I'll watch twice, very, very few more than twice, so $10 as a purchase price is already high for most discs. For me.
So I do seem to be trapped in some kind of market failure here, where I've got the money, want the product, and the one market mechanism for meeting product with customer at an agreeable price has just collapsed, beaten out by "good enough"....and if 1Mbps is "good enough" (is it really that people are too damn lazy to go to the mall to browse instead of clicking from the sofa??), then maybe BR is doomed because nobody appreciates resolution. And not having freezes and artifacts and glitches.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
I have a rather vast collection of DVD's. Several hundred, in fact. I don't actually watch a lot of films, but I do enjoy owning the ones I like.
When Blu-ray first came along, or rather when I first got a Blu-ray player (A PS3 I managed to grab on the cheap, back when they were still £350+), I started the transition to Blu-ray. If I bought a new film, I'd buy the Blu-ray version instead of the DVD. If I wanted to watch an old film, I'd see if I could find it on blu-ray before raiding my collection.
Then the irregularities hit - obviously being a collector, I'd want to get the "best" version of the films in question. Yet for the longest time, you could get a "vanilla" DVD, a "Special" DVD (which often came with a second disk full of "Features" and maybe some art cards) or THE blu-ray. Which came with only some, or none, of the special features. And it was still £5 more than the special DVD.
I stopped buying either. I found that I could just as easily spend £10 a month on a newsgroup subscription and download whatever film I wanted in whatever quality I wanted, whenever I wanted. Why rebuy my whole collection when I can just watch what I want, when I want? If I wanted the extras, I could have them as well - at no extra cost. What's more, I could play them wherever I wanted, including streaming them to various other non-bluray capable devices. Much how people preferred MP3's simply because anything could play them, I now prefer downloaded copies for the same reason. I'm sorry that "crooks" are getting my money instead of the people who made the films, but it all just got too much. I will switch to a streaming service as soon as one offers a decent catalogue of films without charging stupid amounts. I refuse to "rent" films for anything more than £1 a pop - particularly as brand new DVDs can be had for less than £5 and most streams are NOT actually HD quality (they're often about as good as DVD quality, maybe a bit better - certainly no 1080p). The content is the killer though - why does Netflix US have 10x the content than Netflix UK does? Oh yeah, because the Movie companies are plainly greedy. They want licensing rights done on a per-country basis so they can squeeze as much out of everyone. Well fuck you, how about you let anyone access all your content for a set price and let competition do the work.
Netflix BDs by mail? That's still using the same BD DRM. Netflix and Hulu video on demand? Those are available only where you can get cable TV. If your home isn't served by a cable TV provider, and the DSLAM isn't close enough to you either, then you're stuck with satellite and 3G, whose monthly data transfer caps aren't near enough for streaming feature-length video.
This is a big thing - DVD and Blu-Ray have lengthy startup sequences that you are not allowed to skip (they kindly say "not available" if you try, but might as well say "neener neener"). Add that to the time it takes to locate a disk, insert it into the drive, let it spin up, etc..
Netflix lets me watch something *now*. No startup, just right into the movie. That's exactly what I want.
Also the fact that Netflix and Vudu is only available in the USA.
Doesn't LoveFilm pick up a few more countries?
Some of us have no interest in streaming our media. And many of us have no interest in storing our stuff in the cloud.
I want my movies stored local, offline, and accessible when I want it and without asking permission. Streaming is just going to lead to 'monetizing' each view. Storing it in the cloud means I can't watch movies on the plane, in bed, or by the pool.
I'm probably old fashioned, but I still buy Blu Ray discs and CDs which I rip to MP3. With ISPs adding bandwidth caps and the like, I'm not going to pay to stream down a movie I've already bought, and then pay my ISP again for the bandwidth for re-watching the movie again. Everyone wants a piece of that action, and I'm not playing.
So, for many of us, the physical disk is going to remain as the way we play these movies for a long time yet.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Even though watching a movie even just two times is unlikely.
Unless you have single-digit-year-old kids who "wanna watch Sin-duh-weh-wuh again, Daddy." There are some films suitable for a repeat viewing, and a lot of those are G-rated animated films. For me when I was growing up, it was The Care Bears Movie.
I'm perfectly happy paying under $10 for a BluRay, because if I buy it I do so with the intention of watching it multiple times. But then again I rarely buy Hollywood blockbusters and I never buy the day they hit the shelves.
that a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection.
While certainly there are large portions of the U.S. who for various reasons do not have fast or reliable net connections, there is also the issue of costs.
In my area, to get 25/25 by itself costs $70/month. That's if you have a verizon phone line. Without the line you can add another $5/month.
If you want 50/20, that will cost you $140/month ($145 without phone).
Even 15/5 is expensive at $50/month with a phone line).
So people have to think: do I want to shell out $70/month just to have a high speed connection? Do I need that high speed connection?
Right now, there is a large portion of the population who says no, that is too high and not worth the money.
Until some form of TRUE competition is injected into the marketplace (2 providers is not competition), the cost/benefit ratio is not consumer friendly.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
My bluray player upsamples DVDs and downloaded content to the point where the difference in quality isn't worth the price of admission for a typical blueray purchase. Combined with the fall of Blockbuster and the general rental market, I find I purchase much less video content overall these days.
After updating my PS3's firmware, I could no longer play my blu-ray backups that I had ripped with AC3 audio.
I didn't hesitate. I sold my PS3 and bought parts to build an HTPC - and never looked back.
I don't regret the decision at all. Neither will you.
When will we be able to stream bluray quality to our homes over an affordable internet connection? Given that a bluray based 1080p movie is about 15GB in size, to stream that amount of data to your house in 2 hours would require an internet connection of about 17Mb/s.
I know, I know, most people can't tell when you're getting heavily compressed, downsampled whatever using H.264 ogg-something-or-other. But when someone invests a couple grand into their TV+stereo+speakers, we'd like to be able to get a high quality input into it and not a something that's sufficient for the 6 o'clock news.
I'm not a audiophile, but a believer in garbage-in = garbage-out. I hope the media companies or movie studios don't force us down the path of the lowest common denominator which would be low quality streams fit for an iphone. It's a shame that in order to get a high quality stream you need to pay a ton for the internet connection and then most likely pay a ton for a 1080p stream.
Nuff said. If something is not available electronically, then it's probably antiquated and only available on CDs anyway.
That's exactly the point. Yes, the vendor dictates the terms, but I decide whether I accept them. And I don't.
I don't quite get the idea why throwing more shit at my face is supposed to make me buy it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
on the PS3 has been cracked/removed. Of course, you need to be on firmware 3.55 or lower unless you are willing to downgrade (requires soldering).
You mean, after they sell this crap to some clueless people with lame net connections, the format is going to die, and they get to sell something else?
And they're supposed to regard that as a problem?
The only reason that streaming services haven't completely phased out Blu-rays is the fact that a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection. Once such connections become ubiquitous, most of the titles owned by consumers would probably end up being stored in the cloud.
Aren't we already supposed to be in the time of "ubiquitous" high speed internet access? Besides which as much as they may claim that streaming is just as good, it's usually the case that most consumers don't have a good enough connection to receive bluray quality (even if they have high speed access). Assuming you care about that.
Bluray makes some things look great, but it's not that much better than DVD in many cases. Not even counting bluray releases that are crap transfers. The main reason I stick to disk for things (I like enough to purchase) is due to the fact that I can watch them whenever I want. In particular when my internet connection goes down I can at least still watch something if that's what I felt like doing. Considering my 1) router can break 2) cable modem stops working 3) comcast doesn't work 4) netflix is down, is a lot more to go wrong than player going into my TV. Not to mention that all those examples of internet related problems (comcast in particular) happen quite often, but my TV setup hasn't failed me.
"The cloud" isn't at the level of reliability I'd like, nor is it at a level of trust I believe in.
The only reason that streaming services haven't completely phased out Blu-rays is the fact that a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection.
I can think of two other reasons:
* Consumers who for whatever reason aren't willing to go "grey market" or "black market" can't access titles that aren't licensed by streaming services.
* Many collectors and some other consumers like a factory-made, factory-authorized physical medium.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
... it has come down in prices since inception for sure. I have yet to own an BR machine but I just came across some recent release concert BR+CD combo is just $22. I'd prefer $5 but this is not too bad. I recall in the early days it's just stupidly expensive like upwards of $35-$40.
One slight problem .. Iron Man 2 is available for streaming, but Iron Man is not. No high speed streaming solution is going to help out when there is a legal roadblock to streaming movies.
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I wouldn't have a problem buying five dollar DVD's, except for the fact that the MPAA is so obnoxious. Ergo, I check out movies from my local library just long enough to convert them to mp4's. i occasionally do the same thing with Red Box DVD's. Blu-Ray? Not even on my radar screen at this point. My high-quality mp4's look great on my hi-def, FWIW.
What I want to know is why Blurays take so long to load.
When I want to watch a movie, typically, I want to watch the movie, not wait sevefral minutes for the disk to load, then try to skip through 15 minutes of commercials (if it's possible to skip through them at all).
When I first got my Bluray play, I upgraded my Netflix membership to Bluray. 2 weeks later, I downgraded back to DVD because DVD's are more usable. I've bought a few movies on Bluray, but for the vast majority of what I watch, DVD quality is more than sufficient (even Netflix streaming quality is more than sufficient).
The operating system on my laptop boots up faster than the time it takes most Blurays to load on my bluray player.
And what's with the firmware updates that are needed for some disks to work!? My 8 year old DVD player has never needed a firmware update and it plays all of the DVDs I own but I've already run into a couple disks that refused to work without a bluray player firmware update.
I'm sure the Bluray gives content producers much more freedom to produce rich content, fancy menus and other features (which includes enhanced DRM), but all I want to do is watch my movie.
Why do we always assume this is going to happen?
I will just use the DRM to implement my magic hood of invisibility. Just some content signatures on it and i will be invisible for all surveillance equipment. Project Wulgaru proceeding nicely....
These are all guesstimates feel free to make changes:
$8 Netflix subscription = Varies, lets say $0.13/hour if you watch 2 hours every night.
$30 cable package = Varies, lets say $0.50/hour if you watch 2 hours every night.
$60 Game = $2 - 4/hour
$8 DVD = $4/hour
$8 theatre ticket = $4/hour
$20 Blu-Ray = $10/hour
>There is really no justification for the current media pricing.
It's called collusion and price fixing, something that companies like Hynix and Hitachi and Samsung get his with fines for when they collude to keep prices artificially high on phones and RAM and whatnot.
But the Media companies are "different." Somehow collusion and price fixing and other Sherman Act violations are just fine with the Government when it comes to them.
Well, fuck them. Pirate away. Yo ho ho.
And I will continue to haunt used record and video stores. DVDs are good enough when they're cheap and their smaller size means a dd of the disk doesn't take long to put on the server. Suck it, MAFIAA.
--
BMO
When people say that media is obsolete and downloads are going to replace it, they have no grasp on the reality of the situation. The vast majority of people I know do not stream their video -- they buy it. Because in Canada, when you buy media, you OWN the media. But if you pay for a download, you don't own schite.
Furthermore, although high speed access up to 10Mbit is available here, even 6.4Mbit downloads will cost you around $60/month and it takes hours or even DAYS to download a full 1080p video. So for many people (myself included), downloading a torrent to check out a 480p preview is one thing, but when we want to buy and keep a movie we like, we want the BluRay disk to have that physical OWNED copy and to save on the download time.
But then again, I've always been rather different in my attitude on the purpose of preview "piracy" than the typical freetard. I'm not trying to avoid purchases; I'm trying to decide what's worth purchasing.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Of course, if they just wanted to make a movie and not sell it, then that's fine.
I have a VERY fast internet connection with a VERY fast wifi node. I get Netflix best HD stream but Blu Rays still look better. Netflix also sends down a stereo audio feed, not 5.1 or Master Mass market won't care, they are still watching fat people (stretch) on the HD set, but if you do care, Netlfix is a movie, but the Blu Ray can be an experience. Depends on the movie if that matters.
Not a problem for me, I stopped supporting the music, television, and motion-picture industries a couple of years back. ...made my decision really easy.
Essentially, it boiled down to "do I want to support an industry that sues their own customers"
Plenty of things to do other than sit in front of the idiot box and veg while watching the latest piece of crap from Hollywood. John Carter of Mars, sheesh.
it has no chance to survive make its time
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Blu-what?
Ah, are you talking about those blue cardboard shelves with unusable expensive DVDs in the supermarket?
Not interested.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Studios have got to protect that hi-def content. Because we all know how much more valuable it is. Not.
Do they really think that there's a large black market out there that isn't already buying the low-def crap made by sneaking a camera into a theater (or setting it up in front of a high def video screen)? Most people who buy/download pirated content aren't going to pay a premium for the best quality anyway.
Watermarking isn't going to help. You may be able to track the serial number of the pirate's player. But who is that? And if you eventually blacklist it, they'll just put it up on eBay and buy another one. So now I've got to worry about the resale value of Blu-ray players in a market where many of them may be blacklisted or just not firmware upgradable anymore.
Studios are pissing off honest buyers and not really putting a dent in the pirated content.
Have gnu, will travel.
Oh and by the way, the article suggest that we should be happy because we can just let Blu-Ray die and resort to digital downloads instead. I call bullshit on that: first, because digital downloads require infrastructure that simply isn't there yet (and won't be there soon), and second because digital downloads are equally infested with DRM and, by their own nature, give the user even less control over the storage and playback of the media. Doubly so if the downloads are stored "in the cloud" as the article suggests.
There is really no justification for the current media pricing.
Really? Ever heard of greed?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Hollywood is full of greedy idiots. Why is anybody trying to dissuade them from their own folly.
Let them fuck up and waste their money. Financial failure is the only language these dunces understand.
Wrong. There are many reasons:
* Not everything is available for streaming
* When a film or TV show is available for streaming today, it doesn't mean it will be available for streaming one month, one year, or five years from now
* An Internet connection is required for each and every device you wish to view movies on
* No extra features such as commentaries, deleted scenes, etc.
* inferior video quality
* Few streamed movies offer DD 5.1, let alone DD7.1, 9.1, 9.2, or 11.1 or 11.2 nor do they offer DTS nor other enhanced surround standards
* With a DVD you OWN that copy (evidence: Sony, Disney, etc. all advertise "Own it on DVD today!" or "Own it on Blu-Ray today!" They never say "rent a revocable license on DVD today!" You BUY that COPY and OWN that COPY, just as you OWN a book.
(yes I could have used bold for emphasis but this needs to be drilled through pundits' heads so "yelling" is appropriate)
* Bandwidth caps
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Instead of spending time, money and effort on new DRM measures that get circumvented within a few days of release,
No blue-ray support on Apple Macs nor Linux. Maybe someone somewhere did circumvent it, but I can simply do without these disks. Does the Big Media hope that I will buy some Blue-Ray movies? And play them on what exactly?
Cue "Cinavia DRM Has Been Cracked" story in 5...4...3...2...
If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.
In fact at the end he says you should reconsider whether you really want to support Blu-ray due to its obsession with DRM.
But I have to ask, what is the suggested alternative? Streaming content isn't any less DRMed. WIth streamed movies, the company can pull the content tomorrow and you no longer "own" it. With Blu-ray at least I can continue to use the player I have and the discs I have forever (assuming I don't let them update from the internet).
I would love to see someone back off on these DRM wars. And I don't like Cinavia. But I don't see what pedestal the author is standing on to criticize those who do buy Blu-rays.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Blueray struggling against online media? Since when??? The limit of bandwidth here in Canada is 60Gb thats like 3 games with no other internet activity.
I've probably bought 10 or so new in a collection of about ~150 DVDs. The price tag is so high that I rarely buy them or use the player even though I find the quality of Blu-Ray productions to be distinctly superior.
What did help was I could buy used Blu-Ray disks for about $5-10 at Blockbuster (actually where I've bought a lot of my DVDs). Unfortunately, since every store around me has gone under, I don't have that outlet anymore.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I don't yet find streaming to be a suitable replacement for the actual physical disc -- whether BluRay or DVD.
1: It's hard to skip around on the stream. Easy on the actual disc.
2: Streaming quality has always been lower than quality off of the disc.
3: If I want to capture images for Fair Use purposes, almost impossible off of the stream, quite easy with my DVD software.
4: Netflix streams in the past of some movies have actually deleted scenes that were on the DVD. One movie for example, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was many minutes shorter in the streamed version. Netflix says that the studio supplies the streaming version so it can easily be different than the DVD version.
5: Bonus features seem missing from streams a lot more often from DVD's, although Netflix's new "rental movie only" DVD's are an unhappy trend in this direction. They may turn me into a Red Box customer yet over that omission.
6: I have Comcast cable, but still things can get choppy in the evenings.
A lot -- not all, but a lot -- of the above could be fixed by an Internet box that would read my Netflix queue and download ahead of time the entire DVD-level content of the next movie(s) in my queue. Internet speed wouldn't matter as much since that download could proceed while I was at work, or even in the off-peak early morning hours with a special deal from my Internet supplier for using otherwise unused off-peak time. I get a rental image of the entire DVD to use as if it was the DVD, and when I'm done I just click return, that movie is wiped off of my local storage, and the next item in my queue starts downloading. You could even give me selectable quality of fast & small downloads verses large and hi-res.
But hey, while this could work great for the consumer, it makes too much sense to ever be allowed to be this easy by the troglodytes running the movie studios.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
locally on release dvd's are $20 blu-rays are usually the same price unless they come with the DVD copy also then their 24 i usually dont want the DVD copy but have no choice that being said its easy to copy a DVD but its the same price
HDDs make more sense than troublesome BDs.
Why would they lower their prices, unless forced to?
Because the current media prices are almost certainly above the market clearing price (evidenced by market research, retailers' complaints, and the basic fact that the film/music studios are willing to produce more content at the current price level than households are willing to consume.) A competent CEO would lower their prices to make more money.
What are you people talking about? Blu-rays DO NOT cost 2 or 3 times what a DVD does! New releases at Walmart are typically $19.96 for DVD and $24.96 for blu-ray. The upgrade in quality (not just the picture, but the sound too, maybe even more so the sound!) is well worth the $5. And if you wait a couple of months, MANY can be found for $10 or so. Players are available for under $100, and even the premium models (3D, wireless networking, streaming apps built in) are often under $200. Streaming rarely provides 1080p picture, and I'm not aware of ANY streaming services providing the pristine lossless audio of blu-ray.
VASIMR to Mars!
Deep down, don't we all know that's its purpose?
If it didn't reduce revenues, they wouldn't have done it. This isn't the first over-the-top-silly DRM scheme. For many years now, Hollywood has been red-faced screaming at customers that they don't want them to be customers, and to keep your filthy stinking money away from their companies. There is no party Hollywood treats with more contempt, than someone who pays them.
That the movie companies' execs who insist on DRM haven't been sued into the stone age by their stockholders, was amazing. But nevertheless it didn't happen, and it keeps on not happening, such that it's not a surprise anymore. Remember that, the next time you call that crowd "litigious motherfuckers" or "greedy bastards" because they are clearly neither. The two explanations that come to mind are that they are retarded, or that they're communists. Both ideas have a lot of supporting evidence.
I've had a BD player and an HDTV for a couple years now, and I own exactly zero Blu-ray movies. I've rented maybe 2 Blu-rays from redbox, and that's just because they were action flicks that deserved to be seen in the highest quality possible. The combination of high prices and crappy movies has kept me from buying. I do steam plenty of content, but I'd prefer to "own" any movies I truly enjoyed. I realize I'm missing out on quality when streaming or netflixing DVDs, but I rarely care. The only movies I really care to see in HD are action or otherwise very visual movies, so most of the time the added cost returns almost no benefit. I don't need to see every pore on my favorite actress's face in some drama flick. If I wanted to see people talking in HD, I'd get a girlfriend. I've found that standard def doesn't bother me at all if I just take off my glasses.
> There is no natural downward price progression on an item whose cost of production is not actually being reduce
That's funny because I have been observing just that effect over the last few years. It's why I have as many spinny disks as I do. Otherwise, I would just get sticker shock and never bother.
Unless there is some reason for the Sherman Act to be invoked, the market is what sets the price. Luxury goods by their very nature have very elastic demand. Prices should by pushed by natural forces to the marginal production cost.
That's just the nature of the beast.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Stop suggesting they save their DRM cash and lower prices. We all know this won't happen. Prices are set to what the market will bear, this has little to do with how much it costs to produce things. I would be happy to see the DRM removed, and the prices stay the same. Let them keep the cash of their failing product, and instead invest it in the next new thing. It sounds like the Cash Cow phase of this product is going to be shorter than some, it's time to cut your losses, and just make the maximum amount of money possible from the technology.
I bought the last one, I think. :)
No one will ever steal it, unless they bring a forklift.
Amazingly, my cable system finally started broadcasting some channels in 1080 this month... I bought the set in 2004.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
it was a legal disk. I played it in a legal bluray player. It did not work. I never bought another one.
Only a fraction of movies are streamable yet. Far more are still only on disc. I have a fast and reliable Internet connection, and yet no connection to most of the movies I want to watch.
As in the subject of this post, it seems to me that the quickest and cheapest way of getting rid of DRM is to make its use illegal. It serves no useful purpose to the consumer, it hinders the progress of technology and hinders competition, but the people that make use of it are unlikely to stop unless they have no other option.
We would probably actually be doing these insustries a favour by banning DRM, but while that might be slightly distasteful, not having DRM would be more useful than seeing parts of the entertainment insustry crash and burn (though I would really enjoy seeing it crash and burn).
The production cost differences between a $200 million special effects blockbuster and a $20 million comedy are not reflected in the shelf price of the media. Both types of movies are priced similarly in the theatre and sell in a package for about the same price (perhaps a 20% variation) in a given category (DVD vs. BlueRay). Right or wrong, that reinforces the concept in people's minds that the selling price is not significantly linked to the production cost of the movie and that prices are exorbitant compared to the manufacturing cost of the disk. Now you and I realize that the expected volume of units sold affects how the fixed costs are spread over total sales. But, while you may be correct, the marketing approach (/price setting) used by the big movie distributors reinforces the prevailing perception of price fixing/gouging. In the end, actions speak louder than words.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
But people who buy the bluray's don't have any problems, as their player just plays the discs.. the only people who have a problem with cinavia are people who try to play ripped movies with tv's/receiver's/players that use the cinaviadrm..
most of the titles rented by consumers would probably end up being stored in the cloud.
T,FTFY.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Hey you, it's called something like Steam.
And if UltraViolet ends up succeeding, that's what it'll eventually turn into.
Interesting, I'm not sure if there will be any flicks to show your kids in that situation [where everybody copies and next to nobody pays], as there wouldn't be any industry
What if feature films like Ice Age and How to Train Your Dragon were financed like Big Buck Bunny and Sintel? Is there a reason that the donation model of Blender short films can't scale to features?
That depends on how important the government, as guardian of national security, thinks a food supply is to the security of the people.
So what if blu-ray DRM is circumvented? Nobody has the patience or hard drive room to download original quality, non-downsampled, like 50+ GB or whatever movies. Anything you'd get that's pirated is severely compressed and re-encoded, making an inferior product. That or it's the original size and would take days to download. Then your choices are slowing your internet down to a crawl running it at max speed or waiting even more days to download it at a capped speed. The DRM in blu-ray is simply the size of the data and they don't need to do anything further.
Right now this DRM is limited to Blu-Ray players and the article mentions that people will just buy set-top-boxes that play their pirated content without the Cinavia DRM.
But it will spread. Other content providers like Netflix and Comcast and Hulu will start using Cinavia watermarks on their content and those companies will start insisting that any device that plays back their content (e.g. set-top-boxes with Netflix or Hulu support) pass all the content they play through the Cinavia validation system and produce warnings if the content is pirated.
And yes that includes passing every YouTube video played by the device through Cinavia.
Blu-Ray never had a chance, because it was released at completely the wrong time. The market had already settled on a successor to the then-most-popular video format: by the time most people first heard of "Blu-Ray", everyone already understood that the new video format that would replace VHS was definitely going to be DVD. In fact, a lot of people -- maybe even the majority -- already had DVD players.
If Blu-Ray had been released six or eight years sooner, when DVD hadn't really got anybody's attention yet (outside the extreme bleeding-edge crowd that also used LaserDisc and Betamax and LS120 SuperDisk), it might have been able to catch on and steal DVD's chance for dominance. But Blu-Ray wasn't ready at that time.
As for being the next format _after_ DVD, that's patently absurd: it's nowhere near time for that. The CD format for music is much older than DVD and hasn't been replaced yet. DVD is still so new, a lot of people still think the word "video" means VHS as opposed to DVD -- and VHS is still *significantly* more widely deployed than Blu-Ray will ever be, partly because people moved their old VCRs into the kids' rooms, and partly because a lot of people kept the VCR so they could continue watching their old collections. (The players for that format were also more robust and lasted longer.) There are almost as many working VCRs out there as there are working DVD players. The market doesn't have room for a third physical-media video format, and the second slot won't open up until VHS has had time to become nearly as obscure as Betamax was when DVD was introduced -- that's going to be another few years yet. By then, Blu-Ray will probably be edged out by something newer and better -- like what happened when iOmega Zip drives didn't replace floppies fast enough and got edged out by CD-R.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
As far as I can tell no one has posted about Cinavia itself. It only poses a deterrent for players that actually support it. The DRM is encoded in the audio stream so if you are using passthrough audio in the DVD/BR rip then it will detect the protection scheme after 20 minutes of playing the movie. In my case my PS3 is the only media player affected by it. I don't use it much from playing my media files anyway. I hear that other Sony Blu-Ray players support it too. Most popular media players (and PC s/w such as VLC) ignore it. The Western Digital TV Live Plus, for example doesn't and I can play lovely BR rips at 1080p.
As for all this BS about streaming vs Blu Ray: videophiles see and know the difference but your average consumer isn't even sure they're watching an HDTV channel most of the time. Give them 720p and Dolby Digital 5.1 (which Netflix supports quite nicely) and a majority will be happy. Vudu 1080p HDX is pretty impressive for a streaming service too. Moreover, others in the know that refuse to pay the stupid prices for media, know how to get Blu Ray images if they have the bandwidth and disk space or excellent compressed rips at 720p and 1080p. These look and sound fantastic. There will always be a market for Blu Ray as there still exists one for DVD and CD. However, I'm willing to trade off the quality until things change. If they don't, so be it, I'm still happy with the setup I have.
People still buy physical media? Who knew!
The only way to fight Redbox is to wean consumers off physical media.
In turn, the only way to do that is to get some sort of wired broadband to rural customers, such as those who grow the food that a film's cast and crew eat. Right now, a lot of customers in sparsely populated areas still depend on satellite or cellular Internet with a 5 GB/mo cap.