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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?
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.
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.
Author also forgets to take into account that the number of options available for streaming generally suck. I gave up on Netflix for movies when 85% of what I wanted to watch wasn't available. I'll use it for TV shows, but that's it.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Which is why we have such great Internet connectivity in our cities with high population density, like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston or Philadelphia?
Face it, the "population density" argument just doesn't work. The real reason the USA is fucked in terms of infrastructure is because for some reason we prefer spending money blowing up other people's roads and bridges and networks over maintaining our own.