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Sony Warns It Will Take $1 Billion Writedown, Blames Slowing DVD Sales (reuters.com)
Sony has warned investors that it will take roughly $978m writedown on its film business, blaming a goodwill impairment charge that dates back to an acquisition of a Hollywood studio almost three decades ago. From a report on Reuters: The impairment charge came as Sony cut its outlook for profits from DVD, blu-ray discs and other home entertainment operations in line with a broader market decline, the company said in statement on Monday. Sony has been working to revive its movie business. In November, the Japanese conglomerate's chief financial officer, Kenichiro Yoshida, said a turnaround was "progressing, but it takes time for the benefit to be realized."
Let's ban the internet and lobby congress for more DRM. Thats IT MORE DRM! It has to be piracy. Let's work to make hardware not work with Linux and I am sure everyone will be happy to cancel their netflix accountants and open their wallets.
That's the ticket
http://saveie6.com/
Let's ban the internet and lobby congress for more DRM.
And that would have worked under Hillary with her cozy Hollywood relationships.
Under Trump, Hollywood can go pound sand.
One fun thing Trump could do to get back at the screeching entertainment industry going after him; halve the current copyright expiration period.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No idea. I've only heard about DVDA, and very few performers can do it...
DVD sales are "ok", because the media and platform doesn't suck like Blu-ray. Sony needs to pay big time for the death sentence they gave Blu-ray. Very very bad business decision. The paid their way in, and then locked it down to make it unusable.
Subject line should read: "Sony Warns It Will Take $1 Billion Writedown as their Vision of the Future Sucked"
One fun thing Trump could do to get back at the screeching entertainment industry going after him; halve the current copyright expiration period.
Switching from life of grandchildren back to the 56-year term of the 1909 Act would require leaving not only the WTO but also several bilateral treaties already in force. Good luck getting that passed without angering constituents in districts with a strong export manufacturing sector. And watch entertainment industry lawyers argue in court that shortening the term of subsisting copyrights qualifies as a "taking" that requires "just compensation" pursuant to the Fifth Amendment.
Most households have realized their unwatched DVD collections are worthless and have written their value down to $0.
DVD Video is 704x480* (24 or 30 frames per second) or 704x576 (25 frames per second) for 1.33:1 or 1.78:1 display aspect ratio. (Many players support only one of those resolutions, such as the PlayStation 2 that was popular during the early DVD market.) Video at "scope" aspect ratio is encoded with hard letterboxing, producing a lower resolution: 704x360 or 704x432 respectively. Chroma is encoded at half resolution (4:2:0). DVD also supports interlaced video, trading off vertical detail for high motion (50 or 60 fields per second).
* Stored as 720, including eight pixels of "nominal analog blanking" pillarboxing on each side for recentering the signal.
DVD? What the fuck is that?
It is a physical audio-visual media storage format that you can purchase in a store or online. Once you purchase a movie or other content on a DVD, you can watch it as many times as you want without any expiration or revealing to anyone how many times you have watched the content. This is in contrast to an online streaming model where the provider of the content can at any time decide that you can no longer watch the content and with which the content provider knows what you watch, when you watch it, and can sell or use that information without restriction.
While it can be argued that it is possible to copy the contents of a DVD or an online stream for unrestricted and offline use, doing so is likely against the law. Physical media purchases are a way to legally watch the content you want in an unrestricted way.
I always thought a DVD was a legal way to watch FBI warnings and previews for other movies.
DVDs weren't actually locked to a particular resolution. In NTSC markets (e.g. North America), 720x480 interlaced (i.e. 480i) was probably the most common, whereas in PAL markets (e.g. Europe), 720x576 interlaced (i.e. 576i) was more common. That said, DVDs were kinda weird, since they supported legacy formats and some various extensions to the standards. They could go down to 240p on the low-end, but they also supported anamorphic widescreen (i.e. using the same resolutions as above, but telling the player to stretch the pixels wide, that way it would fill a widescreen TV), which were typically marketed as widescreen versions of the movie, and that would look squished if you tried to play them on a 4:3 TV, since it wouldn't stretch the pixels wide.
All of which is to say, DVDs weren't in HD. Or, at least, the use of DVDs to support HD was never adopted in the mainstream, though there were some efforts to do so.
... the "forced to view" unskippable advertisements were not present at the beginning of a lot of the DVD's I had purchased in the past. It is amazing how a content provider can intentionally piss off its potential customers, then wonder why sales are down.
Greater lossy compression than you find for the video on Blu-Ray, and lossy compression on the audio (Blu-Rays generally have lossless audio).
Who wants DVDs? [...] Or Blu-Ray disks?
I do. Discs are the only means I'm aware of by which I can legally obtain content to watch on any device, at the highest quality, online or offline, at home or away, without previews, without affecting my data cap, and without having to worry about it going away after a licensing deal expires. Nothing else available today can provide all of that with certainty.
Going into specifics:
1) There's media worth owning. I sometimes want to support companies with my wallet. Other times, I want to ensure that I'll have perpetual access to a show or film. Netflix et al. can't guarantee that, so for media I want to be able to re-watch in perpetuity, it's oftentimes worth it to me to purchase a copy.
2) Media that's worth owning is typically worth owning in high quality. While Netflix is great, I can still get a higher quality image and sound from a blu-ray (e.g. lossless surround audio) than I can via streaming. For media worth owning, it's nice to know that it's in the highest quality, that way it'll still look and sound good in the future.
3) I can bring discs with me anywhere. Unlike streaming services, which are a mixed bag when it comes to the content that's available for offline viewing, physical copies can be watched offline in cars, on airplanes, or away from civilization.
4) It isn't an either/or between discs and streaming. I rip all of my discs, encode them using Don Melton's transcoding scripts, and load them onto my Plex server. Plex lets me do everything I could with a disc, plus provide the benefits of streaming.
5) I don't run afoul of the legal and moral concerns. While companies need to be doing a much better job of making their content more accessible (e.g. less locked down, no forced ads, etc.), it's nonsensical, immature (il)logic to suggest that we're magically entitled to free copies of their content if they don't give it to us on our terms. Especially so since it's possible to watch it on our terms legally already.
Piracy's only additional benefits are that it's free and that it's oftentimes available before an official release is available, but neither of those are benefits I'm entitled to, so, as per #5, they don't factor into my thinking. Moreover, DVDs are apparently still relevant today, despite hitting peak sales about a decade back. Given that blu-ray sales only hit their peak about 2-3 years back, I expect they'll remain relevant for at least a decade or more.
Which is to say, the reports of disc-based media's death have been greatly exaggerated.
Considering both sides of the Atlantic have been ping-ponging the extensions back and forth every 20 or so years to keep Steam Boat Willie in chains.
A copyright term that approximates the life of the author's grandchildren has been standard in Europe for well over a century. The 1990s term extensions didn't change this rationale; they merely amended its implementation to account for health care improvements during the twentieth century. Barring some drastic change to this rationale or a dramatic improvement to human life span within the next seven years, Gershwin and Disney won't be able to use this excuse again before Rhapsody in Blue, The House at Pooh Corner, and the original Mickey Mouse trilogy enter the public domain in the United States by 2024.
Both Netflix and Bittorrent allow you to download the movie on an unmetered network
What unmetered network? In many areas, even home Internet is metered. This includes home satellite Internet, home terrestrial microwave Internet (which uses cell towers), and reportedly even home DSL in parts of Iowa. I imagine many find it easier to order DVDs from a web shop than to drive into town to make a multi-gigabyte download over restaurant Wi-Fi.
Netflix because they graciously allow you to do so
I was told this was available only on select devices and only for select titles in its dwindling selection of third-party feature films and TV series.
bittorrent because that's just how it works when you have a drm free file.
Which publishers of notable motion pictures routinely make them lawfully available through BitTorrent?
DVD? is that?
from some info I found (I forgot who the originator is) and kept in my diatribes folder:
All of the following have been proposed as the words behind the letters DVD:
- Delayed, Very Delayed (referring to the many late releases of DVD formats)
- Diversified, Very Diversified (referring to the proliferation of recordable formats and other spinoffs)
- Digital Venereal Disease (referring to piracy and copying of DVDs)
- Dead, Very Dead (from naysayers who predicted DVD would never take off)
- Digital Video Disc (the original meaning proposed by some of DVD's creators)
- Digital Versatile Disc (a meaning later proposed by some of DVD's creators)
- Nothing
And the official answer is... "nothing." The original initialism came from "digital video disc." Some members of the DVD Forum (see 6.1) tried to express how DVD goes far beyond video by retrofitting the painfully contorted phrase "digital versatile disc," but this has never been officially accepted by the DVD Forum as a whole. A report from DVD Forum Steering Committee in 1999 decreed that DVD, as an international standard, is simply three letters. Nevertheless, Toshiba —the maintainer of the DVD Forum Web site— still confusingly prefers "digital video disc." And after all, how many people ask what VHS stands for? (Guess what? No one agrees on that one either.)
mfwright@batnet.com