If you recall the battle during the early days of DVD+R and DVD-R drives, a lot of people didn't bother adopting either because no one was sure what each format was good for. It wasn't until Sony released a dual format drive did adoption sky rocket.
Correlation != Causation.
People weren't adopting single-format DVD burners as much because the prices were still very high. The switch to dual-format came at the same time as a dramatic price-drop. I certainly don't even know of anyone who held-off on buying one at the time because of format issues. I do know of a few that held off because many DVD players on the market couldn't play either format, which also changed at about the time dual-format burners became popular...
Your case study isn't very strong evidence.
As I said earlier, having a new technology doesn't promise success.
I'm getting very tired of this nonsense. A new technology doesn't promise anything, just look at D-VHS/D-Theatre... It is exceedingly clear, however, that highdef discs will be.
SACD and DVD-a offered nothing. Even with multi-channel setups, you're making a big jump to assume it sounds better than stereo to most people, and you're acting like people's movie habits and music habits are just just similar, but interchangable, which they certainly aren't.
Wrong. The differences in VHS to DVD didn't make a multi-thousand dollar display device to show the benefit. However, the HD-DVD to Blu-Ray jump requires better than consumer level equipment to be able to tell the difference
Pure nonsense. Anyone that isn't blind can tell the difference between TV and HDTV, on nice cheap consumer equipment. Even the smallest 27" screen is adequate to show the difference. HDTVs are under $500 for ~30", and under $1000 for 50"+. (Lowsy transfers can muck things up, but that's besides the point)
They may see a difference between SD and HD but I was never arguing that.
You say that, but then in the NEXT LINE, you argue the point once again...
I'm not even going to bother. You'd better go figure out what you want to say before trying to say it.
take a Telarc recording and convert it to 128kpbs MP3.
Eyes are not ears. We are operating at the upper-limits of what most people can hear, but are nowhere near the upper-limits of what people can see. That's a world of difference.
However, native 1080p to 1080i results in losing half the picture information.
That's completely untrue. You lose some picture information due to interlaced output, but it's NOWHERE near 50%.
As in, a 6Mbps connection won't give you 768KByte/s downloads (unless the company is actually giving you MORE than 6Mbit). The speeds they quote are for the physical lines, and don't include the overhead of whatever protocol is in-use. It's far worse for DSL, where PPPoE, ATM, etc., are standard.
Go over to Bestbuy's website and start clicking through their TVs like I did.
Most people don't buy their TVs online. Best Buy's site is absolutely not representative of their stores.
As for VoIP, that takes up much much less than 128. We're talking about transmitting voice, not music, for crying out loud.
VoIP isn't about the bandwidth, it's extremely latency-sensitive, and nearly maxing out your connection will drastically increase latency, even with your router doing advanced QoS/Throttling. You've apparently never had to deal with it.
Besides, those were just a couple minor examples. As I said, people buy their high-speed connections for a reason, otherwise, they'd have lower-speed plans to begin with.
For the cost of sending 25GB over the net, you don't have any numbers do you? Just a guess that the cost is more than $2 but less than $3.50?
I know how much bandwidth costs, what I don't know is how much movie licensing costs. Find those numbers, and I we can get much more specific.
Is there a word for the jittery effect you get in pans or rapid motion at 24 fps, then?
Film shown natively (no conversion) certainly shouldn't look "jittery" or "uneven" at all... only when rate-converted. The only artifact should be motion blur.
Perhaps you're just talking about one specific film that was shot on cheap equipment, at the wrong shutter speed, or played back on a miscalibrated projector?
Unless my math is wrong, a 6Mbps Comcast cable connection could download a movie in about 6 hours,
I get 7.5 hours as the theoretical minimum. Obviously there is a lot of overhead and other real-world conditions which will make that significantly longer.
Additionally, since the majority of HDTVs only have pixels to actually display 720p,
I can't believe that's possibly true. EVERYTHING sold in stores now, and for the past several years, is 1080. The only exceptions I can think of may be the old Plasma screens, and they're not incredibly popular.
But how much bandwidth does the average user use while surfing? Next to nothing.
Streaming audio? VoIP calls? The user has this high-speed internet connection for a reason... And every bit of bandwidth you take away from the download, increases the download time noticably.
My video rental store charges $3.50. How about that?
That surely wouldn't be a net loss, but I don't think that would give them the profit margin to compete with conventional services. And that's not mentioning this high-end Tivo you're going to have to purchase up-front. DRM usually kills services that attempt this kind of thing.
I think the prospect of the arrival of low-cost holographic versatile disc with storage capacities 10 to 20 times what is available on the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats is good reason why customers may sit on the sidelines for now.
I doubt that very much. Mainly because the spectre of holographic storage has been around for a long time, and gets brought up over and over again, yet never pans out. But also because storing multiple movies on one disc is the ONLY advantage you'd get out of it, which might be a small incentive to some, but a disincentive to others.
I wasn't saying that DVD's uptake was inevitable simply because it was a singular format.
Gee, I guess got confused when you said "But DVD is/was a singular format. Its uptake was just a matter of time."
Besides that, part of my point was that DVD did have several competitors (S-VHS, D-VHS, etc.).
I said "for example" and you respond to me like I made an absolute claim about the one thing that a new format needs to have.
That wasn't made in response to your "for example", it was made in response to your "absolutely no added convenience for consumers..."
First you say it doesn't have added convenience, then you give an example of what might help accomplish that, and somehow I'm the bad guy for pointing out it already has it? I think you might have a bit of a complex.
And you did it in reply to a comment about something to replace HD-DVD/Blu-ray, in a thread about high-def DVDs, AND without specifically saying you weren't talking about high-def.
Clearly my fault.
It doesn't matter if it is this year, or 6 years from now.
Yes, it does matter. By 6+ years from now, HD-DVD or Blu-ray will be entrenched, and everyone will expect highdef content, not just DVD quality.
Even if that wasn't the case, bandwidth still isn't cheap.
Low end to me is 14". Can you tell the difference between HD and non HD at 14"?
Sure I can. Put me in-front of two 14" TVs, on standard, and one HD, and I'll tell you which is which. In fact, I can tell you now that they'll both be standard-def, because THEY DON'T MAKE 14" HDTVs.
the difference in quality over SD is barely noticable at small screen sizes.
On your imaginary 14" HDTV, perhaps it would be, but you can't get a 14" HDTV, so it's completely moot.
You can get cheap flat screens that are not HD,
Okay then, point me to some 40"+ flat, cheap (standard def), TVs.
Now he's paying through the nose for what little HD content there is.
Most people have one HDTV station in range of them. Whether or not you chose to pay through the nose to your cable/satellite provider is entirely up to you.
the lowest end of HD, 720p, which isn't much better than normal TV.
Completely, totally, factually, wrong. 720 is 2.667X the resolution of standard TV, non interlaced, and full 60fps. Not to mention that broadcast 720 is far less common than 1080.
you need a large TV to get any benefit from HDTV.
Completely untrue. The low-end 27" HDTVs are perfectly capable of displaying full 1080, and practically any flat-screen TV you buy is going to be HD. The standard def LCD TVs are tiny (~13") and still about 50% as expensive as a 40"+ HDTV.
DVDs took years to take off, and you could play them on a normal TV.
You can play HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs on a normal TV. RF converters and widescreen DVDs actually resulted in a net-loss of quality over VHS tapes. Not to mention that many people still hate the extreme dynamic range of audio, which makes it impossible to hear dialog without a surround-sound setup.
If you needed a thousand dollar TV to play a DVD, we'd still all be using videos.
Blurry pans and fast action don't bother you as much as the alternative?
Pans and fast action are "uneven", not blury, and that's only on 60Hz TVs, which won't be with us much longer.
If you really want to know, I do much prefer judder to the 4% speed-up of PAL.
What about those who say the eventual projection in a multiplex is only equivalent to about 2K anyway?
People around here have more ego than brains, and it's a good idea not to listen to most of them. 1080p HDTV is more than 2K, and I don't believe it looks better than most theatres I've been to (some cheap and tiny old theatres in small towns might be worse). In addition, people that have seen these digital projectors in action have said 2K looks rather awful compared to film, and I'm inclined to believe them.
You didn't need to go buy a $2000+ monitor to enjoy watching a DVD or appreciate the advance in quality and new features.
Most people didn't have S-Video connections when they got a DVD player. Once run through an RF converter, DVDs aren't much of an improvement. Add to that the inaudible sound, with far too much dynamic range.
HDTVs are below $500. Plenty of people already have them. Even if the other 80% of people don't get one soon, that's still a good market.
I meant they're using MPEG4 now on the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs.
And you're wrong there too. VC-1 and H.264 are not "MPEG-4". *
*(yes, yes, Part 2, I know, it's irrelevant since nobody uses names of "standards" in any other context than in discussions about standards, just as MP3 is MPEG-1 layer3, not MPEG-3).
most Americans don't have, and don't want to buy, an HDTV set that would even need either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD,
Most Americans didn't have TVs with S-Video inputs, or 5.1 channel surround-sound systems when DVD players came out.
nor do most consumers see any reason to pay twice as much for the same product they can use today.
You could have said the same thing about VHS vs DVDs.
resulting in two formats way too early for consumers to be interested in either.
As opposed to DVDs, which sold millions in 1996, the instant they came out...
There are enough HDTVs already out there that either format could grab double-digit percentages of homes right now.
Besides that, progressive-scan DVD players are already in stores everywhere. These formats could take over that market right now, and save people $100+ over buying a progressive-scan DVD player now, and only LATER buying a highdef player. It's the same reason people without access to HD content are already buying HDTVs.
After all, once the pipes get big enough, why should I bother to pay $20 to buy a disc I'll watch once or twice when I can pay $2 to watch it each time I want, when I want.
First off, the pipes won't be big enough for HDTV in reasonable download time for well-over a decade. Just calculate how many days it would take to download a 50GB movie on your connection.
The consider you'll need to buy a second line, or upgrade your speed, since your connection will be effective unavailable as you are downloading each movie, for DAYS at a time. Internet access isn't free.
Then consider how much money it's going to cost companies to pay for their own pipes to let you download 50GBs from them, and try to figure out how that will turn into a $2/movie business model.
My way is more convenient.
How is maxing out your connection (which you pay for) for several days more convenient than NOT wasting your connection, and getting the disc in 1-2 days as Netflix currently does?
It's cheaper (you can P2P the popular movies between boxes)
Bullshit. Bandwidth is massively expensive. There is too much variety in movies to expect several people to have them available when someone else wants to watch. ISPs will rake Netflix over tho coals for having their customers uploading 50GB files. Far too many users are behind firewalls and NAT routers for this to work. Nobody is going to max-out their upstream, all day, every day, making their connections useless. Asyncronous connections mean you need 10+ people who have the movie, and are willing to share, for every 1 person that wants to download it. Nobody is going to want to pay for Netflix, pay again with all their downstream bandwidth, pay again with all their upstream bandwidth, wait several days, etc. It's complete nonsense, until bandwidth is orders of magnitude cheaper, everyone has connections that is orders of magnitude faster, etc.
My way has no postage, no delivery,
Bandwidth is FAR more expensive than postage, and you'll have pretty much all the same delivery problems.
no "I'll go to the store and buy the movie tomorrow".
Yes, and far worse than now.
In other words: Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. And, Bullshit.
They'll have a year TOPS before the average consumer passes them by for set top boxes and the iTheater store.
What strange, magical, mystical world do you live in?
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are competing. Nobody knows which one to invest in. [...] well, the whole thing just stalls. Probably until someone comes out with a format that is actually more convenient than DVD. Like something that doesn't scratch, for example.
Yes, HD-DVD and Blu-ray are doomed. Nothing new is going to make inroads until we have something that doesn't scratch. Like, for example, Blu-ray discs...
A few videophiles and the usual "gotta have the next bestest toy" nerds love the idea of high-def DVD, but Joe Sixpack (and Sally Sobstory and just about everyone else) does not care at all.
I've got news for you... Joe Sixpack's 10-year old TV went out a few months ago, and with widescreen HDTVs being cheap, he went that route. Now he's seeing HDTV broadcasts from one of his local networks, and he's not happy his DVDs of special-effects blockbuster movies don't look nearly as good. And he's not the only one.
Alice and Bob went for HDTV because they don't have much space, and large flat-screens are all HDTV. They haven't seen a real HDTV stream yet, but they've come to notice all the nasty artifacts of their DVDs on their new TV. They don't know that there's anything to be done about it, but the next time they walk into Circuit City, you can bet the salesman will explain it to them.... the installed base grows.
And come 2009, these senarios are going to repeat, ad nauseum, all around the US.
DV-Audio died for the same reason quadrophonic music died:
DVD-audio died because people's ears quite literally can't hear any improvement over CDs (except for the multiple channels, yes).
Quadraphonic music failed for the same reason 5.1 channel surround-sound failed... what? It didn't fail you say? How interesting.
This is technology without a need or a demand.
There is a need. There is a demand. People don't go around saying "I want highdef DVDs" but when they have a product in front of them that does just that, and they see the improvement, the demand will be obvious.
Of course, I guess there was no need or demand for DVDs either.
SD, Compact Flash, etc. why not a movie on a chip in a credit card sized package?
Because it will NEVER be as cheap as stamping a thin piece of metal, and gluing it between two circular chunks of plastic.
It's going to be a long time before Flash is cheaper than even notebook-sized hard drives, even longer until it can match desktop-sized hard drives, and far, far longer until it can match RO/write-once optical media.
We may switch to that one day, in the very distant future, but the video market isn't going to sit still for decades, until that comes to pass.
Slashdot Mirror
Correlation != Causation.
People weren't adopting single-format DVD burners as much because the prices were still very high. The switch to dual-format came at the same time as a dramatic price-drop. I certainly don't even know of anyone who held-off on buying one at the time because of format issues. I do know of a few that held off because many DVD players on the market couldn't play either format, which also changed at about the time dual-format burners became popular...
Your case study isn't very strong evidence.
I'm getting very tired of this nonsense. A new technology doesn't promise anything, just look at D-VHS/D-Theatre... It is exceedingly clear, however, that highdef discs will be.
SACD and DVD-a offered nothing. Even with multi-channel setups, you're making a big jump to assume it sounds better than stereo to most people, and you're acting like people's movie habits and music habits are just just similar, but interchangable, which they certainly aren't.
Pure nonsense. Anyone that isn't blind can tell the difference between TV and HDTV, on nice cheap consumer equipment. Even the smallest 27" screen is adequate to show the difference. HDTVs are under $500 for ~30", and under $1000 for 50"+. (Lowsy transfers can muck things up, but that's besides the point)
You say that, but then in the NEXT LINE, you argue the point once again...
I'm not even going to bother. You'd better go figure out what you want to say before trying to say it.
Eyes are not ears. We are operating at the upper-limits of what most people can hear, but are nowhere near the upper-limits of what people can see. That's a world of difference.
That's completely untrue. You lose some picture information due to interlaced output, but it's NOWHERE near 50%.
As in, a 6Mbps connection won't give you 768KByte/s downloads (unless the company is actually giving you MORE than 6Mbit). The speeds they quote are for the physical lines, and don't include the overhead of whatever protocol is in-use. It's far worse for DSL, where PPPoE, ATM, etc., are standard.
Most people don't buy their TVs online. Best Buy's site is absolutely not representative of their stores.
VoIP isn't about the bandwidth, it's extremely latency-sensitive, and nearly maxing out your connection will drastically increase latency, even with your router doing advanced QoS/Throttling. You've apparently never had to deal with it.
Besides, those were just a couple minor examples. As I said, people buy their high-speed connections for a reason, otherwise, they'd have lower-speed plans to begin with.
I know how much bandwidth costs, what I don't know is how much movie licensing costs. Find those numbers, and I we can get much more specific.
Film shown natively (no conversion) certainly shouldn't look "jittery" or "uneven" at all... only when rate-converted. The only artifact should be motion blur.
Perhaps you're just talking about one specific film that was shot on cheap equipment, at the wrong shutter speed, or played back on a miscalibrated projector?
I get 7.5 hours as the theoretical minimum. Obviously there is a lot of overhead and other real-world conditions which will make that significantly longer.
I can't believe that's possibly true. EVERYTHING sold in stores now, and for the past several years, is 1080. The only exceptions I can think of may be the old Plasma screens, and they're not incredibly popular.
Streaming audio? VoIP calls? The user has this high-speed internet connection for a reason... And every bit of bandwidth you take away from the download, increases the download time noticably.
That surely wouldn't be a net loss, but I don't think that would give them the profit margin to compete with conventional services. And that's not mentioning this high-end Tivo you're going to have to purchase up-front. DRM usually kills services that attempt this kind of thing.
I doubt that very much. Mainly because the spectre of holographic storage has been around for a long time, and gets brought up over and over again, yet never pans out. But also because storing multiple movies on one disc is the ONLY advantage you'd get out of it, which might be a small incentive to some, but a disincentive to others.
Gee, I guess got confused when you said "But DVD is/was a singular format. Its uptake was just a matter of time."
Besides that, part of my point was that DVD did have several competitors (S-VHS, D-VHS, etc.).
That wasn't made in response to your "for example", it was made in response to your "absolutely no added convenience for consumers..."
First you say it doesn't have added convenience, then you give an example of what might help accomplish that, and somehow I'm the bad guy for pointing out it already has it? I think you might have a bit of a complex.
And you did it in reply to a comment about something to replace HD-DVD/Blu-ray, in a thread about high-def DVDs, AND without specifically saying you weren't talking about high-def.
Clearly my fault.
Yes, it does matter. By 6+ years from now, HD-DVD or Blu-ray will be entrenched, and everyone will expect highdef content, not just DVD quality.
Even if that wasn't the case, bandwidth still isn't cheap.
No, it's 2.667x NTSC, and 2.223X PAL.
Sure I can. Put me in-front of two 14" TVs, on standard, and one HD, and I'll tell you which is which. In fact, I can tell you now that they'll both be standard-def, because THEY DON'T MAKE 14" HDTVs.
On your imaginary 14" HDTV, perhaps it would be, but you can't get a 14" HDTV, so it's completely moot.
Okay then, point me to some 40"+ flat, cheap (standard def), TVs.
It deserves a "-1 Banal" because everyone already knows what upconverting is, that players exist, etc., etc.
My ire is reserved for whoever modded your comment up, not you, or your comment for that matter.
Most people have one HDTV station in range of them. Whether or not you chose to pay through the nose to your cable/satellite provider is entirely up to you.
Completely, totally, factually, wrong. 720 is 2.667X the resolution of standard TV, non interlaced, and full 60fps. Not to mention that broadcast 720 is far less common than 1080.
Completely untrue. The low-end 27" HDTVs are perfectly capable of displaying full 1080, and practically any flat-screen TV you buy is going to be HD. The standard def LCD TVs are tiny (~13") and still about 50% as expensive as a 40"+ HDTV.
You can play HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs on a normal TV. RF converters and widescreen DVDs actually resulted in a net-loss of quality over VHS tapes. Not to mention that many people still hate the extreme dynamic range of audio, which makes it impossible to hear dialog without a surround-sound setup.
HDTVs are well below $500.
Pans and fast action are "uneven", not blury, and that's only on 60Hz TVs, which won't be with us much longer.
If you really want to know, I do much prefer judder to the 4% speed-up of PAL.
People around here have more ego than brains, and it's a good idea not to listen to most of them. 1080p HDTV is more than 2K, and I don't believe it looks better than most theatres I've been to (some cheap and tiny old theatres in small towns might be worse). In addition, people that have seen these digital projectors in action have said 2K looks rather awful compared to film, and I'm inclined to believe them.
Most people didn't have S-Video connections when they got a DVD player. Once run through an RF converter, DVDs aren't much of an improvement. Add to that the inaudible sound, with far too much dynamic range.
HDTVs are below $500. Plenty of people already have them. Even if the other 80% of people don't get one soon, that's still a good market.
Anyone that isn't blind can see the difference between highdef and standard def. Not even remotely the case for audio.
Much higher video quality if your TV cost 3 digits. 27"+ HDTVs are under $500, and 50" projection HDTV can be had easily for less than $999.
And:
MORE Switchable audio tracks
MORE Subtitles that are optional
MORE Extras
MORE ADVANCED Nifty menus
Backwards compatibility. Scratch-resistant coatings (Blu-ray), etc.
And you're wrong there too. VC-1 and H.264 are not "MPEG-4". *
*(yes, yes, Part 2, I know, it's irrelevant since nobody uses names of "standards" in any other context than in discussions about standards, just as MP3 is MPEG-1 layer3, not MPEG-3).
Keep it up! Maybe the spelling nazis will die of heart attacks...
Most Americans didn't have TVs with S-Video inputs, or 5.1 channel surround-sound systems when DVD players came out.
You could have said the same thing about VHS vs DVDs.
As opposed to DVDs, which sold millions in 1996, the instant they came out...
There are enough HDTVs already out there that either format could grab double-digit percentages of homes right now.
Besides that, progressive-scan DVD players are already in stores everywhere. These formats could take over that market right now, and save people $100+ over buying a progressive-scan DVD player now, and only LATER buying a highdef player. It's the same reason people without access to HD content are already buying HDTVs.
You don't know what judder is. Judder is the artifact (uneven pans) when converting progressive 24FPS film to 60fields/sec interlaced displays.
With progressive HDTVs, which natively support progressive 24FPS, there is no judder.
I'll take the 2X higher res at half the FPS, personally.
First off, the pipes won't be big enough for HDTV in reasonable download time for well-over a decade. Just calculate how many days it would take to download a 50GB movie on your connection.
The consider you'll need to buy a second line, or upgrade your speed, since your connection will be effective unavailable as you are downloading each movie, for DAYS at a time. Internet access isn't free.
Then consider how much money it's going to cost companies to pay for their own pipes to let you download 50GBs from them, and try to figure out how that will turn into a $2/movie business model.
How is maxing out your connection (which you pay for) for several days more convenient than NOT wasting your connection, and getting the disc in 1-2 days as Netflix currently does?
Bullshit. Bandwidth is massively expensive. There is too much variety in movies to expect several people to have them available when someone else wants to watch. ISPs will rake Netflix over tho coals for having their customers uploading 50GB files. Far too many users are behind firewalls and NAT routers for this to work. Nobody is going to max-out their upstream, all day, every day, making their connections useless. Asyncronous connections mean you need 10+ people who have the movie, and are willing to share, for every 1 person that wants to download it. Nobody is going to want to pay for Netflix, pay again with all their downstream bandwidth, pay again with all their upstream bandwidth, wait several days, etc. It's complete nonsense, until bandwidth is orders of magnitude cheaper, everyone has connections that is orders of magnitude faster, etc.
Bandwidth is FAR more expensive than postage, and you'll have pretty much all the same delivery problems.
Yes, and far worse than now.
In other words: Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. And, Bullshit.
What strange, magical, mystical world do you live in?
Who was (is?) your math teacher? I feel the overwhelming need to punch him...
(1920*1080) / (720*304) = 9.473684
NTSC is 480, PAL is 576.
The recomended viewing distance for standard TV is ~8X. It's ~3X for HDTV.
You can claim all the crazy crap you want, but that won't make it true.
Many, many people have seen HDTV, and can definitively tell you that anyone who isn't blind CAN SEE THE HUGE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES.
BAD MODS. NO COOKIE.
They were very large and ultra-bulky, could only hold 30-minutes per side of a disc, etc. Quite the opposite of HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
Something practically scratch-proof? Like, for example, Blu-ray discs?
Yes, HD-DVD and Blu-ray are doomed. Nothing new is going to make inroads until we have something that doesn't scratch. Like, for example, Blu-ray discs...
1969: But EVR is a singular format. Its uptake is just a matter of time.
1972: But Cartrivision is a singular format. Its uptake is just a matter of time.
1978: But LaserDisc is a singular format. Its uptake is just a matter of time.
1987: But S-VHS is a singular format. Its uptake is just a matter of time.
1998: But D-VHS is a singular format. Its uptake is just a matter of time.
But reel-to-reel tape is a singular format. Its uptake is just a matter of time.
But DAT is a singular format. Its uptake is just a matter of time.
But MiniDisc is a singular format. Its uptake is just a matter of time.
I've got news for you... Joe Sixpack's 10-year old TV went out a few months ago, and with widescreen HDTVs being cheap, he went that route. Now he's seeing HDTV broadcasts from one of his local networks, and he's not happy his DVDs of special-effects blockbuster movies don't look nearly as good. And he's not the only one.
Alice and Bob went for HDTV because they don't have much space, and large flat-screens are all HDTV. They haven't seen a real HDTV stream yet, but they've come to notice all the nasty artifacts of their DVDs on their new TV. They don't know that there's anything to be done about it, but the next time they walk into Circuit City, you can bet the salesman will explain it to them.... the installed base grows.
And come 2009, these senarios are going to repeat, ad nauseum, all around the US.
DVD-audio died because people's ears quite literally can't hear any improvement over CDs (except for the multiple channels, yes).
Quadraphonic music failed for the same reason 5.1 channel surround-sound failed... what? It didn't fail you say? How interesting.
There is a need. There is a demand. People don't go around saying "I want highdef DVDs" but when they have a product in front of them that does just that, and they see the improvement, the demand will be obvious.
Of course, I guess there was no need or demand for DVDs either.
Because it will NEVER be as cheap as stamping a thin piece of metal, and gluing it between two circular chunks of plastic.
It's going to be a long time before Flash is cheaper than even notebook-sized hard drives, even longer until it can match desktop-sized hard drives, and far, far longer until it can match RO/write-once optical media.
We may switch to that one day, in the very distant future, but the video market isn't going to sit still for decades, until that comes to pass.