I don't see that it will be a strong selling point to charge someone more money (even marginally) to be able to play a format that the major studios aren't even making anymore.
It's one Hell of a jump from our current situation to "aren't even making anymore." I don't think anyone with any intelligence is seriously suggesting that HD is suddenly going to vanish. So long as both formats make it through this initial period, then dual-format players will become the norm. Once that happens then the format war shifts gears rapidly downwards.
Why have no more players come to market for dual-format?
Well even a cursory search turns up that Samsung's latest, leading high-definition DVD player is a dual-format model.Samsung is a Very Big Player and whereas initially they were doing their best to peddle Blue-Ray, they're now moving their product range to represent both formats (not just this model). They are serious in this. Their new dual-format player will take market share from their own BD-only player which is sidelined. It's pricey now, but believe me it will come down fast. We've yet to see the effect of cheap high definition players rolling in from the non-Big Name players in China. Unless HD dissapears tomorrow, nothing is going to stop the move toward dual-format players.
Just think about this: How often do you even see a new non-HD TV for sale anymore? Who would buy a non-HD TV when they aren't much less than a 720p flat panel which you can get for well under a thousand dollars now?
To answer the two questions respectively, I see a lot of "HD-Ready" TVs advertised here in the UK, which isn't quite the same thing, but it's wrong to equate HD TV with either purchasing of new and expensive DVD players or with the purchasing of new and expensive DVD formats. People buy TV's because they must have TVs and if HD is all that's available, they buy that. It doesn't mean that they're scooping up DVDs that cost double what normal DVD's cost. And to address your second question, about who would buy a non-HD TV when you can get a HD one for well under a thousand dollars... Heh! A thousand dollars is a lot of money to some people and the figures I've been reading don't suggest to me that a large proportion of the existing TV owning demographic is rushing out to spend money on an upgrade. Even a lot of posters on Slashdot are saying it's not worth it. On Slashdot - where we love our toys! It may have escaped your notice but the US retail market is tightening its belt right now, and the UK has a less bad, but significant credit hang-over as well. It's not a question of whether new TVs being sold are HD or not. It's going to take a long time before that's a significant factor. It's a question of the proportion of total TV owners that are HD which matters. Until that's much, much higher, both formats still have a huge amount of wealth out there waiting to be gathered.
And when everything is dual format, there might be one other card left to play for HD-DVD. Firstly, it currently costs less to manufacture due to an existing manufacturing base that can handle it and secondly, it has less of a licencing cost for content producers. And apparently the DRM is optional on HD-DVD as well. That's another plus to me.
Which is why I made the point that they would become more relevant once the prevalence of dual-format reduced the worry about long-term support of the studios.:)
All of which ignores the point I made - that by the time HD vs. BD would be anywhere close to settled, prices will have come down enormously in all areas. As I said already, the difference in manufacturing cost between dual- and single-format players will be very small and given that it is a strong selling point, you'll see them everywhere.
Asking whether people are willing to pay an extra $100-300 for dual format is meaningless when most people aren't willing to pay the markup for any sort of high-definition player at all. There is sweet FA penetration into the home player market right now and the PS3's sold are almost nothing in comparison to the size of the total market. There is a long way to go before High Definition players are common and by that point, dual-format will be everywhere. And that removes the disincentive to purchase either format.
You make it seem like the non early adopters even matter on which way the war will end.
Well of course they do. If two groups are targetting a market of a billion+, they're not going to say, "oh dear, of the first three million sold we only got 25% lets abandon our investment now." The market has barely been scratched. By the time it's even a tenth of the way to being fully exploited, dual-format players will likely be in the same price range as single format players (it's not as though the manufacturing cost is wildly different and it's a great selling point), so there will be plenty of market for both. Besides, what I'm hearing a lot of, is people saying they prefer HD for the stability of the format and the lack of region coding (and other DRM issues). So I think the vast numbers of people out there who haven't bought in yet, are very significant. They represent a vast untouched market that any company would love to get a slice of. You're not thinking just how much money 10% of all the TV owners out there represents. It's enormous! If you can claim that 10% of the market and you don't, any CEO would be rightly kicked out by the company's investors.
HD will certainly be around long enough for dual-format to be the norm (you only need a tiny difference in title releases between formats to make dual-format appealing to the hardware purchaser), and once that happens, both formats have survived the critical format war stage.
This is interesting. It's an area I know little about. Isn't the decoding of the content off-loaded to the graphics card normally, and doesn't this mean that a quad-core CPU doesn't help?
Not meant as a challenge - interested in more information.
More like it comes down to whether the hardware manufacturers consider dual-format to be a big enough selling point to justify the cost. The actual technologies are very, very similar. I don't know how it affects R&D, but I'd make an educated guess that the manufacturing cost of a dual-format player is barely different to the manufacturing cost of a single-formet player. In which case hands up who here would pay a few pounds more for a dual-format player over one that could play only BD or HD? Yep, most of us. Even if you don't currently own any discs of a particular format, you'll prefer to have something that can handle both if it doesn't cost you much extra.
Once dual-format players become the norm, the format war is going to be all about technical advantages. And I think HD edges Blue-Ray out in this regard.
Hate to just post 'me too,' but that's a fair summary of how I feel as well. I would rather see HD become the standard, mostly due to the fact that producers can then forgo encryption and region locking, but also because you can have double-sided discs with DVD on one side and HD on the other which is convenient and a good selling point. Also HD was the first to have the DRM broken which is a selling point to me. I would far sooner purchase media that I know will be easy to play on whatever operating system I so choose, or can be backed up and streamed around my house.
I don't think HD will vanish. We'll likely end up with both much as we have DVD+R and DVD-R and lots and lots of dual-format players. If one format died a quick death, then we wouldn't see the manufacturing side adapt to dual-format, but I think a quick death is out of the question so we'll end up with a dual-format standard in players (and writers). Once that happens, the hesitancy in buying either format will be gone and they can both compete on their technical merits. In which case HD may yet win the day.
I'm holding off mainly for the prices of HD-DVD drives and the content to come down. But there are certainly a few movies in my collection I'm already tempted to re-buy in HD.
Its irrational to believe in something there is no proof of.
Millions of people claim to have felt a connection to a higher being / existence. It is irrational to dismiss evidence because it does not fit your paradigm.
Seconded. I want to be able to stream all of my movies from my home server on demand, not fiddle around with discs that can be damaged. But a big point with the DRM is that if one of the formats didn't have it, that format would suddenly become safe to invest in. It wouldn't be ideal to have to re-burn all of my HD discs if the format went under and everyone used Blueray, but I (a) wouldn't need to as I could play them from the file and (b) would at least be able to without as much cost as replacing them if I so chose.
Get rid of the DRM and you're not taking a big risk in buying that media.
Oh, I know that, but thank you.:) I'm not dismayed. I'm actually using an Nvidia card at the moment. I just felt that with my new computer (updating the OS now), that I should show my appreciation of ATI opening up to the open source world. My new card works okay with the proprietary drivers (so far). I've been following the forums on Phoronix and I think it wont be that long before I see an equivalent open source driver. And from there on, it's all improvement.
The proper implementation of C&B is therefore to give a client to GPs that they can book appointments with. The decision to expose it to the general public is purely to say "hey, look, we made something that works".
Well for most of the time, they've been saying "hey look, we made something that doesn't work," but I agree with you. I add though, that almost no doctor that I know wants the system either. GPs usually have a pretty good handle on where to send people and can choose differently if there's a specific need or preference on the patient's part, anyway. The correct approach to implementing this would be to try and decentralise things as much as possible - hospitals show what they've got, GP's book like a hotel room. Okay - you need more sophistication than that, but last I saw, Choose and Book was a monstrous, top-down system that fell over frequently and took everyone else with it. The only reasons I see it being designed the way it has been are to centralise control of the medical records and to feed large sums of money to certain companies. Furthermore, a lot of people's time is being wasted at the PCTs and in the practices either implementing this or checking practices compliance with it.
And it has come straight from Number 10 with zero willingness to listen to anyone who actually does real work in the NHS.
I just upgraded my system. I'm not a big graphics user but I bought an ATI HD 2600 Pro over an Nvidia card because AMD seem to be really supportive of Open Source at the moment. Driver support will catch up with me soon enough and I expect ATI cards to end up the best supported cards under Linux, until Nvidia starts following.
In the UK, the government has invested vast sums of money into a system called "Choose and Book." It's billed on the slim selling point of offering patients greater choice in hospital care but the most cursory look at the technology involved shows that the biggest effect is that of centralising patient's records.
Aside from the fact that patients can be offered a choice in secondary care already (by their doctor referring them to somewhere else), the system is buggy and flawed. The doctors don't want it, there have been national campaigns by the public against it, but the government is doing every single thing they can to force it on people up to and including financially penalising doctor's practices for not using it. The motivations are (a) presumed financial interests in the big companies that are providing the system and (b) a burning desire to get hold of everyone's personal medical data for government and police purposes.
It's not even legal as the responsibility for patient confidentiality belongs to the patient's own GP and if there's a misuse, they will be the ones legally to blame for sharing the data. There's some information on it here
If there's a need for easily transportable medical records, then this can be resolved by putting the data in the patient's hands. Public-Private key technology, or even hashes of the data, could be used to ensure accuracy. The solution is not that complicated, but in the UK we're having a very hard fight getting it.
Thanks and good of you to say so. Sadly/. mods fail to agree as I'm "Offtopic" now apparently. No more posting about solar powered lamp posts in an article on solar powered lamp posts for me then, eh? Bad Harmony!:D
I haven't seen "real" (ie, damage-causing) hail since 1980 or 1981, and when it does happen, it tends to happen over a small area. I'd call that a low enough probability event to ignore. As for the more general "accidental damage" category - Well, does your house have windows? Do you need to replace them all every few years due to baseballs or hail or meteorite damage?
Didn't anyone see that indestructible monitor a few days ago with the crystal screen? Okay, it's not actually indestructible but it's a transparent material that is strong enough to resist hammers, nails and cheap crossbow bolts whilst being cheap enough to use as the front for a monitor. The technology to make tough solar panels probably exists.
So we might be down one more argument against solar panels and we already have some good arguments for them - the fact that Earth will run out of fossil fuels and the general consensus that existing energy production methods are destroying our environment.
Well, looking at the photo, it's certainly prettier to look at than most street lamps. Just a bit of a futuristic, more organic look. I like it. And it certainly gets more publicity than bolting some panels on top of an existing lamp. Besides, this is a prototype, so maybe you'll get your wish and the actual approach taken by city councils will be to adapt existing lights.
We should never give up our appreciation for elegance.
I have always understood "begs the question" to mean that something demands another issue to be taken into account and answered. What other meaning for the phrase is there? This is the third or fourth time I've seen someone irate at this usage, but it's correct where I've heard it.
No, BlueParrot is right. Watermarking is not just a form of DRM. Digital Rights Management restricts the operations that can be performed on data. Watermarking makes the data unique. The only way that watermarking restricts operations on the file is through encouraging human compliance, not through technological means.
Something like iTunes Fairplay (DRM) and watermarking are qualitiatively different, having substantially different effects. It is damaging to people's understanding to try and equate the two.
Bring on the watermarks. They don't stop me from using the file in any way that I'd like to and if they provide the producer enough reassurance that they're willing to sell more material online, unencumbered, then it's a good thing.
I'm not worried about the possibility that EMI will try to frame me for copyright infringement and I am paranoid!
That would be nice, but really all I need is a download link to a zip file. Unfortunately I can't have one because Amazon don't offer this service in the UK. Does anyone know if there's any word on extending this to Europe, yet?
Slashdot Mirror
It's one Hell of a jump from our current situation to "aren't even making anymore." I don't think anyone with any intelligence is seriously suggesting that HD is suddenly going to vanish. So long as both formats make it through this initial period, then dual-format players will become the norm. Once that happens then the format war shifts gears rapidly downwards.
Well even a cursory search turns up that Samsung's latest, leading high-definition DVD player is a dual-format model.Samsung is a Very Big Player and whereas initially they were doing their best to peddle Blue-Ray, they're now moving their product range to represent both formats (not just this model). They are serious in this. Their new dual-format player will take market share from their own BD-only player which is sidelined. It's pricey now, but believe me it will come down fast. We've yet to see the effect of cheap high definition players rolling in from the non-Big Name players in China. Unless HD dissapears tomorrow, nothing is going to stop the move toward dual-format players.
To answer the two questions respectively, I see a lot of "HD-Ready" TVs advertised here in the UK, which isn't quite the same thing, but it's wrong to equate HD TV with either purchasing of new and expensive DVD players or with the purchasing of new and expensive DVD formats. People buy TV's because they must have TVs and if HD is all that's available, they buy that. It doesn't mean that they're scooping up DVDs that cost double what normal DVD's cost. And to address your second question, about who would buy a non-HD TV when you can get a HD one for well under a thousand dollars... Heh! A thousand dollars is a lot of money to some people and the figures I've been reading don't suggest to me that a large proportion of the existing TV owning demographic is rushing out to spend money on an upgrade. Even a lot of posters on Slashdot are saying it's not worth it. On Slashdot - where we love our toys! It may have escaped your notice but the US retail market is tightening its belt right now, and the UK has a less bad, but significant credit hang-over as well. It's not a question of whether new TVs being sold are HD or not. It's going to take a long time before that's a significant factor. It's a question of the proportion of total TV owners that are HD which matters. Until that's much, much higher, both formats still have a huge amount of wealth out there waiting to be gathered.
And when everything is dual format, there might be one other card left to play for HD-DVD. Firstly, it currently costs less to manufacture due to an existing manufacturing base that can handle it and secondly, it has less of a licencing cost for content producers. And apparently the DRM is optional on HD-DVD as well. That's another plus to me.
Which is why I made the point that they would become more relevant once the prevalence of dual-format reduced the worry about long-term support of the studios.
All of which ignores the point I made - that by the time HD vs. BD would be anywhere close to settled, prices will have come down enormously in all areas. As I said already, the difference in manufacturing cost between dual- and single-format players will be very small and given that it is a strong selling point, you'll see them everywhere.
Asking whether people are willing to pay an extra $100-300 for dual format is meaningless when most people aren't willing to pay the markup for any sort of high-definition player at all. There is sweet FA penetration into the home player market right now and the PS3's sold are almost nothing in comparison to the size of the total market. There is a long way to go before High Definition players are common and by that point, dual-format will be everywhere. And that removes the disincentive to purchase either format.
That made a lot of sense (though I'm well aware of the gap between a summary and practical knowledge). Am glad I asked. Thanks!
-H.
Well of course they do. If two groups are targetting a market of a billion+, they're not going to say, "oh dear, of the first three million sold we only got 25% lets abandon our investment now." The market has barely been scratched. By the time it's even a tenth of the way to being fully exploited, dual-format players will likely be in the same price range as single format players (it's not as though the manufacturing cost is wildly different and it's a great selling point), so there will be plenty of market for both. Besides, what I'm hearing a lot of, is people saying they prefer HD for the stability of the format and the lack of region coding (and other DRM issues). So I think the vast numbers of people out there who haven't bought in yet, are very significant. They represent a vast untouched market that any company would love to get a slice of. You're not thinking just how much money 10% of all the TV owners out there represents. It's enormous! If you can claim that 10% of the market and you don't, any CEO would be rightly kicked out by the company's investors.
HD will certainly be around long enough for dual-format to be the norm (you only need a tiny difference in title releases between formats to make dual-format appealing to the hardware purchaser), and once that happens, both formats have survived the critical format war stage.
This is interesting. It's an area I know little about. Isn't the decoding of the content off-loaded to the graphics card normally, and doesn't this mean that a quad-core CPU doesn't help?
Not meant as a challenge - interested in more information.
More like it comes down to whether the hardware manufacturers consider dual-format to be a big enough selling point to justify the cost. The actual technologies are very, very similar. I don't know how it affects R&D, but I'd make an educated guess that the manufacturing cost of a dual-format player is barely different to the manufacturing cost of a single-formet player. In which case hands up who here would pay a few pounds more for a dual-format player over one that could play only BD or HD? Yep, most of us. Even if you don't currently own any discs of a particular format, you'll prefer to have something that can handle both if it doesn't cost you much extra.
Once dual-format players become the norm, the format war is going to be all about technical advantages. And I think HD edges Blue-Ray out in this regard.
Hate to just post 'me too,' but that's a fair summary of how I feel as well. I would rather see HD become the standard, mostly due to the fact that producers can then forgo encryption and region locking, but also because you can have double-sided discs with DVD on one side and HD on the other which is convenient and a good selling point. Also HD was the first to have the DRM broken which is a selling point to me. I would far sooner purchase media that I know will be easy to play on whatever operating system I so choose, or can be backed up and streamed around my house.
I don't think HD will vanish. We'll likely end up with both much as we have DVD+R and DVD-R and lots and lots of dual-format players. If one format died a quick death, then we wouldn't see the manufacturing side adapt to dual-format, but I think a quick death is out of the question so we'll end up with a dual-format standard in players (and writers). Once that happens, the hesitancy in buying either format will be gone and they can both compete on their technical merits. In which case HD may yet win the day.
I'm holding off mainly for the prices of HD-DVD drives and the content to come down. But there are certainly a few movies in my collection I'm already tempted to re-buy in HD.
Millions of people claim to have felt a connection to a higher being / existence. It is irrational to dismiss evidence because it does not fit your paradigm.
Same here. There was only one, mind you, but we did it.
Seconded. I want to be able to stream all of my movies from my home server on demand, not fiddle around with discs that can be damaged. But a big point with the DRM is that if one of the formats didn't have it, that format would suddenly become safe to invest in. It wouldn't be ideal to have to re-burn all of my HD discs if the format went under and everyone used Blueray, but I (a) wouldn't need to as I could play them from the file and (b) would at least be able to without as much cost as replacing them if I so chose.
Get rid of the DRM and you're not taking a big risk in buying that media.
Oh, I know that, but thank you.
Why not?
I just upgraded my system. I'm not a big graphics user but I bought an ATI HD 2600 Pro over an Nvidia card because AMD seem to be really supportive of Open Source at the moment. Driver support will catch up with me soon enough and I expect ATI cards to end up the best supported cards under Linux, until Nvidia starts following.
In the UK, the government has invested vast sums of money into a system called "Choose and Book." It's billed on the slim selling point of offering patients greater choice in hospital care but the most cursory look at the technology involved shows that the biggest effect is that of centralising patient's records.
Aside from the fact that patients can be offered a choice in secondary care already (by their doctor referring them to somewhere else), the system is buggy and flawed. The doctors don't want it, there have been national campaigns by the public against it, but the government is doing every single thing they can to force it on people up to and including financially penalising doctor's practices for not using it. The motivations are (a) presumed financial interests in the big companies that are providing the system and (b) a burning desire to get hold of everyone's personal medical data for government and police purposes.
It's not even legal as the responsibility for patient confidentiality belongs to the patient's own GP and if there's a misuse, they will be the ones legally to blame for sharing the data. There's some information on it here
If there's a need for easily transportable medical records, then this can be resolved by putting the data in the patient's hands. Public-Private key technology, or even hashes of the data, could be used to ensure accuracy. The solution is not that complicated, but in the UK we're having a very hard fight getting it.
Oh fantastic. No kidding - guess what I decided to install on my new computer this afternoon!
Thanks and good of you to say so. Sadly
Didn't anyone see that indestructible monitor a few days ago with the crystal screen? Okay, it's not actually indestructible but it's a transparent material that is strong enough to resist hammers, nails and cheap crossbow bolts whilst being cheap enough to use as the front for a monitor. The technology to make tough solar panels probably exists.
So we might be down one more argument against solar panels and we already have some good arguments for them - the fact that Earth will run out of fossil fuels and the general consensus that existing energy production methods are destroying our environment.
Well, looking at the photo, it's certainly prettier to look at than most street lamps. Just a bit of a futuristic, more organic look. I like it. And it certainly gets more publicity than bolting some panels on top of an existing lamp. Besides, this is a prototype, so maybe you'll get your wish and the actual approach taken by city councils will be to adapt existing lights.
We should never give up our appreciation for elegance.
I have always understood "begs the question" to mean that something demands another issue to be taken into account and answered. What other meaning for the phrase is there? This is the third or fourth time I've seen someone irate at this usage, but it's correct where I've heard it.
I know what you mean. I'm frequently bothered by the fact that people can tell who I am from my number plate.
No, BlueParrot is right. Watermarking is not just a form of DRM. Digital Rights Management restricts the operations that can be performed on data. Watermarking makes the data unique. The only way that watermarking restricts operations on the file is through encouraging human compliance, not through technological means.
Something like iTunes Fairplay (DRM) and watermarking are qualitiatively different, having substantially different effects. It is damaging to people's understanding to try and equate the two.
Watermarking is not DRM.
Bring on the watermarks. They don't stop me from using the file in any way that I'd like to and if they provide the producer enough reassurance that they're willing to sell more material online, unencumbered, then it's a good thing.
I'm not worried about the possibility that EMI will try to frame me for copyright infringement and I am paranoid!
That would be nice, but really all I need is a download link to a zip file. Unfortunately I can't have one because Amazon don't offer this service in the UK. Does anyone know if there's any word on extending this to Europe, yet?