And what part of your personal habits makes my statements false? My statement was about the present. In the present, most people don’t have anything more complicated than a tivo (if that) providing digital content the their televisions, and everybody I know has a DVD player.
And your predictions of the future based on your personal habits are easily countered by predictions based on my personal habits: I have never downloaded a movie, and if there is any alternative, I never will. Heck, I might not anyway; unlike those who pay per download I’ll have amassed a sizeable library of content to re-watch by then.
I like having hardcopy, I like having walls of DVDs on my shelves. It’s kind of cool.
I actually do have an IPod, and for every song on it, I have the original disk I ripped it from. I do this because 1) I like it that way, 2) occasionally files get lost, deleted, and go bad, and I don’t want to have to buy them again, 3) I like to actually own stuff, and most importantly, 4) I like it that way.
I’m as equally valid a sample as you are; therefore, were I in the habit of making brash generalizaions on a sample size of one, then it must be true that hardcopy will rule the world, and this piffling wireless content thing will dry up as soon as the media producers make the Uberchip and block all the illegal copying.
However I’m not in the habit of making generalizations on that grand scale, so I’ll just say that I think that DVDs and downloadable movies will continue to exist side-by-side, just like wireless content hasn’t sent paper books the way of the dodo. I think we can safely say now that there is a market (of at least one) for both technologies.
Oh, and that little picture of people running back and forth to their bookcase to change disks sounds pretty stupid when you realize that a movie is typically about twenty times longer than a song is; the two situations are not reasonably comparable. If you’re going to argue by analogy, at least pick a decent one.
People don’t have anything more complicated than a Tivo? Do you know what goes into Tivo? Does your TV provider send you a brick every month with “Tivo stuff” on it? Do you insert your monthly Tivo brick into your Tivo thingy so that your Tivo thing is then up to date? How much wall space do you dedicate to your daily, weekly, or monthly Tivo bricks?
How’s your LP collection doing these days? What, you really think you don’t download? Hello? Digital information coming into your house. Tivo storing it on a hard drive. You calling it up when you want. With menus.
It’s all back up. Just like your LPs. Or cassettes. Or CDs. Or DVDs. Or any number of other ways of backing up your data.
You really think they’re going to come up with an uberchip that will put an end to “this piffling wireless content thing?” You have heard you can download TV shows to your iPod right? Right?
So computers, the internet, etc have not proven the downfall of paper books. Ok. But they have proven the downfall of manual typewriters. You & me are just gonna have to sit on other sides of the fence on this one. I hope we can still be friends though.
Firstly, I don’t own a Tivo, which pretty much blows the crap out of whatever you were attempting with this little storm. If the goal was to imply that tivo-owners are dowloading content, then it wasn’t even a very good attempt, because I actually do know what goes into a Tivo: recorded broadcast television. The main difference between a Tivo and your average VCR is that the Tivo reads the TV Guide for you. Tivos definitely do not represent a replacement for DVDs in general, as is evinced by the fact that people have been known to own both a Tivo and a DVD player, at the same time. :eek:
No, it’s not. The CDs are obviously the source, not some ‘backup’, and I don’t rip the DVDs so they’re not separate from ‘the data’ at all.
I like actually owning the DVDs, in their pretty little cases. Besides the fact that they nicely complement my shelves of books, when I buy something I like getting something concrete for it. The only way I’ll ever download something is if it’s free, as in legally free, since I won’t download illegally, and since I won’t pay good money for media I can’t hold in my hand. You can stop telling me why I do things, because you’re not going to convince me.
By the way, were the implications that I might own LP’s (I don’t) supposed to be some kind of ad hominem? Just curious.
Did you even read my post? I was presenting the Uberchip an ironic counter to your equal-or-more unfounded and unlikely assertion that “[their] computer wirelessly streaming everything to [their] entertainment center” is “where it’s going to be for everyone, pretty soon.”
And it boggles my mind that anybody would watch anything on that crappy little ipod screen. I own the video ipod, I downloaded a few videos of mine to it just to check it out, and it was like watching a low-resolution postage stamp. It’s not like I’m a total videophile, but I like my viewing experience to be somewhat more pleasurable than reading fine print. If these are your examples of the wave of the future then DVDs (much less large-screen, high-definition next-gen DVDs) have nothing to worry about.
The comparison was between digital content and books, not the delivery vehicle, but I’ll discuss your statement anyway. Most people agree that computers outdo typewriters in pretty much every department, which is why most people (not all) have chosen to switch from typewriters to computers. On the other hand, books defeinitely have something that that text file on your computer lacks: weight, substance, and visual appeal in its static state. Similarly, a shelf of DVD cases is a lot more appealing to me to select from than a list of filenames on my computer. Not that, at 15 gigs a pop, you’ll be storing more than a dozen or two movies anyway. Since I don’t do pay-per-view, that fact does cap off the discussion where I’m concerned; with likely lower quality, long download times, and a probable pay-per-veiwing pricing policy, there’s really nothing at all in online movie distribution that appeals to me. You may think differently; fine, you can download stuff if you want. But don’t be surprised if the world doesn’t all fall in line behind you.
I like the irony here. Did you forget a smiley? Anybody watching this will note that I was pointing out that his analogy was stupid, which it was; not that he was stupid, which is as yet unproven.
The topic at hand is the likely resolution of the BluRay/HD-DVD format war. I stated my opinion: the movie companies will decide. Now, there’s a fair chance that they’ll decide through market pressures; both release the product, and each try to convince consumers to come to their side of the fence. If it weren’t for the fact that content providers have jumped to either side of the fence, this sort of competition for consumer attention would likely grant vicrory to the one with the lowest price/production costs, in this case HD-DVD. Given that you might only be able to get the next Disney movie (or porn flick, strange bedfellows) on Blu-Ray, though, heaven only knows who’ll capture more market force. Either way it’s sure to be a pain in the rear and leave some consumers having paid good money for the ‘wrong’ system, which would be a shame and be detrimental to consumers in general.
Apparently a number of the largest distributor of adult US DVDs decided to support Blu-Ray. 40% I read, but cannot just now remember, but I think it was 40% of all revenue in the US porn industry comes from DVD sale.
I don’t see how harddisks could now takeover the market from DVDs. There is a need for a robust and cheap way to store movies and computer games and programs. I think perhaps flashmem could be a better choice. But you can’t buy 50gb flashmem for anything like what a DVD og Blu-Ray/HD-DVD disc costs.
We already have 60gb iPods out there. I don’t see that big a leap between that and a Pod suitable for movie storage. Plug it into a dock on your entertainment center(s) and you’re good to go. Currently you can download movies at CinemaNow.
Regarding Sony not repeating it’s Betamax mistakes…
Sone notable Sony failures:
Minidisc, UMD, HiFD, ATRAC
About the only things Sony has done well in terms of storage formats are Hi8 and the 3.5" floppy disc, memory stick is being beaten by SD (IMO) and you will very rarely find it in anything other than Sony hardware.
I’m waiting for Holographic storage, until then, 4 and 8 GB DVDs will do jus fine.
Don’t confuse storage with distribution. Publishing companies will not release movies on hard drives - in any event it wouldn’t make any difference for consumers, we would still get a separate disk for each movie we buy.
How we store and play media content is a different story. Today it’s computers for movies, ipods for our favorite music, or simply the original disk and a stand-alone player. The future is online distribution and an entertainment center with stationary and mobile players/commuication devices connected through a wireless interface - but that’s years away. Really.
Alien, go to CinemaNow and tell me how that’s not online distribution. You can only store it on a hard drive, and you can put as many movies on your hard drive as space allows. It’s certainly not a DVD-killer at this point but it’s happening.
I get your point (check out Valve’s Steam), but online delivery as the de facto standard is years away, probably a decade at least. It’s the lack of bandwidth and satisfactory copyright mechanisms. We’re just at the beginning, with small content, like music, still entering the market. Of all the movies sold or rented last year, how many were distributed online? Not many.
Apple’s iTunes Music Store already lets you buy made-for-TV-movies, drop them on an iPod, then play them back on a big-screen TV with AV cables. You may quibble about the quality (watchable but not HDTV), but it seems like a minor leap to go from that scenario to buying 1080i movies online and watching them on your display of choice.
How long does something have to be the de facto standard before it’s really considered the de facto standard? LPs lasted a long time. CDs lasted a long time. DVDs haven’t really been the de facto standard for much more than ten years, have they? We’re already trying to replace them. At our current rate of change, I don’t see either Blu-ray or HD lasting even ten years as a de facto standard. I think they’ll be more like DAT tapes or ZIP discs. They’ll be a nifty alternate storage medium for a little while, then be quickly replaced. I don’t think they’re going to make de facto standard status.
Last I heard, in South Korea something like 60-70% of homes have broadband, with speeds ranging from 8-20mbps. They’re currently building the infrastructure to increase it to 100mbps. People watch TV over the net, and it’s cheaper to stream a movie into your home than to rent it from a store.
I have to wonder wether Blu-ray/HD actually will be replaced the way dat tapes and zip disk were, largely because I have to wonder wether we’re reaching the point where additional movie quality will be moot. CDs certainly haven’t been replaced, and as far as I can tell they’re still lasting because nobody can get too excited over the potential increase in sound quality offered by putting sound on a more spacious or newer format. Based on that, I wonder wether with the next generation of video disks we’ll have reached the point that the bulk of consumers won’t see any benefit in upgrading to the theoretical Purple-ray/HHD format of the future either.
If so, that’d be a good thing for all the online advocates; it’ll give the bandwidth and storage hardware a chance to catch up with the content they’d ostensibly be shipping/storing. If the video format freezes (with a single standard, hopefully) then it’ll only be a matter of time before a person can swipe their credit card through the slot on the front of their TV and have downloaded the movie by the time the popcorn is done. (Or, more probably, it’ll only be a matter of time before the bandwidth can handle the sustained throughput 2 megs a second that’s required.)
A frozen video disc format would also be good for us disc-slingers, because we won’t have to buy another player every ten years after that. Not as grand a benefit, but what the hey, every little but and all that.
That’s a good question. Maybe we can say laser technology products are the de facto standard of distribution? What I’ve been wondering about lately is exactly how much data is required by 2 hours of nicely compressed hidef video of perfect quality? That might tell us something about how long HD-DVD/BR could last. But I’ve been too lazy to do the math. Anyone?
South Korea is blessed with some gifted politicians who understands the value of being at the forefront of information technology. Lucky bastards. I had 10/10 from my home 6-7 years ago and I felt mighty powerful. Yeah
You make some excellent points begbert. I’ll have to think about that for a bit.
But you just know, some bastard is going to invent 3-D TVs or worse, holodecks, and then all our old media is going to get reencoded into the new “plaid-ray” format requiring 100 terabyte discs.
Just going off the Blu-ray FAQ website, a dual layer 50GB Blu-ray disc holds over 9 hours of HD video. So that’s about 5.5 gigs per hour of HD video.
They have plans on adding additional layers to their discs in the future, so you could end up with 100-200GB Blu-ray discs, but it sounds like a Blu-ray disc could be the last format you’ll have to upgrade to for quite a while.
But, apparently Pioneer is working on ultraviolet discs, with a 500GB capacity and superior data transfer rates than Blu-ray. Arghh! What’s next, the gamma ray disc?
Maxell is planning on releasing 300GB holographic discs this fall, with eventual capacities of up to 1.6TB per disk with a 120MBps bandwidth.
Blu-ray could be the last format you’ll have to buy if you want to buy a hardcopy of your favorite movie and have it on your shelf.
But for people like me, I want to buy all my media off the internet, stream it to my hard drive and store 50 TV shows, or 25 movies, all on one disc. And that’s HD. If, like me, standard def (SD) is good enough, that’s what? 100 TV shows, or 50 movies, all on one disc?
