According to this Hollywood Reporter article, the DVD is about to join the fate of video tapes (Beta and VHS) and become obsolete.
There is still some hope for the Blu-Ray disks (due to 3D capabilities and higher quality), but the writing is on the wall; normal DVD’s are on the way out.
I suppose I saw this coming - recently I went to buy a new DVD burner/tuner to make copies of TV shows and movies for friends in Germany. There used to be several models and styles to choose from; last month there was one single model available at my local Fry’s Electronics.
A part of me is kind of sad - I love my DVD boxed set of LOTR extended versions, with all of the bells and whistles and extras. Plus, I have some other great films on DVD, as well as some personal films of parties and events with friends and family that will always be held in regard and watched occasionally.
Yes, I see the advantages - access to films you have “bought” from anywhere, on any device (TV, laptop, smart phone) at any time. But still - I never thought the DVD would just fade away - always assumed there would be a smaller, better version coming out.
I saw the word “cloud” in the title and instantly scoffed. It’s one of those seldom understood terms that bad journalists use to look clever. It means “internet.” As in, you don’t have access to a copy, unless it’s streaming to your computer.
Notice this line:
You bet it changes the value of ownership. For the worse. I need the internet to see my own paid content?? Now, I’m by no means a jetsetter, but I’ve been at enough airports with my laptop, in the past year alone, to know that a) Airport wi-fi is often expensive, and b) It is often unreliable. I offer a token anecdote: I had the wi-fi fail on me at airports in North Carolina, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, while the internet at West Palm Beach, Ottawa, and Cincinnati was good. That’s a 50% fail rate. (2 out of the 3 good ones were free to boot; and smaller airport, no less!)
I genuinely believe that the the main motivations behind these “developments” have always been to enforce copyright. I don’t think Blu-Ray drives on computers have become mainstream yet, have they? They exist, but they’re not ubiquitous. Anyone with an afternoon to kill and a $15 DVD-ROM can download certain nameless free software programs, and copy a bunch of movies to their tower, and make copies for all their friends. It’s trickier with blu-ray. It is, AFAIK, next to impossible with these streaming videos running MS-Silverlight.
On top of that, I’ve hit my data cap on more than one month because of my Netflix watching habits. Admittedly, we here in Canada have very restrictive caps from our ISPs. If the physical medium dies, it sure as heck won’t because of consumer preference, as far as I’m concerned.
It looks to me like the typical streaming rate at home is around 1 gigabyte an hour which is less than DVD quality. Streaming may be more convenient, but it is a step down from DVD much less Blu-ray.
but …but…what about DVD extras? Are they going away too? If I really like a movie I sometimes watch it again right away with the commentary. If I really really like it I will watch it again with the other commentary. And sometimes those commentaries pointed out so much stuff that I missed that I will then watch the movie again.
There are no technical reasons why commentaries etc would go anywhere. The question is if the consumers care enough about them that the producers think it’s worth the effort to make them.
As long as internet connectivity is unreliable and bandwidth is expensive (and ISPs impose limits, as they do in most countries), physical copies will remain necessary.
Maybe in five or ten years they’ll properly start to seriously wane in usefulness, but not yet.
That is my understanding. Maybe in South Korea you can get rid of DVDs, but in the US our broadband isn’t fast enough, reliable enough, secure enough or everpresent enough to take DVDs out of the picture. Data is being capped in the US, esp for cell phones.
What would be nice are devides like the goflex satellite a small hard drive that connects to a device like an ipad wirelessly and can hold 500+GB of data. You store your compressed movies on that, and you have several hundred DVDs in your pocket that you don’t need to connect to the internet for.
But that is a major hassle converting and compressing all those files. Plus you can’t stream and store video from services like netflix.
Wait…what? That is like McDonald’s announcing they plan to continue selling Big Macs because of the unexpected interest in hamburgers They built there business on DVDs how could the need for people to want to rent them be surprising to them?
Edited to add: the picture quality on the streaming for me is poor. I mainly just use it for TV shows.
More like McDonald’s announcing that despite their planned move to “all Big Macs”, the interest in the original hamburger is high enough to keep them, but they will raise the price.
Given the vaguarities of internet connection availability, speed and interruptions…
NO FUCKING WAY am I going to entrust my content to be all on-line.
We got these terabyte drives these days, and more. I want it on my computer, not on someone elses site that I may or may not have access to at any given moment or may run into speed/cost issues with downloading on demand.
I also am firmly aware of the physical and lifespan limitations of hard drives. I want PHYSICAL MEDIA on which my content is stored that isn’t going to crash or get corrupted, or in an extremely unlikely event, be wiped out my an EMP.
The big thing in this conversation that Hollywood hates to admit is that DVD sales were so high for so long because a lot of people went back and purchased a lot of their favorite movies when they originally made the jump to DVD. Those catalog titles aren’t selling very well on Blu-ray because everyone already has the DVD and most believe its good enough.
The Cloud/Internet for movies? Nope. The isps moan and throttle bandwidth now if you get a bit of a download going, and then say “we’ll sell you movies”. Then moan and throttle.
As for DVDs dying? No chance. Blue Rays in themselves, the previous Dvd killer, are overly expensive and not enough of a technological jump compared to Dvd (especially compared to an upscaled dvd, thwarted by a simple technology). They’ve failed. They’ll be making dvd players and recorders long after they’ve stopped making blue ray only players.
As for internet movies, its been the perpetually reappearing white elephant of the last 20 years of technology: Video on demand. It offers less than what we have now, so even now they’d do it for free (they often tried to do that as a premium service previously), people pay their money and want to be able to see a film more than once. And thats what the movie distributers don’t want.
Dvd is a mature format which is established and hasn’t provide a more better or easier alternative.
As for 3d, perhaps when real 3d comes in any format, rather than another variation of optical illusion/ headache inducing based/ failed before will fail now format.
Well, of course. That’s why I’m buying my favorite movies on DVD and Blu-Ray; loading them on my laptop; backing them up to a hard drive; AND rehersing them with a small troupe of actors.
So after the EMP, I’ll be able to watch HARVEY as many times as I want (and my Jimmy Stewart guy is excellent).
You can’t say they are obsolete when people still own standalone DVD players, just like you couldn’t say it with VHS while people still owned VCRs. I’d predict at least 3 more years before DVDs die, and that will be to Blu-Ray, which won’t be replaced by streaming until bandwidth halves or thirds in price. And even then, there will probably be a local copy, so you can take it with you without relying on the still spotty cell phone network.
Chalk me up as another one who thinks a lot of the push for video-on-demand is rooted in DRM fantasies. Migrate the populace out of the quaint notion of ‘owning’ a movie and not only have you killed lending and resales, but the primary hurdle to pay-per-view, limited utility vs infinite utility, is eliminated.
It’ll never happen, if nothing else due to the technological impossibility of actually delivering infallible DRM, but I get the feeling that’s what the big names of the industry are planning for an endgame.
That’s not really surprising, considering that the typical home budget-rate bandwidth is significantly lower than that. It could mean that people are happy with sub-DVD quality, or it could mean that US internet connections just don’t have the quality and penetration to be up to the task. I think it’s both, myself. My guess to the future is that Blueray will eventually take over as the default standard, but it will be a long time coming, assuming it doesn’t get leapfrogged before that happens by new tech. DVD was adopted relatively quickly in large part due to the immense quality and convenience jump over tape, and I just don’t see anything in the forseeable future doing that to DVD.
