I’m with Fiver. Whichever format “wins,” it will be to DVD what Super Audio CD is to the regular CD. Audiophiles and early-adopter techie types loved them, but Joe Consumer couldn’t discern the quality difference anway, and was more interested in the convenience of mp3. It’s just too late in the game for another physical format to acheive the ubiquity and staying power of DVD.
I don’t see a way of ending this hijack, unless a tech person from an ISP steps in. But your assumption is wrong, because all neighbours in an apartment block stream HDTV (20mbps) at the same time while still having extra bandwidth to use for internet. Things vary between different apartment buildings, different geographical regions ASF. But for my friend who has 100 down, the bottleneck is not within the network he’s connected to, it’s with the service provider.
Back OT:
Yes, DVD and any other physical form of distribution is going the way of the Dodo, but I doubt it’ll reach critical mass within five years. And content providers really need to find a working business model instead of hampering the evolution.
Are HD DVD players and Blu Ray players or both, backwards compatible with my vast collection of DVD titles ?
I wont be buying a player any time soon, but certainly wont if I have to stack it on top of my old DVD player to watch them, or worse re-buy my collection of DVDs in slightly better definition but with loads more extras.
You aren’t Scottish are you? Actually I was thinking the same thing.
Hi-def players, for the foreseeable future, will be able to play conventional DVDs. The sad thing is that my friend who bought a 400 DVD player last year doesn’t have a good choice for enjoying Blu-ray.
While there is no doubt that technology will improve for many customers, it will move at a glacial pace for many others. I see a widening of the gap between the haves and have-nots with respect to bandwidth over the next 5-10 years.
To illustrate, where I live, I can get 10MB service thru cable, and that could easily be boosted if the company decided to. But all around me are rural, low-population areas where cable and DSL are nonexistent and not likely to be offered anytime soon, if ever. They must be content with 19K dialup (that’s right, 56K is an impossible luxury) or expensive satellite systems. So their best access to hi-def will still be disc for a long time. Upgrading to a blu-ray player is relatively cheap.
Oh man. The day the people push through exclusive streaming of movies from the web is the day you’ll find me sobbing over my DVD collection in the closet. The thought of trying to enjoy a movie that halts every two minutes to buffer, sync or compensate for the usual wireless/ISP crap makes me shiver. Fine enough, I’ve downloaded my share of episodes and movies (legally - iTunes or a co/links site) but those usually end up being burnt out to watch on my BR/HD-TV combo anyway. And then being replaced as soon as the episodes/movie come to the local movie shop. (And good luck waiting for Sony to deliver a way to make most movies streamable on the PS3. Hah!)
My prediction is that the Blu-Ray may be the last widely used physical medium, but the internet revolution is over-hyped and won’t be a superior factor in sales until 2015.
HD video/audio content is nearly uncompressible because it’s already compressed via incredibly efficient and very heavily studied algorithms. There may be tiny incremental improvements of some sort, but nothing drastic. That’s just math.
Blu-ray is currently supported by all studios except Universal. HD-DVD is supported by all studios except Disney, Fox and Lionsgate. Blu-ray has a higher data bandwidth, which allows it to support more features (indeed, some people have speculated that HD-DVD may not be capable of supporting multiple 1080p streams [necessary for the windowed video modes that both formats have] and audio at the same time). Blu-ray also has a sizable advantage in players out there, thanks to the PS3. Supporting only one HD format might make sense from a corporate perspective, and if that’s the direction to go, Blu-ray is the better choice at this point.
I have opined in the past that Microsoft’s strange, half-hearted support for HD-DVD over Blu-ray is not really to support the winning format. Rather, I think they just want to draw out the competition to allow on-demand video to make physical media obsolete (as Fiver alluded). Their big investment in Xbox Live, and their focus on Windows Media Center (and its Vista-descendants) give a clue to them coveting the same space that Apple does; namely as the living room entertainment device that people rely on. The studios will support a robust CRM, particularly if it removes the whole manufacturing and inventory distribution channel that eats up a significant portion of the cost. (It’ll be interesting to see if any studio actually reduces the consumer price of movies correspondingly.)
With regard to the network, bandwidth is no issue. True on-demand video (i.e. I select a movie and can watch it immediately, as many cable operators have already) is probably not required. A NetFlix-style approach, where you create a list of movies you want to watch over the next few days, and they get downloaded incrementally, would work fine with the current Internet. A lot of schemes have been developed should they be necessary, much as Akamai created their “border servers” (massively geographically distributed networks to keep servers physically close to end-users) during the dramatic ramp-up of 'Net usage during the late 1990’s.
Perhaps there’s some confusion between transmission compression and encoding compression. VC-1 and H.264 represent a big improvement over MPEG-2, which itself got much better during its lifetime. And, as the people doing the encoding got experienced, as as the tools improved, the compression ratios got even better. Much better than tiny, incremental improvements. It’s true that once you encode an HD movie, real-time compression such as happens over a network protocol is extremely unlikely to offer any improvements. However, it is a fact that five years from now, HD movies will be encoded much more efficiently than they are now, whether it be from new codecs or just improvements to the ones that exist now.
I’m skeptical. Your claim seems to be “every 5 years, compression will get much better”, with no qualifiers. Except that there’s clearly a mathematical limit to how much compression there can be. Compression can’t get 10% better every 5 years forever. So eventually compression has to stop getting better, and (without actually really knowing what I’m talking about) the level of sophistication and research and understanding that already exists for compression algorithms makes me think that we’re way off into the diminishing returns tail…
Mine doesn’t do any of those things now, and data speeds are improving, so it’s less likely to do it in the future.
No doubt you are correct that it can’t be a continuing trend. Nonetheless, we’re essentially starting again with a new set of codecs. I guarantee you that there will be significant improvements over the next five years, from better algorithm implementations, new features added to the algorithms and improvements in the tools used to do the encoding. One of the reasons that Sony cites for releasing early BD movies in MPEG-2 was that the VC-1 and H.264 tools have just not reached the same level of refinement that the older tools have, and no one is yet an expert on using those codecs. I’m told that it’s actually quite a high art, knowing what and where to vary the compression in a movie. The current solution for the new codecs is just to use a lower compression over all to keep the quality up, and make use of the high capacity of the new disc formats.
You can do a lot with clever caching when you get critical mass. Most of the time, people are going to be downloading the latest harry potter or spiderman or whatever. Say each HD move is 50Gb. A 500Gb HD is $300 these days so assuming an 18 month doubling time, in 5 years, you’ll be getting 2Tb HDs for that price. Chuck 10 of those into a box and you have a 400 movie cache which probably would account for 80% of the movies being downloaded. Chuck one of those into every apartment block and hook it up directly into the gigabit LAN and you’re well on your way to solving the infrastructure problem.
edit: peer to peer also works. Instead of storing 400 movies in a central location, just have each DVR store 5 movies. If the movie you want to watch is present on someone else’s DVR inside the local network, just stream it off there rather than hitting the internet.
While I think the bandwidth problem will go away for most people, five years from now there will still be a significant number of people who will not be downloading movies, thus there will still be a need for another format.
However, that doesn’t mean it has to be optical disk. What about a ‘blockbuster card’ that’s actually an 8 GB flash drive? You go into blockbuster, order up a movie, plug in your flash drive, and the movie is downloaded to it from their server. Take it home, put it into your blockbuster reader, which is connected to your TV like a DVD player, and watch your movie. The whole thing is proprietary and includes encryption and a way to prevent the movie from being watched after one week.
Think of what a huge advance that would be for everyone. For one thing, you’re always guaranteed to get the movie. Blockbuster saves zillions of dollars on inventory, the movie companies don’t have to press all the DVDs and package them.
For those who have a high-speed connection, they simply connect to blockbuster’s server through the internet and download the movie to play in their DRM-protected blockbuster movie player.
It may not even be Blockbuster who does this. There’s a huge opening here for a clever company like Netflix to jump into the market. They don’t even need storefronts - they could make deals with companies like 7-11 to put movie kiosks in their stores just like we find ATMs now. Ten years from now, they may be ubiquitous. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to see ‘media kiosks’ in gas stations, convenience stores, etc. You’ll go to the counter and buy a card if you don’t have one, just like people buy phone cards now. Take it over to the machine, pay $3.00, and grab a movie for the night. Or the latest CD from your favorite band. Or the TV show you missed last night. Even for people with internet connections, the ability to stop and grab a movie on the way home and plug it into a player connected to your stereo system might be way more convenient than downloading, unless you’re set up with a media extender from your PC to your TV.
You can get a 2 GB SD flash card today for about $20. Five years from now, that $20 will probably buy you at least 8 GB. A company like Blockbuster might even throw one in for free with an annual membership, confident in making their money back on rentals.
Those are great ideas, Sam! 
Damn. I should have patented it. Now it’s in the public domain!
There would also be no late fees, and no extra trips to blockbuster to return the disk.
I’ll bet you could make a litttle dedicated flash player that connects to your TV through HDMI or component for less than $50. No screen required, no batteries required. Everyone could have one.
Don’t feel bad about it. No doubt somebody’s already patented and is just waiting to sue whomever implements the idea.
Yeah, which is why I can guarantee you that the MPAA will never allow such a thing to happen. Even if they consider it for the barest of moments, Jack Valenti’s rotting corpse will tear itself free of it’s crypt and proceed to hunt them down.
Video on demand hasn’t killed off the rental DVD business yet, and aside from one major flaw* it has most of what Sam was talking about. But B’busters still keeps churning along. I am intrigued with the idea of the Zombie Valenti,however and will support any measures to bring it to fruition…
*Pan and Scan pics, at least from my cable provider. They just started offering HD movies- at $10 each, and an extensive selection of choices (five.)