Yes, movie DVDs and/or Blu-rays are not going away tomorrow, and an optical disk is a great format for people who want to watch a movie.
But computers are moving away from having optical drives. Yes, you can still get them, especially on desktops where space and power consumption is not a concern. But on laptops they are already no longer standard.
Again, if you want to watch a DVD on your TV, you buy a device that plugs into your TV that can read the optical disk. Your TV doesn’t come with an integrated optical disk player. It’s going to be more and more rare to find laptops that include an optical disk player, just because fewer and fewer laptop owners are wanting one. And the ones that really need an optical disk player aren’t out in the cold, because they’ll be able to get an external player. And you’ll be able to buy one of those far into the future.
That’s totally true, but when you go buy the VR movie at the store, are you going to buy a little solid-state drive that plugs into your VR headset, or are you going to buy a high-capacity stamped disc of some sort that you put into a reader at home that uploads it to your headset.
I would bet money that it’s going to be the latter. Yeah, you do need enough solid state storage to hold the thing you’re watching, but that’s a different question than how the data will be distributed. And stamped media is just so cheap to distribute that I think it will be at least part of the data distribution channel for a while.
Other options, of course, are that you don’t go to the store at all, and you just download the thing, or that you go to the store with your own solid-state drive and plug it into a thing that uploads it. But those are both trickier than shipping a bunch of plastic discs around.
I will bet you a dollar that downloads are the future. Yes, trucks full of optical media or even flash drives have a higher bandwidth than your cable modem. But if you want to watch 50 Shades of Gray right now, streaming beats jumping in your car, driving down to the Target, buying the DVD, and driving home. The bandwidth on that trip to pick up and deliver a single movie sucks.
Optical disks are going to be around for a long time, but they’re not going to be on your computer anymore.
There are persons (ahem) who aren’t thrilled with the idea of downloading, because of unreliable quality and the current tendency for your favorite show to mysteriously vanish or move to one of the other sixty providers who wants a continuous tap into your bank account. A disc is physical and can be paid for once and considered owned. Some people like that.
I think you’re maybe arguing against a point I’m not making. My claim is: optical disks aren’t going away any time soon, and there will be a higher-storage format than Bluray that is used to distribute consumer-mass-market media.
Downloads (well, really streaming) are going to be the dominant delivery mechanism. But there’s still going to be plenty of market for stamped discs. Lots of people live where the internet isn’t fast enough, or aren’t willing to pay the monthly cost of broadband.
Sure, for most people. But not for everyone. And there’s enough that will use it that there will be another optical disk standard that’s higher resolution than Bluray is.
As long as there are standalone optical disk player things, there will be drives available for computers to read those disks.
This is true but eventually the market moves on regardless because the cost of catering to those people becomes less and less worth it. Case in point: Very few PC games come on physical media these days. Even when you see a box on a shelf, it almost always has a digital download code inside versus a plastic disc containing the actual software. The box only exists so Grandma has something to wrap for Christmas.
There are, of course, a number of people who exist with 56k connections or draconian data caps but the market has basically shrugged them off because the savings from going digital exceed the lost sales from those areas.
Downloading is better than streaming, but I also don’t like downloading much, because your possession of the item relies on one of two assumptions: you store everything on your hard drive/flashdrives locally forever, or that the place you bought and downloaded them from will exist and be accessible forever. (If you take the latter option you have to suffer through wait times before each use, too.) As a bird-in-the-hand sort of guy, I prefer to keep things locally. And if I’m going to do that I might as well have them on disc.
(This is all assuming that we’re talking about legal downloading, of course. Illegal downloading is simply something that doesn’t exist to me.)
On a completely unrelated note that probably applies to nobody but me, I also don’t like browsing for things in a computer folder. There’s something about browsing shelves full of book/DVD spines that presents my entire collection to my eye at once and facilitates a more fun ‘pick something to read/watch’ experience. (Picking things to watch on Netflix took forever! Six at a time, scroll, wait for the pictures to load, scroll, wait for the pictures to load…) So I will never ever go all digital, just because it make my collection feel inaccessible to me.
My current laptop doesn’t have an optical media drive. I recently trashed an old tower with a sweet aftermarket CD/DVD drive…and forgot to rip my CD’s. Dammit.
Blu-ray is good enough as a storage format that it’s never going to be supplanted by a different optical disk standard. It’s the end of the line.
Even for just video, I can’t ever tell the difference between a blu-ray movie and a DVD movie. Almost nobody cares about how much better blu-ray is compared to DVD. Yeah, DVDs were much better than VHS. Blu-rays not much better than DVDs.
20 years in the future, when room-immersion holo-smello is the hot new standard, the luddites are still going to be hanging on to their optical disks, and you’ll still be able to get optical disks from AmaWalTargetCo. For regular old movies. If you want the holo-smello version you’ll have to use the new standard distribution method, which isn’t going to be an optical disk. But…holo-smello is still going to be a niche market, like home 3D. 3D isn’t that much better than regular 2D that people feel the need for it.
Sound was much better than silent. Color was much better than black and white. Recorded media was much better than watching whatever they broadcasted. HD was much better than analog.
But 3D is not that much better than 2D. And holo-smello is not going going to be much better than just plain movies. Once you get past a certain point, convenience and accessibility matter more than fidelity. Look at all the people watching video on tiny little phone screens and listening to music on little earbuds.
And so I don’t predict that the future will feature immersive video that will require ten times the data density of current media, just like there never was a denser audio medium than the CD. Digital audio is often of worse quality than CD, but nobody cares because it’s all coming out of little earbuds anyway. Your Mark One eyeball can only absorb so much visual information at once, which is why a tiny phone screen two feet from your face is nearly as immersive as a giant IMAX screen.
There will be room for holo-smello or whatever mutant formats exist in the future. But the trend for the last 10 years hasn’t been improved fidelity, it’s been cheaper, faster, and easier. Very few people are going to have home holo-smello, if you want the full holo-smello experience you’ll go to the holo-smello-torium and pay for a premium experience. Meanwhile your luddite great-uncle Steve is watching the same movie 3 months later on his 4 inch handheld screen and is glad he didn’t have to leave his housing pod.
For the record, in about half the stuff I watch I can easily see the difference between dvd and blu-ray. Specifically, the half that is “not live action”. Animation, 3D rendering: the difference is clear. And I have at least one friend who claims to be able to see the difference even in live action.
The reason 3D hasn’t taken off isn’t that it’s not a dramatic improvement over 2D - of course it’s a dramatic improvement over 2D. The real problem is that our ways of delivering it to the viewer kind of suck, generally involving glasses and motion sickness and stuff, and half the people who shoot in it actually fake it instead for a visibly lower-quality product. If we cracked the glasses issue (with room-immersion holo-smello, perhaps) and shrunk the cameras to make shooting it for real cost-effective, then I’m quite confident that 3D would supplant 2D, both in theaters and, when costs came down, in homes.
You say “luddite”, I say “people who don’t like settling for lower-quality crap.” And yes, any format they come up with will eventually be ported onto some sort of physical media - unless the people who like lower-quality crap have shunted the market over to streaming to such a degree that physical media isn’t sold at all anymore.
Hmmm. I guess then I’ll backtrack and say “mass market standard”. Yeah, better formats will exist, and I shouldn’t have said they won’t exist. But are these higher-density formats going to become the standard way video is release, like DVDs were? Or are they going to be a niche format?
The quantities of 4K disks I’m currently seeing at Walmarts and Targets nowadays are 1) not trivial, and 2) reminiscent of the way blu-ray started out. And blu-ray is in no way “niche”, not anymore.
It doesn’t really make market sense to devise and sell a niche delivery system. If you’re going to bother with it at all the idea would be to upgrade everyone, so that you can sell as many of these things as possible at their higher price. Keep in mind here that buyers have to buy new hardware for this stuff to work, and that once they own the hardware they’ll be more inclined to buy the more expensive discs due to sunk cost psychology.
What I expect to happen is that once the 4K disks expand beyond their current shelves into the ‘mainstream’ (so to speak), then either dvds or blu-rays will start petering out and go the way of the VCR tape. It really doesn’t feel to me like the market wants to support more than two qualities of delivery format at a time.
Right, but the problem is getting everyone to buy the latest optical player. Will they do that? I’m actually shocked that you’re seeing this new format in stores, because who’s clamoring for it?
First off, I would argue what you are describing is not “video” at that point. It is VR. And there’s still a lot to be worked out there. There’s still a whole lot of people getting headaches and motion sickness in VR. Even with the increased processing, there’s a reason it hasn’t taken off as well.
But, assuming we do work that out, I do agree the amount of data will be quite large. But I largely suspect that such content will be streamed digitally, because digital is a cheaper distribution method. There’s a reason why I could download around 30 (2k) Blu-ray rips a month and yet pay about the price for two actual disks.
And streaming could even cut down on the amount of data needed to be sent, anyways. If you aren’t in a particular area and won’t conceivably be there by the time the latency, it can skip that data. You would ultimately only need to stream a portion of the data that would need to be on a disk.
I’m also not entirely sure optical media even has multiple orders of magnitude left to go.
That’s just you. I can easily tell the difference between 480p video and 720p video, and often can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, even though my monitor’s resolution is actually 900p.
I’m not sure about 4k, but the difference from DVD to Blu-ray is definitely noticeable. It took me a bit, but I’m now to the point that I at least watch in 720p as much as I can. Hell, I bought a $60 video card so I could watch 1080p without driving my computer to its knees. (The only limit now is bandwidth: we can’t watch two 1080p videos at once on my DSL.)
Which reminds me. My previous post forgot to mention that that my DSL is quite slow. Legally, it’s about 25% too slow to qualify as broadband, which starts at 25Mbps. I could get a better per $1 rate if I switched to cable, but I find my current amount is enough for what I do online.
Also, that last line above means that I’m not sure how small we can make the tracks for optical media. I’m sure that to get to even one order of magnitude, we’d at least need to move to lasers with higher frequencies that we can visibly see.
How many of those PC games can even be played without a fast network connection? It’s definitely reasonable to ignore a distribution channel that’s mostly useful to people who can’t use the product anyway.
But that doesn’t apply to movies. You don’t have to have a fast ping to watch a movie.
Well, predictions are hard, especially about the future. Care to make a friendly wager?
If you can’t tell the difference between a Bluray and a DVD, I’m not convinced that you have your finger on the pulse of the future of video. The difference between a Bluray and a DVD is vast.
Look at all the people who buy 80" 4K televisions. There’s room for both convenience and higher definition in the market.
Look, streaming is definitely a big part of the future. Some future higher-definition optical disk isn’t going to be the dominant way of distributing movies, the way DVDs and Blurays are. But they’re gonna exist. And hundreds of millions of people worldwide are going to buy them and watch them on their ginormous 8K television walls.