To be a replacement, a technolgoy has to be SIGNIFICANTLY better. There’s no doubt the differnece in convenience and quality between, i.e. VHS and DVD, tape or vinyl and CD, or modem vs. high-speed internet. With upscaling, the difference between DVD and BR is not that great; many people will not pay the difference.
What I think will happen is that soon BR will be cheap enough that when you need to replace that $39.95 DVD player, it will be with a $39.95 BR player (which plays DVDs too); when you go to buy a movie, BR will be the same price as DVD or you won’t be able to find a DVD version (fewer stores will carry them.)
As others mentioned, the real villain will be the internet and downloads. You can watch yor missed TV episodes on the internet; soon, you will be able to watch movies too. Soon, the quality will surpass DVD. All they have to do is sort out the billing system; I suspect your cable company will sort that out - instead of carrying stations, they will carry programs on demand… plus a massive archive. Sort of like a giant version of the new in-flight entertainment systems.
The shift will come when we trust the content to always be there and available on-line; instead of buying all 10 seasons of Friends or 20(?) seasons of MASH or Simpsons on DVD, we’ll call up the episodes we want; or use shuffle and TiVO smarts to surprise us…
The problem is that visually, BR is not enough of a quantum leap; 1080p vs upscaled 480x720? The only thing BR can compete on really is price - it’s getting there… (“Supersize it for only 50 cents more”). It will win by default, 20% better for the same price, and your old discs still play.
The impediment to that quantum leap is the TV itself. When you start to see 2160P or 4320p with BR upscaling (shades of Farenheit 451!) You’ll know DVD is obsolete - and their will finally be a real market for all those IMAX films - but can BR support a 2 hour movie at IMAX quality, or is that a job for the internet III?
32 gig USB drives are starting to move into the range where they can compete with CD/DVD/Blu-Ray.
They’re significantly more rugged and portable than a Jewel cased disk.
By the time such keychain devices hit a terabyte or two they’ll pose a serious threat to clunky old 12 cm disks. Sure, people’ll download from the internet, but for stuff they want to keep a copy, they’ll go to transistorized storage.
I think you’re missing a qualifier, there… YouTube is part of the Internet, and the part obviously can’t be greater than the whole. Is it greater than the entire rest of the Internet? Greater than the Internet was in 2000? Some other qualifier?
Déjà vu. I remember threads 14 years ago hotly debating whether laser disc would last. At the time, there were several video stores renting them in my city. They were the 1990’s equivalent of Blu Ray. I bought over 500 titles between 1986 though 1997. Laser Discs typically sold for $25 to $35 each. I sold them off on Ebay for a couple bucks each.
I swore that I’ll never get screwed over again. I’m not getting suckered into collecting dvd or blu ray movies. You can’t ever count on any format lasting. My a-hole is still raw. I blew over 10 grand on this garbage.
But laser discs couldn’t record that limited their popularity. People perfered a player that would allow them to record AND play back things.
Americans have consistantly shown they prefer convenience to perfection. (Such as MP3 to CDs and Cell phones to landlines). Sure a CD and Landliine sound better but not that much better, where most people care.
Now you can buy a blu ray rip it to your computer and convert it to all sorts of formats.
VHS is hardly dead. BetaMax is dead and LaserDisc is dead, but not VHS. I still use it to tape programs for later rewatching or if a friend wants me to tape something.
Blu ray will never make it. It has few advantages over DVD, other than HD.
I go by what’s on sale. I remember when VHS was the dominant format and DVD was a specialty item. As DVD sales grew there was a tipping point and DVD became the primary format and VHS became a specialty item. The same thing happened with albums and CD’s.
We’re approaching that point with Blu-Ray. DVD is still the primary but Blu-Ray is clearly growing fast. I expect that within two years it’ll reach its tipping point and become the new primary format. DVD will then go into a quick decline. My prediction is that you won’t be able to buy a DVD in Target or WalMart by the end of 2016.
I plan to skip the Blu-Ray step. CDs, DVDs all made sense, but Blu-Ray isn’t a big enough step up to justify the extra cost. I just bought a handful of 1TB hard drives, under $100 each. Do you realize each one of those stores 20 times more data than a Blu-Ray disc, reads faster, and it’s eraseable? The cost of hard drive storage is dropping faster than optical discs.
You can see that I’m coming from a computer use rather than a movie collection orientation, but the two are merging. I watch more movies on my computer than my TV and most of my data storage is video files.
So I looked into Blu-Ray about a year ago as the next logical progression up from CD/DVD, but it made no sense. Online storage or even bigger hard drives are the next likely steps.
Blu-ray is much better than any streamed HD content available. While there’s not much of a difference on my 26" LCD, there’s a massive difference on my projector with a 93" screen. Even HD satellite looks bad on my projector compared to Blu-ray. I’ve never shown anyone a Blu-ray movie on my projector that didn’t wow them. It’s up to you whether or not you want to take advantage of Blu-ray over DVD or streaming, but there is a huge difference.
I can’t say I’m rocking a 93" screen, but Netflix streaming (HD) is still a step above DVD quality on my rig. Not quite Blu-Ray quality, but it’s definitely better than DVD.
I suppose this might be true if you were actually getting an HD movie on your TV, but you’re not, since the signal has been significantly compressed by your carrier and then it has been decompressed by your box. You might be receiving a 720p signal and it might look prettier than SD but it’s certainly not HD.
In fact it was not until earlier this year that the first broadcast in true uncompressed 1080p was done, and it was done by an ISP (Level 3) and not a major broadcaster… (Super Bowl in case you were curious). Sadly, you wouldn’t know that, since CBS and everybody else delivering the content compressed it on their own before the broadcast, but the point remains…
What? Are you suggesting DVDs have some magical properties that prevent them from aging or degrading? I would be surprised if archival quality DVDs consistently made it to 20 years, and certainly not the consumer grade crap that is sold at Best Buy, Fry’s etc.
YouTube is nowhere near HD quality, even on the videos they claim are 720p. Just because the input meets the requisite pixels really doesn’t mean much, I have a hand held Kodak ZX1 that records the same number of pixels as 720p but I’d have to be smoking some pretty serious crack to try to pass it off as being anything close to HD…
Sorry if I have come off harsh but this thread is being pervaded with ignorance and it’s the same typical crap the media has been spewing for a long time without much regard for accuracy or reality.
Another fine example of consumer HD confusion. Your post is almost perfectly accurate, minus the HD reference.
A 720p image is 921600 pixels. There are about 25 frames per second in standard video. That equates to roughly 23040000 pixels per second. We haven’t taken into account audio at this point, either.
Does anyone think Netflix is really pushing 23+ mbps to its customers? How many people even have a connection capable of supporting this data transfer at a sustained rate?
Probably in 20 years. It will likely be replaced when high speed, reliable wireless broadband is available anywhere and people can download from central servers.
Holographic DVDs are supposed to hold 300-2000 GB of data on them. But even so, if you have 100Mbps wireless broadband you can have endless terabytes of video and audio at your beck and call.
On Netflix streaming I probably have access to 50+ TB of video data. Its easier than carrying around 1,000 Blu-ray disks or 50 holographic DVDs.
I’m assuming you’ll buy a DVD and either store it on your own HD or on a central server, then just have access to it anytime/anywhere you want it via the internet.
I think downloads are further from replacing physical media than a lot of people seem to think.
Something like 30% of the US is still without high-speed Internet, for example. There are parts of Europe and Asia that are doing better in making this available, but huge portions of the world population lack high speed Internet now and will continue to lack it for quite some time in the future.
Given the CD-DVD-BluRay interchangeability, I think it’s safe to say that they’ll all be around for quite some time. Any future technology will have a boost in acceptance if it is also compatible with those.
I don’t know. But I do know I can get DVD level and Satellite TV level quality video on my 480p TV when I use netflix, and 480p is 338k pixels. 338k*25=8.45Mbps. However I have a 3Mbps connection, and it normally doesn’t use all of the broadband.
No, you are still receiving a highly compressed stream, however at SD you are not as likely to notice. I can’t speak to the quality you suggest you are receiving, as that’s strictly subjective and in the eye of the beholder, but Netflix is not serving you an actual SD stream.