THX says Blu-ray is dead. Does that mean no Star Wars in HD?
- March 26th, 2008
- Read 191 times
- 6 Comments
Guess what? One of THX’s chief scientists says Blu-ray is toast. Laurie Fincham was recently interviewed by Home Cinema Choice Magazine and when asked about HD DVD’s recent death he commented with this,
“Personally, I think it’s too late for Blu-ray. I think consumers will only become interested in replacing DVD when HD movies becomes available on flash memory. Do we really need another spinning format?” he told the magazine.
“In the future I want to be able to carry four to five movies around with me in a wallet, or walk into a store and have someone copy me a movie to a USB device. Stores will like that idea, because it’s all about having zero inventory. I don’t want to take up shelf space with dozens of HD movies.”
“By the time Blu-ray really finds a mass market, we will have 128GB cards. I would guess that getting studios to supply movies on media cards, or offer downloads, will be a lot easier than getting them to sign up to support a disc format.” he concluded.
DVD Town brings up a good point regarding Star Wars, though. We may not see the epic intergalactic love story on a HD format. That would suck. Big time.
The problem with flash cards is that no one will pay a premium for a file that has no packaging. Would you pay $20 for an ISO file (or whatever) of Star Wars in HD? I would rather pay $50 and have the file on a Darth Vader shaped thumbdrive than pay to put a file only on a drive of my choice.
This THX guy fails to see that many people (especially Star Wars fans) like to have something to hold in their hands and show off to their other geek friends - it is what we live for. Sure it takes up space and is not practicle - but it is shiny and purdy and I WANT I WANT I WANT!
Nerds are a niche market…SD cards and flash drives will take over. It just makes sense everything else is getting smaller why wouldnt movies do the same.
I doubt that.
I think most collectors want persistent media.
Maybe movies will only be available on flash drives for people to watch once but there needs to be a medium to store it for a long time for collectors.
What an idiot.
We will see it in HD. First, althought eh Dr. is not an idiot, i doubt he has sway over GL and his ideas to make money on the franchise. Secondly he only says that the optical format is dead.
I agree.
While I think he’s completely wrong (people love their tangibles), one idea of his did intrigue me. Notice he said “walk into a store and have someone copy me a movie to a USB device” instead of downloading the movie from the internet. Maybe in areas where broadband isn’t available, there could be a market for these kind of shops. I could also see Apple opening up iTunes kiosks in airports, so people could download a movie or an album before getting on a flight; or on a college campus where there isn’t enough bandwidth for everyone; or maybe in hotels, so people could download a movie or an ebook for on the beach. Hell, even if you did have access to broadband, would you be willing to pay a 5-10% markup to get instant access to a movie, instead of clogging up your bandwidth for hours at a time?