There’s a lengthy article over here written by a well-meaning but perhaps slightly self-deluding Sony apologist, detailing nine reasons why Blu-ray will succeed. It’s worth checking out, but it’s pretty clearly the view from one side. So take a look and then come back and see if you agree with our tempering of that laudable but unwarranted optimism.
Ready? Then let’s begin the deconstruction. Let’s take it step by step.
[Note: just so we're clear, I am disagreeing with the points suggested in bold.]
1. Digital downloads will not eliminate the need for discs anytime soon.
“Soon” is a relative term, and it’s not a question of if but when. That lends a certain doomed air to the whole Blu-ray setup; it’s like buying a ticket for a ship that everyone knows is sinking, but no one knows how fast. Sure, a lot of people have crappy connections now and streaming video isn’t as high quality by a good measure, but that gap is constantly narrowing and it’s not all going to be streaming anyway. A high-def movie with perfectly good compression takes up perhaps 10GB. That means you can fit 50 on a $100 hard drive. That sort of proposition is finding more and more willing participants.
2. Having one clear standard is a big advantage.
Kind of true. But the benefit of a versatile platform (a PC or set-top box) is that the “standard” isn’t: it can change without affecting end users. Re-encode your library to be smaller, or download a new version with better image quality. Push a firmware upgrade with better noise reduction. Download a new player that offers more and better features. We’re no longer setting hardware standards like before; we had standards for videotapes, and it would have been nice to have them for things like memory cards, but now we’re beyond the physical restrictions that were the main reason a “clear standard” was advantageous.
3. Blu-ray isn’t going to be replaced by another disc format anytime soon.
No, it’s not going to be replaced by another disc format, but it’s already being replaced by another storage format. Hard drives are cheaper per gig, more convenient, and already in half the devices we own. The optical drive is on its way out; a new disc format would be like a new extra-long-play VHS tape in 2000.
4. Prices for large-screen HDTVs will continue to drop.
5. Prices for Blu-ray players will continue to drop.
6. Prices for Blu-ray discs will drop to near DVD price levels.
Hope you don’t mind me combining these things, because they essentially amount to “The price of having a Blu-ray setup will continue to drop.” This is true, but it’s not just Blu-ray stuff that’s getting cheaper. As the price of storage and broadband connections drops as well, you’ll find that the increased appetite for Blu-ray devices will be matched by the increased presence of alternatives like set-top boxes and HTPCs. Imagine having an Eee Keyboard reading movies off an easily-set-up home media server and beaming it over wireless HDMI to your big screen. That’s what people see themselves doing in two or three years — they don’t want to do the same crap they’ve been doing since the 80s.
7. Sony will sell lots of PlayStation 3 game consoles.
Wow, let me get some of that crack!
8. Sony can’t afford to have Blu-ray fail.
If all it took to succeed was the desire to do so, Napoleon would have conquered the world. He threw everything he had at it, as Sony will, but who’s to say when Sony will meet its Wellington?
9. Sony and its partners will figure out a way to have Blu-ray resonate with the public.
This is a bit of a leap of faith, and unfortunately I think it’s the same leap of faith people made with the PS3. They’ve tried and failed to make it “resonate”; it’s just not catching. DVD was clearly better than VHS, so it was eventually adopted. Blu-ray is clearly better than DVD, but situation is different because DVD had no agile, popular competitor like iTunes and its brethren. Not only is it too late to make Blu-ray or the PS3 resonate with the public, but the public is already resonating with the seductive vibrations of all-digital media.
Don’t get me wrong, I like physical media. I like the boxes, I like the extra stuff, I like the objects. But high-definition video is made for a digital life cycle. It belongs on a hard drive, or in the cloud. I feel differently about e-books, for example; many books and magazines belong on the printed page, although that too is changing. But the optical disc establishment is being torn down and it’s about time. Blu-ray is the last stand and is making a good thing of it, but let’s not be unrealistic in our praise or expectations; why polish the knobs on the Titanic? Why not look towards something new?
You mean David Carnoy at Cnet? You could at least give the link to the article rather than copying and pasting.
Here’s the truth about blu-ray. its overpriced. people that “only” understand physical media, as most people are implying, are the people still using DVD’s. and truth is, with a $30 upconverting DVD, or an HDTV with 1080p upconverting, they can get an image thats 90% of the quality of what a blu-ray disc and player produces. 0 and if you sit just 1 foot farther back, the differences are nearly indecipherable. another thing people know about blu-ray players is that they’re ridiculously slow, which is quite frustrating. and people looking to invest in something knew are going to be looking at both.
o and Sony is lagging behind tremendously in console sales. they were outsold by xbox 360 2 to 1 over the holidays, which is really bad news, considering sony looses nearly $100 on every console.
do yourself a favor, buy a 360 with one of the new motherboards, get a netflix subscription and don’t look back.
You’re completely right! The difference in quality is minimal.
And: I’m already DOING it. I do not even own a Blu-Ray player and the only DVD drives are in my PCs.
BUT: it takes a lot of technical knowledge to run a server which is hosting terabytes of movies for my house and running a PC in every room connected to the HDTV screen. The “normal user” at the moment is not able to do it.
But as technology progresses this will definitively be the future…
still noticeable
http://thecashcratescam.blogspot.com
“it takes a lot of technical knowledge to run a server which is hosting…”
No, it’s not. iTunes (and Apple TV) does it out of the box, just switch on the sharing stuff. If that isn’t an option (and I’m in no way saying that iTunes is the be all and end all of video playing) you could always have one central machine with lots of storage, and play the videos on other devices over the network, using pretty standard network shares.
I think it depends on how you use Blu-Ray. I have a 110″ front projector so I see a big difference in the image quality of a DVD and Blu-Ray.
Can you imagine if your harddrive crashes and you have to re-download 100’s of gigs of HD movies.
And I agree with the post above the day when just anyone can hook up a network viewing system all around their house for movies is what I think will be the longest transition point of this idea of no physical media.
I am a niche home theater lover so the little things matter to me that dont to others
The difference between bluray and DVD is not nearly as noticeable to the average person as the difference between VHS and DVD was, even on a 52″ screen (few people will buy projectors).
Actually the really noticable difference for me is the sound, however perhaps 2% of the public has equipment capable of rendering the uncompressed TrueHD tracks on a bluray disc (the traditional DVD audio tracks are also included, which is what almost all Bluray owners actually experience). If you have an A/V receiver with 1.3a HDMI you can hear the uncompressed audio: it is startlingly better than DVD.
No reason in principle this can’t be included in streamed/downloaded movies, but in general the web versions suck compared to blu-ray so far.
Gotta disagree…
1) The difference in quality is not minimal at all – I was initially quite skeptical myself about how much better it would be until I watched some BR movies on a big HDTV and was very pleasantly surprised.
2) Getting a Netflix subscription or running your own media server might sound like a piece of cake to techy readers on here but to most of the population it sounds like a pain in the ass compared to just going to the shop and buying a movie.
3) I have lost so much data in the past when hard drives have failed – I just don’t trust them to hold all my data. Sure, you can scratch a Blu-ray disc, but when you scratch it it doesn’t also wipe out your entire film collection, plus music, photos and anything else on your hard drive.
4) By the time internet connections get to the kind of universal level where everyone in the world can download all their films on demand, Blu-ray will have been around for years.
So no, I really don’t think it will fail. It might not be catching on especially quickly but it’s not going to be usurped by digital downloads either. I think the two will just exist happily side by side.
I think you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head. 10GB of hard drive space is sure cheaper than a Blu-Ray disc, but until someone comes up with a RAIDed PVR/downloader with multiple TB capacity at a consumer price point, the experience just doesn’t match Blu-Ray (which also has consumer experience inertia on its side).
I work with streaming feature films, and #4 is totally correct. If you want something approaching DVD quality at 640×480, even with the latest h.264 encoders and a lot of expertise with dialing in the settings you need around 768kbps of bandwidth, and even then the CPU requirements are pretty beefy (particularly when running through Flash in a browser).
Granted that is not a tremendous amount of bandwidth, but here in the valley we’re spoiled, and bandwidth isn’t being built out fast enough in the US for this to catch up to Blu-Ray for anything close to a majority of middle class households for at least a decade.
All that said, on-demand is definitely the future. There will always be some demand for owning movies, but when the bandwidth, consumer devices and business models DO catch up, far more money will be made from on-demand. Just look at the user experience NetFlix has created around snail mail and the future is clear.
Up converting is not in the same caliber as a true HD movie. I upconvert some of my old movies, I have an actual HD-DVD player with HD-DVD’s (cheap as dirt now!) and a Bluray. The quality is vastly different and can be seen even by someone without a keen eye (me). Up converting is just no where close to being on par in quality. As per quality that people care about? It’s just fine, I wouldn’t re-buy most of my movies for the new versions.
I also as someone stated host my movies on a 3TB server that streams throughout the house to every room of the house via Xbox 360’s/Xbox1s modded and PCs. Physical mediums are uninteresting to me anymore.
Soon people will do as WB did with Dark Knight, purchase the movie, get the free digital download from them as well DRM free.
All media should be watchable instantly from any location without effort. That is what digital media does for you.
This post seems fail to realize that Blu-Ray can co-exist with digital lifestyle. Does anybody ever heard digital copy? Why you have to occupied yourself downloading for hours, if you can buy physical format like Blu-Ray along with digital copy included
Internet speeds are not fast enough yet and hard drive technology is not full proof. Hard drive do fail and when they do, all of your data gone just in the blink of an eye. You would have to re-download, if you where allowed re-download all of you old library over again. Another thing is that people want to buy something physical, not something like a software download. It doesn’t hold the same value.
Silly me. Didn’t catch the link at the beginning. Sorry dewd.
Heh heh. I’m devious that way.
I would like to see an article outlining 9 reasons why blu-ray WILL fail.
Here’s one:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/20/nine-questionable-reasons-why-blu-ray-will-succeed/
Devin gets the LAWLtrophy for today.
Sorry, but refutation is not proof. You didn’t say why BR will fail, you countered arguments someone said about why it will. This isn’t the same thing, regardless of how highly you think of yourself.
There was a pretty good analysis of the situation for Blu-ray on ZDNET (”Blue-ray is dead”):
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365
Right now I am converting my last few audio cassettes over to mp3. My few remaining VHS cassettes will be handled by mail order. Then I’ll be eliminating CDs and DVDs, converting all the ones I want to keep to a digital format.
Why would I want to introduce another physical format like blu-ray? I’m going 100% digital and not looking back!
I’m repairing a 4 track Teac to use with a dbx 155 Type I noise reduction unit to make surround audio properly for when Flash REALLY gets some sick Moxie. I have hundreds of cassettes and found that all the money I grumbled about spending on Maxell UDXL II was the best I ever spent with over 25 years gone by.
Ditto that on the Maxell (and other chrome) tapes. I started playing some tapes I made some 15+ years ago again in the car and they all still sound excellent.
I have to say that capturing a set of songs in a certain order (i.e. audio mixed tapes) at a certain time will make for a great listening experience every time you pop that tape in the deck in years to come. Can’t really be paralleled with playlists. Yes, I’m going digital too – just had to point that out.
Nice, I’m digging the tape love.
Nonsense. You can put the songs in any order you want in a playlist, just as we were able to years ago with tapes. You’re letting nostalgia get the better of you.
I realize I’m not a normal consumer, and aware of “tech to come” more than most…but after hearing about SDXC (that it goes up to 2 TB) I’ve become much more interested in that than blu-ray.
you have n idea what you are talking about you cheap hack so why not run and along and play jenga with that ass hat Arrington?
prat!
And the nonsensical post of the year award goes to, Emma!
sorry i forgot to point out why you’re a d*ck
10GB per HD movie, yada yada: shame about throttling, bandwidth caps, 99% of the world population not giving a f*ck about downloads.
Hard Drives versus optical yada yada: HD’s fail all the time, when was the last time a DVD failed. But of course the general public have backup solutions, TB’s of data storage just hanging around that they know how to use.
Re-encode, re-download. Now let me see which f*cking dload media store doesn’t let you do that?
your a dick, how the fuck you got hired to write about tech is anybody’s guess.
I don’t know if you wanna date her, son, she might be into taking your McNuggets for a tattoo.
my gramma’s got runnings an core7 with two 1TB externals for raid storage.
dvd’s fail when you scratch em. hard drives fail when you drop em lol. streaming never fails… it just pixelizes like crazy
can i ask anyone ,can u sell the contents when u downloads?? i know that i can sell back all my dvd or bluray movies at a reduced price.. cmon this is the biggest advantages of owning something… how can u say physical media disc is dead….
The funniest highlights of this post IMO were:
“yada yada” – LOL
“when was the last time a DVD failed” – LOL
“yada yada” – LOL
I’m no Sony apologist but your argument is shot through with holes. Argument 1 applies to virtually any and all products – ppl still buy an ipod/mobile this year knowing a new one will come next year. Argument 2 is silly and counterintuitive – so more different standards is better for the consumer than a unified format – yeah in what lifetime. The storage vs disc argument is interesting but jo bloggs consumer is still uncertain about having all those apples in one basket (even if its a very big basket), also for those special movies ppl still favour something tangible over “0’s” and “1’s” on a hard disc. The pricing argument is a very strong one and your attempt to underplay it does little to strengthen your case – bottom line how many ppl would pay $10 for something and save themselves the 1hr of downloading which I note can be taken anywhere and played anywhere. Argument 7 is just silly, current sales performance is not the result of lack of brand knowledge or lack of content but simply the price has not hit that consumer sweet spot – when it does it will sell a great deal more. 8 & 9 are just good commercial sense – however I do agree with you that it is a leap of faith.
Not everyone in the world is as tech savvy as you. There are still people on dial-up. You may have moved past the physical product in video, but I think this has a lot of legs left.
Yes, there are still people on dial-up. There are also people who have 10 and 100MB pipes running into their houses (Admittedly, not in the Americas, but some places in Sweden, Germany, Finland and Japan (for example)). That kind of bandwidth is easily enough to stream a couple of 1080p h264 streams in realtime. The median bandwidth speed for developed countries is somewhere around 5Mb (IIRC), and technology is improving all the time to make this less of a factor. In the face of ever improving technology, throttling and caps are a temporary solution, employed by greedy companies who want to oversaturate their lines and justify not providing the service they have been contracted for. And with WiMax coming, with it’s federal coverage and openness mandates, soon fears over dial-up and the like will be things of the past.
Sorry dude, as soon as you mentioned greedy companies your credibility went downhill fast. Companies exist to create profit. Profit creates growth. Growth creates jobs. Jobs create income. Income creates a market, a market creates companies and innovation. Companies create profit, and so on. Learn something about life before you simply repeat someone’s incorrect propaganda.
Anyways, back to your real argument. There is much more to streaming video then just big pipes at the receiving end. The provider needs to be set up with a huge amount of bandwidth, their data center and storage system needs to be built up to support huge amounts of data from 10GB files. And then the ISPs need to be able to pipe that around the country to provide you with your video. If everyone tunes into Dark Knight on its launch date, the demands of the infrastructure are huge. Then, once you get it to the house, how do you get it to the TV? Most homes don’t have ethernet to the TV. Wireless you say? Have you ever tried streaming HD over a G connection? It doesn’t always work. Think everyone will just upgrade to N? How much do you think people are going to spend to build our their own infrastructure? BDs are easy. Put the disk in and it plays.
You can’t just build infrastructure overnight. It involves a lot of people, a lot of hardware, and a lot of bandwidth. The infrastructure for printing BDs is already there. The same printing facility that printed DVDs makes a few changes to their process ($1 million worth last I heard) and they are ready to print huge numbers of BDs. That is easy and requires no big changes in infrastructure. Prices for BD are bound to come down as more companies come on to create them, and this will expand faster than the capacity of the internet to provide homes with the kind of data they need.
There are a lot of reasons why BD may not work. There are also a lot of reasons why it may. If you armchair quarterbacks think you know the answers, Sony would have already hired you. Unless you don’t like to work for greedy companies…
Good answer Eric. This is the most intelligent answer on this thread. Some people just don’t understand what it takes to get everything digitally served.
@Eric – great post… but you will be surprised on how far a digital download infrastructure has developed to take on this task :)
@Wiiliam – We understand quite well and will make it all look too easy.
That point is moot anyway because most of those countries don’t really sell that many PS3’s. The US is the biggest market for them, and the US is where broadband has not yet become standard.
Hmmm, I don’t think BR has much to fear from digital downloads and vice versa. There is definitely room for both of these formats in the world. A lot of people who support downloads seem to forget that they live in parts of the world where things like this are possible.
In countries like South Africa even if you can afford unlimited broadband the packages are still capped at between 5 and 10 gigs. There are a lot of countries like this in the world where there just isn’t enough international bandwidth for downloads of that size. In the states definately. Even in Europe there are bandwidth issues, unlimited isn’t unlimited. A shed load of peering agreements need to be set up so that Virgin and Tiscali dont start crying because everybody is downloading in HD and they have to cough up the dough. All this and the legal issues surrounding copyright have not even been dealt with yet. More DRM? Just as we are getting rid of it? Maybe they will sort out download tax like they are doing in the Isle of Man?
All of this will take time especially in the developing world where the bandwidth is not going to be available for a while. People in these places still watch movies and play games and will do it on Blueray.
The format will easily last as long as DVD has. Some countries may not use it as much but the other not so privileged countries will make up those numbers.
:)
You’re certainly right, and that’s a viewpoint I didn’t include. But the way I’d think about it is that they are simply behind on the adoption curve for new technology – not their fault, just the way it is. So while it may take longer to reach there, it’s still part of the natural cycle and shouldn’t be considered a “win” by Sony.
Why would Blu-Ray succeed? Because its a “finished” format with support.
Digital Distribution will be dominate as soon as regulators and IP owners pull their head out of their backsides and make it legal/easy to manage digital content. I refuse to be locked into one of the many different digital stores (iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, etc). I refuse to use questionable software to rip and encode things that I need to spend a few hours on forums figuring out. A Blu-Ray disk is to me a safer bet. What happens when Apple decides to charge everyone 30% in 2 years to rebuy their existing library of video content?
So, until then, Blu-Ray works. It not very exciting, but it works. Digital is still a myriad bunch of people arguing about how to do it and it’s hardly comforting. I do not have much faith in this segment of the industry, especially not when Big Content is still trying to push Luddite methods like Selectable Output Control.
Okay, while “emma” is being a dick, I do agree with a couple of his/her points.
The fact is, a 10GB HD movie is going to look like shit. It’s going to be hideously overcompressed and you’ll have artifacting all over the place. There’s a reason that Blu-Ray discs are 50GB, and you don’t see more than about 3 hours of content on them. So if you’re really talking equivalent quality, it’s more like 30GB for your average 2 to 2.5 hour movie. That’s a lot of data.
Furthermore, bandwidth has been creeping forward VERY slowly in the US. If you have Verizon FIOS, good for you. Most areas have DSL or cable, and max out at 6-8Mbps if you’re lucky. Even when the lines to your home increase, that doesn’t mean your provider has provisioned enough bandwidth upsteam to handle you and a bunch of other people downloading movies.
It’s just a whole lot of bandwidth, and in a country that has such a large and spread out population as the US, it’s not going to happen quickly.
Oh, and don’t forget DRM. For digital downloads to work, the movie industry will insist on DRM’ing the heck out of things – which of course hurts interoperability. Your iTunes purchases aren’t going to stream to your Windows HTPC, and your WMV’s or XViDs aren’t going to your AppleTV. It’s a balkanized mess that makes HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray look trivial by comparison.
So, if we take digital downloads out of the picture for the foreseeable future, where does that leave us? Right, with Blu-Ray. You can feel free to wait it out – but you’ll be waiting a LONG time, and in the meantime you’ll be missing all of that pretty content on that nice big TV you just bought (and if you didn’t, why do you care in the first place?). In the meantime I’ll enjoy Blu-Ray, and DAMN, is it pretty…
I disagree on the 30GB part – Blu-ray uses a relatively (relatively I say) lax form of compression, compared to say x264, which is what you see scene releases in. A 1080p x264 file for a 2-hour movie will run you 10 gigs or so, and it really, really doesn’t look like shit. In fact, in the source comparisons it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference.
Except that x264 is just a public version of the h.264 encoding scheme used in most Blu-rays.
From Wikipedia:
x264 is a free software library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
But, I do agree that 720p rips at 10GB for a movie look pretty good. But at 1080p a 10GB rip is pushing it for good quality when the user is sitting at the right distance. You can’t judge video on screen size alone. It is a function of screen size and distance from the display. On your 40″ TV at 10GB rip might look fine at 12 feet. But on my 60″ I can clearly see problems with the video at 12 feet.
Fair enough. I’d forgotten that the BR standard included H.264.
But just as compression tech outstripped DVDs when they were using old MPEG-2 tech, I think that the public x264 codec along with decent image processing in a good player can make a big difference.
Everyone is forgetting WMV here, which we get 8GB with a 1hr 45min VC-1 encoded 1080p film.
The 50GB Blu-ray discs are not all filled with 50GB worth of content. Some movies are 30GB and some are 40GB and this is because they are using MPEG2 for compression.
WMV VC-1 is also the standard codec included in Blu-ray…
Someone is about to steal home base :)
Most Blu-ray disc today are encoded in VC1 format which is just some lawyer’s way of saying X.264.
“she” doesn’t care about offending your sensibilities, strap on a pair after you get out of your PJ’s and finish your Desperate Housewives DVD box Set
Mom! Get off my site! I hate it when you drink.
so full of win =]
I like the point that “Digital downloads will not eliminate the need for discs anytime soon”. That’s true. I remember when it was thought that the Internet and all the ebooks, ezines, emails, etc will eliminate traditional books, traditional newsletters and traditional mails; but as we all know now, it never happened, :)
As a filmmaker its disappointing that people can’t collect my work like people collect musician’s records. Sure there’s pricey 35mm prints, but there’s never been a universally recognized collectible version of a film, for the general public. If Blu-Ray is that (despite the terrible name), I’ll embrace it.
Better fire up iMovie or something else that has a more aurally-pleasing title then.
Being a PS3-owner I’ve heard this sort of nonsence quite a bit and you know what? You’re right: physical media will be a thing of the past someday. The day that i can legally download movies w 1080 p and uncompressed 7.1 i’ll do it in a heartbeat.
But i won’t hold my breath. Instead i’ll enjoy todays most full-blown video standard.
the reality is very simple… bluray will replace standard dvds, and over the next decade or so the world will move to all digial.
bluray will probably be the last dvd standard, but it will ’succeed’… look at any technology… they stick around much longer than you think and the transition to the ‘new’ thing takes 5-10 years or more. for example… i have a blackberry for wireless voice and email, but still have a POTs line… dvds will be around longer than you think.
#2 is a joke. The standard is far from clear. Some players refuse to play BD-Live discs AT ALL if an *optional* memory card is missing. Try explaining that to Joe Six-pack. Blu-ray is just stupid.
#9 Yes Blu-ray is an incremental improvement over DVD. DVD was *far* superior to VHS, a whole new ballgame. Chapter skipping, digital, surround sound, etc.
True. DVD was a whole new thing. Blu-ray could have more to it than it does, but I think it’s more important (IMHO) that there is a legitimate competitor which is guaranteed to be the ultimate winner.
jimslade is right on. blu ray will succeed bc it’s not slowing down. the only people i know who complain about blu ray are the same tech people (and bloggers) who encoded all their content in ogg vorbis thinking it would kill mp3. the general public will buy whatever is available — and the availability of blu ray far and above surpasses digital distribution over the net, or ‘movies on a drive.’
talk all you want about netflix streaming and downloading movies on your 360 or ps3. the facts are the vast majority of the population is older, relies on physical shopping, doesnt want to add re-occurring monthly bills to their life, and was brought up using physical media. its the next generation that will heavily bite into everything non-blu ray, and they just dont have the spending power to support big media companies revenue needs. new distribution methods will only be adopted by common population when the oldest generation and a half dies.
Totally agree! More often than ever I have the impression that Silicon Valley lives in its self-inflicted “Cloud”, i.e. not the Cloud everybody envisions but a cloud of sheer exaggeration.
Some facts for you guys:
1. Yes, there are people out there actually favoring a Playstation 3 over a PC which you have to configure. And reconfigure, and reconfigure, and re… I mean, the PS 3 is a complete package unmatched by any other device on the planet: You can play awesome games, you can watc movies in an awesome quality. And if you bother, you can even attach all your external hard drives and listen to music, watch pictures and movies. And you can connect to the net and your network. It’s great, it’s installed within five minutes, and costs you 300 bucks.
2. Yes, there are people out there who don’t want to wait for their downloads, even if they have a 20 Mbit connection. They just want to insert a disc and have fun. Instantaneously.
3. Yes, there are people out there who actually care about privacy. Now tell me anything more secure than going to your nearest movie/games/music dealer and buying a disc. With cash.
4. Yes, there are people out there without an iPhone 3G. Even without an iPhone. Really.
If we stretch the definition of Blu-ray to real-time streaming to literally any client from the cloud, big or small, it has legs.
At CES we demonstrated streaming Blu-ray to a legacy phone with full menuing capability and BD special features.
This video shows Hancock BD playing in the cloud. Go to minute 1:45 in the video to see the demo: http://budurl.com/blurayhancock
and you would be….. what’s the word……. lying. You did not stream 47mbps data streams over the internet to a phone. now run along and play with your hair!
It won’t fail, it will just be replaced by newer technology. In 5 years when everyone’s is streaming are you going to scream “See, I told you so!”
As a person that just bought a new Bluray player, I plan to enjoy this “doomed” technology for a couple years.
I can’t get over all this hard drive love. I have had hard drive failures on my last two computers. I am also interested in which is “greener” ?
blu ray is made of poly and has to be trucked around but everybody likes to refer to the “cloud” like its some airy euphoric place when in reality its huge data centers throwing off tremendous heat and sucking electricity from the grid.
You’re using electricity to type your hipster environmental diatribe right now (on a Mac, I’m sure).
actually he’s using human generated kinetic energy to type.
I’m not paying more than necessary for anything these days. I went to the mall here and bought simple Adidas sweatpants for $29.99 at Mavcys and a DVD system for $29.99 at Sears. Amazing they cost the same I was shocked.
Not sure what is the value of Blueray. Unless it cost like a DVD there is no need to pay a penny more. Sony used to be a creative company, the best of the best, now they are managed by penny crunchers and no longer is a leader in any market. They were even able to loose to Micorsoft in the gaming game and seem like Wii is taking over both. Blueray is a great example of trying to get money out of nothing…. Not to mention that the xxx thing still get plenty of scratches, which was my only problem with DVDs.
You paid $29.99 for sweatpants?!!
The three fat elephants in the room Devon (convenienty) ignores are:
1. DRM
2. Proprietary formats
3. Flaky industry licensing agreements.
Until these three problems are eliminated, digital video will never become anything like the constantly morphing, infinitely flexible digital wonderland he described. Right now its more like annoyingly inflexible, not very cheap, low quality crap wrapped in a DRM straightjacket and stuck on a proprietary box made by a company you hope will still be around in a year.
The intrusive DRM, the absurd 24 hour rental time limits, the proprietary formats that keep your media stuck on a single manufacturer’s box, and the industries habit of giving and taking away titles on whims have made digital delivery anything but the utopia the cloud fanboys have claimed it will be. The gulf between the IDEA of digital delivery and the REALITY is huge.
Digital delivery will succeed when the studios DECIDE it will succeed and not a second before then. They hold all the strings. And right now they are pretty much doing everything in their power to ensure the download experience is underwhelming.
Just a quick scan through the postings here and I come to this charm. Man do I agree with you.
As much as a tech guy I like to be, I do not fully put my faith in digital storage. I am constantly worried about backing up to make sure I don’t lose content, etc. As far as renting, DD is nice. As far as owning, no. Not until the above 3 items are dealt with. I rented a movie this past weekend and downloaded it to my HDD. Well, once the movie completed downloading it corrupted my HDD. I lost the movie as well as the many other tv shows I have purchased. I called the manufacturer and was able to get a code to re-download my rental and tv shows but that is it. I can no longer download my tv shows again if my HDD or system as a whole should crash. I can’t even transfer them to an external storage device because they are proprietary to the system. This is simply why I choose to own my media on disc. Not to mention the picture and audio quality I receive from Blu-Ray over an upscaled DVD or “HD” download.
Until I can get the freedom I get with hard copies and the audio and picture quality to match. I will then go to DD for owning media. Until then, it is only rental and streaming.
Best post on this talk page. You win.
I think Joshua Ochs got it right earlier in the comments when he called digital downloads “a balkanized mess that makes HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray look trivial by comparison.”
Apple, Microsoft, and Vudu all love their highly controlled little walled gardens. They certainly are not giving us the holy grail of interperability any time soon. Studios aren’t going to let the devaluation that’s happened to music happen to video. So when they do allow us to buy digitally they don’t offer much of a discount on digital purchases (15 bucks for “near DVD quality” DRM’d crap on iTunes and Amazon?). And the cable companies don’t want to become the managers of dumb pipes and lose all the content money so they give us bandwidth caps to discourage us from using other people’s services too much and to stay in their ecosystem.
There are hundreds of different factions all jockeying for power and pretty much making sure that the digital download dream doesn’t happen the way the fanboys claim its going to happen.
And meanwhile Blu-ray is an established format which all studios and CE companies have agreed upon and which is getting more and more affordable every day. It may be unfashionable to admit this in high tech geek circles but my money is on stodgy old blu-ray. Geeks in their lust for all that is shiny and new forget an that most people people like simplicity and reliability.
it’s true that BluRay will be the last physical media system, sure. but it will be 10 years at least before it is 100% replaced by internet/CATV media delivery systems. so in the meantime it will become the standard once prices really do drop to SD DVD levels. so don’t be so dismissive.
Sony on the other hand is fading, and BluRay may prove its swan song. smart new products that can do everything most consumers want are now being cranked out cheaply by many firms. while other companies like Apple in particular have taken the lead in cutting edge products. big and bloated Sony is caught inbetween. add to that a strong yen and there are years of red ink ahead for Sony. expect a major overhaul in 2010.
Im sorry, but I really cant in the forseeable future see digital downloads take over physical product. it literally comes down to simple human behavior – what would people rather do: fiddle with computer software/hardware, expensive internet lines that will supply enough bandwidth for download, wonky interfaces, DRM, the inability to quickly reach a scene or scroll back or forward and the lack of extra features/multiple audio tracks OR walking into your local Big Box, buying 1 disc and putting it in one player?
I love downloads as much as the next guy, but there is no doubt in my mind that they won’t take over, if at all, in the next 20 years.
Also, you do realize, that if things go how you say, with the way technology progresses, that we will all have, in 5-10, HD projectors spanning 120-inch screens and 10.1 surround systems.
I’d love to see a digital download that would give me the most out of that setup. What would you guestimate – 40-50 gigs at minimum for something that would stand up to that?
Sorry, but I agree with emma – ISPs wont tolerate that amount of bandwidth usage, plus, even at 10-20meg speeds, I still don’t want to wait 6-8 hours for a movie. I’d rather go pick it up for $15.
is blu-ray the last physical format? probably. i think it’s inevitable digital kills it. soon? no way. it’s a long way off. as others have said – bandwidth. bandwidth. bandwidth.
i just went through the whole new-hdtv-now-what ordeal. i didn’t want to admit blu-ray was the way to go. i was in the middle of converting my dvds to digital and it would be no different for hd…oh how wrong i was.
for one, here in canada, i have absolutely no options for hd download except torrents. no itunes, no netflix, no nothing. so yeah, sign up to itunes US…hd tv shows only. can’t even get movies and if i were able to, 720p can’t compete with 1080p on a screen larger than 40″.
not to mention bandwidth. just i “upgraded” to deal with the new load of hd content and it still sit with a 100gig (download and upload) cap. over that and i start paying out my nose. straight download that’s 10 medium quality hd movies. not happening.
as others have said. +DRM, +extras. ++.
is blu ray gonna die? sure. one day…but it’s going to be a while.
I actually agree that blu-ray is dead already. Have you seen some of the new set tops these days with build in Internet and hard drives? There alone kills blu-ray. I would prefer to invest in a NAS drive that could store say, 4 TB of info and data before buying and investing in a medium that will at some point in the future, so longer be with us.
As the article started…its not about if, but ‘when’ and when is too soon for me.
FYI – I just signed up for Fios…man is it fast.
Sorry, but digital downloads will not compete with Blu-ray in the foreseeable future. They will exist, and some technophiles will jump on the download train, but the amount of bandwidth required to deliver HD quality downloads to the mass market is just not present (yet) and won’t likely be present for another generation of media.
While it’s inevitably the future of media, most folks just don’t “get it”. Blu-ray is just much easier for them to understand.
Exactly.
Screw you download haters. I stream HD movies from my connection as it is already – the only limiting factor with my connection is bandwidth the ISPs make available. If they change this, it would be much better. But I still prefer spending less and avoiding a trip down to the local store just to come back, watch it, then go back again.
I’ll just stream the damn thing right here and now.
Calm down and stream it then!
And whats stopping you from streaming?
I never said that digital downloads will die, just that they won’t kill physical media either.
To think either format will kill the other is just being blindly biased towards one side.
So to quote you: “Screw you physical media haters!”
Downloads will eventually overtake physical medium, but it may take awhile due to the inconsistent nature of broadband and its coverage areas, and it still isn’t cheap.
If BR does get to the price level of DVD’s or close, it’ll stay around quite awhile still.
Nonsense. Normal people will not own a Eee Pc, nor will they want to send movies from it to their tv.
“Nonsense! Science has reached it’s peak of evolution! Nobody will ever need a cart pulled by some ‘motor’! That’s why we have horses!”
Did you happen to be around in the 1800’s as well?
Your analogy is weak, as is your spelling. “…reached it’s peak of …” Reached “it is” peak? Good luck with that.
Yeah, because spelling is totally relevant to the analogy. It also happens to be a strong analogy, it represents the non-progressiveness attitude some of our kind can posses.
When it comes to progression, your kind are always proven wrong at some stage.
That analogy dosen’t work when you start comparing physical objects to virtual objects.
Such as a Disk to a Download.
Does it really make sense to stream movies all over the world? I mean, theres a whole lot of bandwidth needed (that really isn’t needed otherwise) – thats a big waste. How many customers will really catch on? And I’m talking on a global scale – developing/developed/overdeveloped or whatever! Is the demand so high?
Secondly, I feel that when it comes to movies, I would buy a DVD essentially to maintain a “library” of movies – that I can then watch over and over again. But I’d most probably watch a movie once, say, in a year. There is some permanency in seeing your DVD stacked in one corner – as opposed to an online list of movies to stream. They could remove it tomorrow, theres no guarantee that an old 1958 classic that I would like to watch with my friends tomorrow would be available on that site to stream. I’d rather buy the DVD. Or Blu-ray.
What if that streaming company goes bankrupt tomorrow? And even if those big movie companies went bankrupt, I’d still have my 1958 classic on Blu-ray. You can’t beat that!
I still buy books even though I can read them for free from the library. Why?
Digital downloads may replace watching movies on TV on pay-per-view, but this generation at least will still want to own stuff they like on a physical medium because people like “owning” stuff (in the “I can put it on the shelf, I can watch it any time I like, I can resell it” kind of way).
The next generation, raised on i-tunes? Maybe not.
I agree with those who said that B-R may be the last physical medium, but it’s not dead yet.
The idea that “hi-def belongs in the cloud” is just bizarre. If so…where is it?
Take a look at any of the IRC channels — plenty of e-book channels. Tons ‘o mp3 channels. But where, oh, where are the hi-def video channels?
Nowhere. Because, as others have pointed out, dinky crappy little YouTube is already causing a massive bandwidth crisis. Now instead of crummy tiny little 100 meg YouTube videos and tiny little 700 meg divx bittorrent avis, you’re going to clog the antiquated junky third-world-grade American “broadband” system with 30 gig files?
Please.
Look, out here in the real world, half of America still gets online via dialup. I’m posting this via DIALUP. America is so far beyond the rest of the world in broadband, it’s ridiculous…and it’s too late. We’re never going to catch up, as Robert X. Cringley (Mark Stephens) pointed out:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070803_002641.html
In _this_ environment, you’re going to get people downloading multiple 40 GB files per day…???!??!???
Seriously. WTF are you thinking, dude?
Hmmm… I find the arguments in the original BR article and this retort article both somewhat speculative.
As much as I like the convenience of streaming/downloading content… and while I’m sure I’ll do it more as bandwidth increases, storage capacity grows, download/steam times decrease and selection increases… but, there is still something to be said to owning physical media.
While there is much talk of building infrastructure (or lack there of), the real thing online content can’t do is move media from one spot to another (home –> car or cottage etc) with ease. For this, a physical medium is often the best option – especially with online content having DRM “over protection”. It’s still easier to grab a few DVDs when heading to your cottage or a friend’s house then taking a server you have in your closet.
Another example: This year I put an iTunes gift card in my sister’s stocking for Christmas. And while I know she appreciated it, a gift card is not the same as the feeling one gets when you are given a gift by an artist or filmmaker that is specifically bought for you… it’s like giving a good book – it means more than a generic gift card.
Surely Downloads will replace physical media at some point, but in the near future, my guess is that downloaded content will replace real world video rental stores before it replaces physical media that a consumer wants to own.
There is room for both technologies.
Once again, look to journalists for their view of an industry they have ZERO knowledge of.
If you guys are so smart, why don’t you make a competitor to bluray instead of talking smack.
Probably too late for this comment to be much good for anyone, but I just wanted to share something.
I have at home a settop box, connected to Internet through 24mbit DSL. It has a digital tuner that I can use to watch live TV (and with a USB HD or stick it has also timeshifting), but what’s better is that it also has an EPG and 5 TB (yes TB) of space which is located in some data warehouse somewhere where all the recordings are made. So in case you have a blackout you won’t miss your favorite show. Every FTA channel is available even if it’s not ordinarily available at your location and you can record as many channels at the same time as you like.
During the last olympics I recorded maybe a few hundred hours worth of HD TV to watch at my leisure and playback never had any problems. Only downside is that most broadcasts aren’t HD and it doesn’t let you watch subscription channels… at least not yet.
But it also picks up any UPnP servers you might have in your home network, let’s you watch and set your recordings from anywhere in the world through a browser and you can rent films from a convenient menu for a bit less than the local rental stores do (although the newest releases take longer to get appear there)
Combine that with Boxee running next to it which contains all the music and DVDs and (hopefully once they get all the bugs fixed) access to YouTube, Joost, Hulu (if i was from US), RSS feeds, torrents etc.
All this digital goodness for 38€ a month which is less than some companies charge you for a 24mbit DSL.
Personally I don’t see any need for a Blu-Ray even if the HD content available at the moment is a bit limited but then again… I’m not watching films or TV series just to see a crystal clear images and to hear a surround sound.
Not too late for me to see anyway. That’s the kind of setup we’re going to see more of, and things like boxee running on easily available hardware are making that easier. thanks for the info.
Reading to all this nine points i feel blu -ray will succed, and from my point strong reason for success of blu-ray will be drop down price in blu- dics, blu-player and blu-ray hdtv
Streaming and blu-ray can definitely coexist. They target different crowd. Blu-ray targets wealthier and mainstream crowds by offering the best video and audio quality you can get.
Streaming targets college or younger crowds. They just want the cheapest way to watch a movie.
“1. Digital downloads will not eliminate the need for discs anytime soon.”
Wrong:
http://retailzip.com/?p=421
We are about to kick Blu-ray’s #&@^#
sony have put out a press release about how l33t you are!!
L33t 15 n07 4 c0mm0n 1n73rn37 5p34k 4m0n9 r34l h4Xo12
Seriously, it’s time to put tired arguments to rest. Write about some new shit, damnit.
Blue-Ray will be around for good, we still need to burn something to a disc once in a while, don’t we? Say, for promotion, software drivers, business portfolio, wedding photos for friends, somethings are better or more meaningful if it is given out in a physical form.
Blue-ray and discs will not fail, it will be LESS relevant in the future.
Frankly speaking, this is a pretty disappointing article because it seems that the writer has no understanding of how “consumer electronics” work. 90% of the people don’t know, don’t care and don’t want to get into the hassle of downloading, encoding, storing movies on hard drives, and then connecting their PC’s to their TV’s to watch the movie.
Blu-ray is not as big a jump as VHS->DVD, but it is a big jump nevertheless, and as larger TVs become commonplace, picture quality becomes very important. Either of Blu-ray or HD-DVD was going to be the next big thing… and Blu-ray has clearly taken the lead.
I think you’re thinking inside the box a little too hard. as in, you live in America.
Not many other countries have a high speed internet network like America.
Something you’re also forgetting is a country like Thailand sold more Thai music per capita then any other music anywhere in the world last year, because 60m people only listen to Thai music.
So the Thai’s who don’t have high end internet or most don’t even have computers, but they all have tv’s and dvd/blueray players, and pirate dvd shops on every corner will definitely have a large adoption of blueray players, thus helping the overall survival of the format, not only for players, but for blank disks.
Lets not forget the billions of people in China and India as well with shitty networks but plentiful retail outlets to sell discs.
Digital Downloads will NEVER replace Physical media.
There is something to be said for choice, and most people I have talked to far prefer to own physical media than downloadable media. So many, and these are other geeks and gadget/tech lovers I have talked to, far prefer physical media to downloads, they aren’t a fan of the idea of “owning” a movie or game you can’t physically hold the disk of.
Here is a question for all your DD-lovers on Crunchgear…. WHY?
WHY exactly do you salivate over Digital Downloads so much?
They would kill the ability to buy used.
They would kill the ability to shop around.
They would kill the ability to rent.
They would kill the ability to lend a movie/game to a friend.
They would kill the ability to sell a movie/game you no longer want.
And WHAT exactly is the advantages of DD over physical media?
Giving up any and all rights for what? So you don’t have to get up off your couch and drive 5 minutes to the store? Is taking a few minues of your time to actually purchase something instead of never leaving your room THAT much of a hassle that you will give up all this just so you can download everything? Is it really THAT difficult to walk up to the tv and put in a disk? And for a version that is a lower quality version of the physical disk for nearly the same price to boot!
Seriously, to switch to DD-only means nothing more than to have everything to lose and nothing to gain other than the ability to never have to get off the couch again.
Let people have their Digital Downloads, as long as I also have the option to purchase it on physical media I don’t care.
Bang on. Blu Ray will fail because it is an intermediate technology. It’s equivalent in the music world is the MiniDisc, another Sony escapade. All the wishful thinking in the world won’t save it.
If Sony had any strategic vision they would aquire Humax and start developing internet enabled STBs.
The way I see it, if anything, DVD was more of an ‘intermediate technology’ than Blu-Ray.
DVD was a nice improvement over VHS for watchign on standard televisions, but when watching it on an HDTV, even when upscaled, it just doesn’t come close to touching the quality of Blu-Ray.
DVD was a HUGE upstep from VHS
I always felt that VHS to DVD was a FAR FAR bigger leap than DVD to Blu-Ray:
1. Dosen’t wear down from repeated playback
2. Can skip to anywhere instantly
3. No rewinding
4. Can use different audio tracks
5. Can turn subtitles on or off
6. Can contain extras
7. Far smaller than a VHS cassete
8. Immune to magnets
Etc Etc
I don’t deny that. All of those aspects were a big step up over VHS, and Blu-Ray has most of those same features as DVD, which means from that perspective, Blu-Ray isn’t a huge leap.
However, in terms of picture and audio quality, Blu-Ray compared to DVD is AT LEAST as big of a leap, if not more so, than DVD to VHS.
Plus, the advantage of Blu-Ray is that all of the players also play DVDs. When DVD first came out, there were no DVD/VHS combo players, and even once those players became available, they weren’t the general standard and often cost more than just a plain DVD player.
However, ALL Blu-Ray players also play DVDs, from the cheapest model all the way up to the most expensive model. And player prices in general are coming down. Some can currently be found in the $200 to $250 range, and those prices will likely drop further over time.
The big problem with trying to convince the ‘average joe’ to jump on board with either Blu-Ray or Digital Downloads is that many people were used to the fact that VHS was the major format for a VERY long time, and DVD has only been around at all for a little over a decade, with most of the general public jumping onbard less than 10 years ago.
But, the advantage that Blu-Ray has is that it plays DVDs also. So, people can continue to use their existing movies, and won’t have to upgrade them if they do not want to. They can simply buy new movies that they don’t already have on Blu-Ray, and maybe upgrade those DVDs that they really want to get the extra quality out of.
Digital Downloads basically means having to completely convert over to a whole new incompatible standard, which the general public is probably going to be more resistant to.
If Blue-ray wants to succeed, quality content is required.
Are the current Hollywood movie productions quality content?
VHS only became popular thanks to adult movie availability.
I love Blu Ray. Have no interest in downloading HD material. F downloads.
Blu ray is already a success – how can something fail that is already successful? Blu Ray is more popular than DVD was this soon after it’s launch and I don’t see any articles about “9 reason DVD will fail”. Blu Ray is much better than DVD – if you cannot see that you need an eye exam. Downloads are great for us geeks – but ma and pa kettle will NEVER download a movie in the trailer park – not for at least another decade – so Blu Ray looks to have a pretty long future to me.