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Feb 21, 08 - 09:04 am Comment from: John Gee

It's all about the digital copy.

Feb 21, 08 - 09:21 am Comment from: Mr. Reeee

There a few things Sony has going for it... at least for a few years.

1.) There's NOT enough bandwidth, in the US at least for the foreseeable future, to allow for Full-HD downloads in a reasonable time. How long would it take to DL a 50GB movie at current speeds? What would happen to your cable signal if half (or even 25%) of the people in your neighborhood decided to download Full-HD movies at the same time? Exactly.

2.) With the recent boom(let) in HDTV sales and the drop in Full-HD TV prices, more and more people will want Full-HD content. Once people see what Blu-ray looks like on their big-ass 52" or 65" HDTVs, they'll want more. Blu-ray delivers it. (Hey, I want one for my 40-incher)

3.) There are MANY people who STILL like to collect physical media. That's not going to end any time soon, either.

I do wish movie packaging would shrink to CD size. I hate the waste of those big, clunky DVD cases. Opera recordings have been released for years with nice booklets filled with essays, photos, librettos, etc.. Why can't movies do the same? It's long overdue.

I prefer to buy physical media - that way I don't have to back it up (which i have to take the time to do when purchasing downloads) and in the case of music, the CD is higher quality anyway.
go Blu-ray!

Feb 21, 08 - 09:25 am Comment from: silverhawk

I have a Blu-ray player and it is absolutely spectacular to see a 1081p movie. Yes, digital downloads will eventually come into their own. And yes, 1080 will get bypassed. That is just the way it is. Oh, did you see the news about the compressed air driven vehicle from France? Downsized oil companies and OPEC nations would be nice also.

Feb 21, 08 - 09:25 am Comment from: Connor MacBook

Mr. Reeee, the movies don't take up the full 50GB, they're closer to 20GB. Plus the downloads would likely be more compressed, in the same way iTunes SD content is a fraction the size of the DVD equivalent. I'd estimate 4GB to 5GB per film - still hefty, but more feasible.

'We believe it is highly likely that the Internet will become the mainstream method of distributing visual content, in the same way as with music,'

The problem is, it hasn't. CD sales still outsell digital downloads. And when it comes to movies, people want something physical and don't want to wait hours for a download. Downloads will do well, but so will BluRay

To add to what Mr. Reeee said...

4. People aren't going to want to download their wedding videos to archive on a hard drive (that will die someday).

5. Corporate videos can't be downloaded to plants that don't have dial-up, let alone broadband, in their training rooms.
I still have some clients that want their videos delivered on VHS.

Downloads will be big for some, but not all.

Feb 21, 08 - 09:31 am Comment from: January 24, 1984

Given 5 GB, and 10 mbps, what is the minimum time to begin streaming - that's the tipping point.

If streaming can start with 1%, that's a few minutes, right?

My iTunes movie rental experience has been great so far. A stutter here and there, but much better than waiting in line. And as an owner of over 1000 DVDs, I can state that they are anything but eternal.

Feb 21, 08 - 09:34 am Comment from: Cubert

The majority of people held onto floppies until we had to pry them from their hands. DVD's, including Blu-Ray, will be like that, too.

Now that 'The War' is over, I can finally upgrade that Betamax drive in my computer.

I'm in agreement with Mr. Reeee. I for one want to have my media in physical form, whether it be a disc, chip, crystal (Star Trek etc.) or whatever. I don't want all my eggs in 1 basket. What if the drive you keep all of your movies on craters. Woops. What a pain in the ass to get them back. I like the ability to just grab a disc and out the door to a friends house or maybe put it in my portable player. No spending time converting or even syncing, uploading etc. It is still easier to get a DVD off of my shelf and play in my portable DVD player than to convert it and then sync with my iPod. I'd like to see movies distributer on something like an SD card. Those things are small. You could keep hundreds in the space 2 or 3 DVDs with cases take up.

as if...

I personally don't wanna get stuck with having to redownload all my movies just because my HD gets replaced.

And plus, the costs of blu-ray discs will go down, no doubt ... and it'll always be cheaper and more convenient to have blu-ray discs than have external HDs holding data...

on the other hand, I think movie rentals on the apple store is going to take over the rental shops

Feb 21, 08 - 09:45 am Comment from: Cubert

With streaming, the movie can start in 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Not too long too wait.

Feb 21, 08 - 09:46 am Comment from: Cubert

Sorry. To wait, I meant.

I'm sorry, but until the day comes that everyone has 10+ Mbps broadband, and at least 2+ TB hard drives in their computers and Apple TVs to store their entire movie/video collection, HD downloads will never come close to rivaling Blu-ray. The bandwidth and storage just isn't there for the overwhelming majority of consumers, and won't be for the next several years.

I think ppl here are right. Physical media is not dead by far. The people pushing this whole notion of physical media being dead are the under 1% bleeding edge media adopters (they are related to the whole Linux for everyone group) who think that the entire world is going to turn on a dime and shift paradigms overnight.

Not going to happen. Bluray will live for at least 5 years probably more like 10-12

Sony also has to continue to compete with regular old DVDs. For most people, regular DVDs played in a cheap, upscaling DVD-player will be "good enough." This is a good thing, as it will force Sony to keep lowering prices and players and discs.
I don't think the tide will turn for Blue Ray until players are less than $150 and disks are close to $15

Feb 21, 08 - 10:07 am Comment from: iYann

@RC & Macromancer: agreed !

An other great article from Reuters citing "industry experts"... with a triggering title but nothing new brought to readers

Feb 21, 08 - 10:12 am Comment from: iYann

Blu-Ray won.
The transition from DVD to Blu-Ray will happen, no matter what industry experts say; just like VHS to DVD did.

Movie downloads will boom too, but in the end, people want their precious data on a physical media... many of us archive downloaded stuff to disc anyway

i ain't buyin' until the price comes down...

Feb 21, 08 - 11:12 am Comment from: Macinfo

The anticipation of downloads replacing media is being grossly over-rated, by the media, for the very reasons cited here.. Lack of bandwidth and there will always be many places on the map that are probably never going to get high speed or as high speed needed to do this effectively.

The other biggest drawback of downloads is as already noted, backups.. I can reasonably protect disc media with care and appropriate physical storage, however if I have a lifetime of memories on a storage medium that can eventually fail, no matter how much care is given, and the capacity needed to store what I have is hundreds of gigabytes or several terabytes, the idea of doing that without some solid redundancy for precious memories or one's movie collection is simply foolish..

If a Hi-def movie could have been compressed to 5Gb without quality loss, it would have been done already and put on a standard DVD. Blu-ray movies already use cutting edge compression, you won't get a Hi-def movie down to 5 or 10Gb without the picture looking like crap. It ends up defeating the whole purpose of Hi-def.

Feb 21, 08 - 12:04 pm Comment from: NCIceman

While downloads will be good for rentals, I think there are enough consumers like me who still like to own physical media that will keep media sales alive.

Wake me when it's two dollars a disk and 10 minutes to burn.

> Howard Stringer said ... he sees its PlayStation 3-based online content distribution service, the PlayStation Network, as a key growth driver for the Japanese company

Doesn't sound like that will be a key profit center to me.

Feb 21, 08 - 12:45 pm Comment from: Think

MDN covered this story a week ago, but it has been updated to compare these formats: Blu-Ray, Apple TV HD & SD, DVD and HD Cable. It is a great read and with many photos for comparison.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/apple-tv-20-vs-blu-ray-dvd-hd-cable-the-comparison/

Here is a piece of info I thought most relavant:

Blu-Ray Disc’s biggest video and audio advantages are real, but will be lost on many HDTV users. Since the majority of HDTVs sold before 2007 were not capable of displaying true 1080p output—most were capped at 720p or 1080i—the superior video quality of the Blu-Ray versions of movies won’t be noticeable on such sets, and the difference between the Apple TV and Blu-Ray versions will be less noticeable. If you’re using a TV without the ability to display 1080p video—especially if you don’t have a receiver capable of decoding the Blu-Ray Disc’s DTS-HD signal—an Apple TV rental will be an almost complete substitute for renting the Blu-Ray.

The other point I want to make is we tried to rent another movie via iTunes last weekend. My great ISP "Windstream" that I have a 3 mbps DSL line with was having problems in the area that took them 4 dyas to figure out. Meanwhile my speed was limping along at 186 kbps. The rental said it would take about 16 hours to download. I paused it Friday nite. Tried again Saturday morning and the speed was upto 500 kbps. I just left it run. We eventually got the movie completely downloaded sometime during the day.
We then got to watch it that night.

My point is, other stuff is out of your control and the Internet may cause you issues and any time. It's not fool proof yet.

Mr. Reeee said
"1.) There's NOT enough bandwidth, in the US at least for the foreseeable future, to allow for Full-HD downloads in a reasonable time. How long would it take to DL a 50GB movie at current speeds? What would happen to your cable signal if half (or even 25%) of the people in your neighborhood decided to download Full-HD movies at the same time? Exactly."

Go to any torrent site and enter in "720p" or "1080p" in the
search bar. An 1080p 2 hour long bluray rip is about 8 gb in
size. A 720p 2 hour long movie is about 4gb in size. I keep all of my movies on my HDD and most of them are bluray rips...that I acquired legally (in my country legally anyway).

rdbvideo said

"4. People aren't going to want to download their wedding videos to archive on a hard drive (that will die someday)."

If you keep the hdd you use to store your data in an external usb enclosure and only use it to store and view your data, it'll probably outlast a bluray disc. I remember I lost a tonne of data from scratched dvds back when I used them to backup my data. I had a dvd which was 4 years old and all the data on it was corrupted (no scratches it just got old). I understand blu-ray is suppossed to have superior scratch protection, but... I've never had a hard drive fail on me. Also, I keep two separate hard drives with the same data on them in external enclosure and just synch the data between them. It's very unlikely that both will fail at the same time. And if I get a new bigger and better hard drive, It's simply a matter of copying and pasting the data between them.

Plus, it makes sense to have a folder just for stuff like wedding archives that you can change whenever you want.

Not to mention that the largest capacity blu-ray disc is only
50gb. You can buy a hdd from 750gb to 500gb for a reasonable price (a 1 TB drive too if you're willing to pay).

Anyway, you could always hook up your computer to a digital tv to watch your movies rather than having to burn them.

Anaknipedro said

"If a Hi-def movie could have been compressed to 5Gb without quality loss, it would have been done already and put on a standard DVD. Blu-ray movies already use cutting edge compression, you won't get a Hi-def movie down to 5 or 10Gb without the picture looking like crap. It ends up defeating the whole purpose of Hi-def."

When it comes to formats in the bluray-rip scene it's unusual seeing big files in an avi container, usually they use the mkv container (matroska/x264) because it has a better compression for the videos. I've watched a x264 rip, one HD rip, it was 8GB and it had a video bitrate on 11000kbps (usualy from 3000kbps to 8000kbps for the same releases in an avi container). Those 4.3GB or 8GB releases are very good quality in my opinion (I'm a prefectionist).

Physical media is dead. The future is going to look like something very similar to apple tv. Everyone will carry their data on their devices or in external containers. People are just going to download movies and hook up their computers to their tvs to watch them.

I'm personally betting on flash being the storage option of choice.

Thanks to a few, for schooling the many, on what's really going on out in the wild. HD downloads are here already (or so they say

"Blu-Ray Disc’s biggest video and audio advantages are real, but will be lost on many HDTV users."

That is clearly a matter of opinion and, even worse, it's stupid because it's someone's opinion about other people's opinions. It will depend on every viewer to assess things for themselves and decide if they agree with that conclusion.

I don't.

"Since the majority of HDTVs sold before 2007 were not capable of displaying true 1080p output—most were capped at 720p or 1080i—the superior video quality of the Blu-Ray versions of movies won’t be noticeable on such sets, and the difference between the Apple TV and Blu-Ray versions will be less noticeable."

I call this a pointless BS comparison. A proper comparison needs to be between HD media and standard definition TV/DVD/downloads/etc. And, again, it's a mater of opinion as to whether or not the differences are noticeable.

I say they are clearly noticeable.

Now... as to whether or not that's as important to others as it is to me, I can't say. I'm not that arrogant or stupid.

"If you’re using a TV without the ability to display 1080p video—especially if you don’t have a receiver capable of decoding the Blu-Ray Disc’s DTS-HD signal—an Apple TV rental will be an almost complete substitute for renting the Blu-Ray."

More BS. I have a 2005 62" Mitsubishi DLP that 's 1080i and I can quite easily tell the difference.

"...I lost a tonne of data from scratched dvds back when I used them to backup my data. I had a dvd which was 4 years old and all the data on it was corrupted (no scratches it just got old). I understand blu-ray is suppossed to have superior scratch protection, but... I've never had a hard drive fail on me."

I presume you're speaking of a recordable DVD, which are not the same as a retail DVD containing the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Retail DVDs (and I presume BR discs) are pressed, not burned. Recordable "burned" DVDs can be a bit finicky when attempting to read them with a different drive than the one which recorded it, and the different recordable formats (+R, -R, ±R, +RW, -RW, ±RW) don't help matters any.

And if you've never had a harddrive fail, then count yourself extremely lucky... because you are.

There's an old saying, "It's not a matter of "if" your hard drive fails, but "when."

Don't trust valuable data to just harddrives. I had two external drives (bought at the same time) fail with a few days of each other, just a few weeks after they went off warranty. Both were made by the same maker, one with a high reputation for the reliability of their drives.

Feb 21, 08 - 08:15 pm Comment from: Think

@ nobodi

Check out the web page I refer to. It wasn't much of an opinion, it was closup photos of the screen resolution with a Nikon. Look at the pics. They have them all side by side.

Sorry, a 1080p disc will not magically display more pixels on a 1080i TV. It will only display what the TV can do.