This week's "Why next-gen DVDs are already dead" article
By Erik Hanson 
posted Nov 20th 2006 12:39PM
posted Nov 20th 2006 12:39PM
- The Internet: Alright, so you can already download movies and HD content online. But it takes forever (think 30 to 50 gigs, or more layers aplenty), and is usually bundled with more annoying DRM than AACS provides. Want to move it between devices? Sorry. Want to play it eight, or ten, or 100 days after you bought it? Perhaps not.
- On Demand: The studios would love it if everything you consumed was on-demand. Then you'd never own anything, and they could control when and where you watch it. Oh, but what about in your car on a road trip, or on the train in your video player? And there are plenty of consumers -- count us in on that! -- who like owning physical media, being able to look at album art and boxes and liner notes. Even if distribution is figured out, there's something about having a physical copy of your content that's reassuring.
- Equipment: We can see the argument against buying yet another piece of hardware that may or may not work out of the box, or have firmware issues, or upscale your standard-def media well, but with existing DVD players at less than $50, and next-gen players sure to hit that mark eventually, it's not exactly preventing anyone from buying in the long run. Media should similarly drop as time goes by, with Blu-ray and HD DVD discs selling for minor margins above standard DVDs. Finally, people are paying thousands for PS3s and Wiis these days, why not pay $199 for an HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360?
- Hard Drives: Sure, hard drives are cheap and hold a lot of data, but with dual-layer discs holding 30 to 50 gigs, and up to 100 or more planned, they aren't exactly slacking. Also, discs are more portable, and more resistant to drops and shocks.
[ Via Slashdot ]
I'm beginning to think there is room for all of them (HD-DVD, Blu-ray, digital distribution). I bought a HD-DVD drive for my 360, but I also plan to try out the HD downloads from Xbox Live. And I have also tried HD On-Demand from my cable company. Unless I get a PS3, I don't plan on getting a Blu-ray player, but there will be plenty of those out there eventually too.
The piece that everyone seems to forget in this whole debate is that people like owning and collecting movies. They like having them to watch whenever they want. That's a viewer habit that will be much harder to break than any sort of format upgrade.
Gaming consoles aside, downloaded content essentially requires having some sort of computer-based media center, and for the time being the effort and know-how required to integrate and use a media center within a home-entertainment system excludes it from the majority market: people already straining to comprehend all the new HDTV technology and terminology; who just want to plug in a player, pop in a disc, and press play. I don't know what percentage of consumers are movie collectors, but it seems likely that for the rental market at least, high-def VOD services will have a major affect on adoption of HD-DVD or Blue-ray, particularly if in the United States the artificially constrained broadband throughput is ever opened up such as we've already seen in Japan and parts of Europe.
The biggest argument is the crappy picture quality of HD (yes, yes, I know). Even 1080p (2Mpix) is crap, really. In a matter of months/years we’re talking 8Mpix or even more. And it’s gonna be growing until there’s no telling if it’s a picture or a window. So standards are doomed, yes. They should’ve just defined the container for HD-DVD/BD, codec being supplied on the disc. Today it’s AVC, tomorrow it’s something new altogether. Same thing goes for screen size, fps etc. As to DRM – have you ever seen a DRM’ed content on bittorrent? He-he.
I own both the HD-DVD add on and PS3 .. and cannot imagine going back to reg dvd's .. I have a 60" Sony SXRD XBR2 native 1080P tv .. and even though the 360 HD-DVD add on is "only" 1080i in componet , i give the edge to HD-DVD over the 1080P PS3 bluray player .. maybe it was the movies i watched king king and Mi3 HD-DVD Vs. taladaga nights and X-Men 3 BLU Ray ... But they BOTH look amazing and better then discovery HD .. Anyhow i would rather have 2 players then buy movies online and watch them on a PC
Think about this, people will insist on high quality, right now xbox is doing movies @ 720 that take hours to download, kick that up to 1080i (I don't even want think about p)then if thats the only way to get a movie, everyone is going to be online slowing down the system. Plus, I live in the middle of nowhere, my only option is satellite, @ well over $100 a month, I dont think so. I dont know anyone who has a PC hooked up to their TV. Now they'll have buy a high speed PC with a big hard drive, a high speed internet connection, and if the PC is'nt in the living room, a way to get it there. Add all that up and that HD/BD player starts to look pretty cheap.
Like Scott (above) said, I want to hold my movies in my hand,
I don't know how your luck is, but I've lost a hard drive or 2, with xbox live you can download it again,
but if you just lost 10 or 20 movies are you really going to go through all that hassle.
Physical media will survive for the foreseeable future, but I personally can't remember the last time that I bought a DVD. As soon as there's a decent HD download service available for my HTPC I'll consider dropping Netflix. People like to own things, and HD-DVD/Blu-ray disk are no exception.
Yes, physical ownership is definitely a big thing. I have 8 HD DVDs now since buying the addon for the 360 a little over a week ago. Plus I've been getting them through my Netflix subscription too. Now will I pay $500 or $1000 for a player, no. But, $200 - $250 yes.
I have been downloading HD movies for sometime now. No matter how quickly I can download a flick, there is something about a physical copy that you just can not beat. It is just easy and reassuring to just take a disc (that has the professional case and graphics) and putting it into the player and enjoying a movie. Anyone can do it unlike most movie downloads you got to have some kind of knowledge about how the system works (i.e. my grandma can pop a HD-DVD disc in, but ask her to play a downloaded movie!?!?).
Your on demand point doesn't make much sense... "Oh, but what about in your car on a road trip, or on the train in your video player?" Well, what about it? I haven't seen many full resolution portable DVD players, let alone HD. If you want media on the road, there's already DVD and a plethora of other cheaper mediums. I would still prefer to download the movie and put it in my Treo/iPod/laptop/PDA or whatever other portable player would be. For a small screen, HD is a non-factor.
I agree with Big Sam, I think HD DVD, Blu-Ray and online distro are all going to own market share. With online distro being the smallest of the 3. I have the Xbox 360 HD DVD player combined with Netflix to get all the HD DVD's I want. And I think the picture quality combined with the new cool menus was worth the $200 for the player.
But once someone releases something for
My comments got cut off :( anyway, when someone releases something that plays both Blu-ray and HD DVD for < $200 I'll buy that because there are some movies I want to watch that are Blu-ray only.
Over at the DVD Dossier...
http://www.dvddossier.com/2006/11/slate_hd_dvd_bl.html
...they agree with you that physical media will stay around for a good while to come. But they also say that one of the reasons is that the cable TV companies suck and will never be able to surmount their bandwith, customer service and training issues with regard to the downloading of movies.
Physical media will always be around. People seem to forget how expensive VHS and DVD players were when they first came out. HD-DVD and BLU-Ray will be around a while, as long as there is good content. Downloading is a great idea, but have you tried downloading an HD file more than an hour long? It takes forever, and blu-ray offers 50-100 gigabytes. That would take a week to download a file of that size, not to mention all the DRM content providers wanna put in stuff. PC's are good for some things but no everything. I'm willing to bet fewer than 20% of people use HTPC's for most of their viewing, because sharing that content between devices is just one more thing to confuse people.
I agree with a need for physical Media, Until we work out the fair use stuff. We own it and as long as we are not reselling it, we should be able to shuffle it around. With physical media it is easy for the user community (net) to "fix" DRM so that we can use OUR purchased media within OUR infrastructure. It may be that we can "fix" download content so that it too can be used seamlessly on all our playback devices, but until that's worked out I don't see physical media going away. An interesting different angle I see is Flash media with it proposed to reach 64g shortly this might be another avenue for distribution of media.
I agree
apple itv.