Yeah. I'd rahter buy my "shiney disc" than a Seagate Hard drive thant can fail anytime (and at $159 - gotta make some dough on the price of the HD eh?).
As per the future Download services, wake me up when an entire neighborhood can Stream 40mb/s 1080p losless audio without dropping a frame or a single block in the picture, in a small to average town in the middle of the US, eh?
If Cox can't even deliver blockless video on 480i when the weather 's bad, can't imagine how it's going to be with tons of people streaming HD. Not that it's not going to happen, it will,but please people. Stop trying to make people think it's going to happen for Joe Schmoe within 2 years.
VoD and DVRs have existed for 12 years or more, and only now start to be popular. Mp3 players were started by Rio in the mid 90's and only in the mid 2000s Ipod made it really popular. There's a long road between inovations and popular adoption, as most technical savy people know :)
You make a really good point Greg about Rio and their mp3 players, but it's sort of a flawed point. Yes Mp3s were great back in the day. I gladly waited 30 minutes to download a 3 minute song (dial-up was a bitch back then) you also didn't find the music industry bitching about piracy back then as much as they did only a couple years later. With the arrival of broadband my 30 minute wait turned into 30 seconds for that 3 minute song. Then p2p services made it easy to share your collection with hundreds of other people's collections. But the real piracy stink was caused easy software for turning those mp3s into custom audio CDs.
As far as mp3 players not taking off right away was more of a hardware limitation than anything else. Early mp3 players could only hold 16-32 megs of mp3s. They also took a good bit of time with USB 1.0 to transfer and it was almost not worth it as it fit less songs than the average audio cd. Then came the ipod with mass storage capacity (thanks to the hard drive), USB 2 or firewire speeds, and easier to use software bundled with a music store. It was quite a simple equation to equal a winning product that I had dream of years before I even got my first Rio mp3 player.
When the ability to readily and easily fill the consumer needs for movie content in a non physical way with the appropriate terms of usage, delivery and what not arrive the service will take off faster than you think! Whoever fulfills this task stands to make a TON of money. Currently it looks like Apple, and Microsoft are in the best situation to take advantage of digital downloads. I wouldn't doubt the whole "conspiracy theory" the by Microsoft supporting HD-DVD was really only an attempt to stall both Blu-ray and HD-DVD from becoming very successful in the market so that they can present a digital download system capable of meeting the markets needs.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
Yeah. I'd rahter buy my "shiney disc" than a Seagate Hard drive thant can fail anytime (and at $159 - gotta make some dough on the price of the HD eh?).
As per the future Download services, wake me up when an entire neighborhood can Stream 40mb/s 1080p losless audio without dropping a frame or a single block in the picture, in a small to average town in the middle of the US, eh?
If Cox can't even deliver blockless video on 480i when the weather 's bad, can't imagine how it's going to be with tons of people streaming HD.
Not that it's not going to happen, it will,but please people. Stop trying to make people think it's going to happen for Joe Schmoe within 2 years.
VoD and DVRs have existed for 12 years or more, and only now start to be popular. Mp3 players were started by Rio in the mid 90's and only in the mid 2000s Ipod made it really popular.
There's a long road between inovations and popular adoption, as most technical savy people know :)
You make a really good point Greg about Rio and their mp3 players, but it's sort of a flawed point. Yes Mp3s were great back in the day. I gladly waited 30 minutes to download a 3 minute song (dial-up was a bitch back then) you also didn't find the music industry bitching about piracy back then as much as they did only a couple years later. With the arrival of broadband my 30 minute wait turned into 30 seconds for that 3 minute song. Then p2p services made it easy to share your collection with hundreds of other people's collections. But the real piracy stink was caused easy software for turning those mp3s into custom audio CDs.
As far as mp3 players not taking off right away was more of a hardware limitation than anything else. Early mp3 players could only hold 16-32 megs of mp3s. They also took a good bit of time with USB 1.0 to transfer and it was almost not worth it as it fit less songs than the average audio cd. Then came the ipod with mass storage capacity (thanks to the hard drive), USB 2 or firewire speeds, and easier to use software bundled with a music store. It was quite a simple equation to equal a winning product that I had dream of years before I even got my first Rio mp3 player.
When the ability to readily and easily fill the consumer needs for movie content in a non physical way with the appropriate terms of usage, delivery and what not arrive the service will take off faster than you think! Whoever fulfills this task stands to make a TON of money. Currently it looks like Apple, and Microsoft are in the best situation to take advantage of digital downloads. I wouldn't doubt the whole "conspiracy theory" the by Microsoft supporting HD-DVD was really only an attempt to stall both Blu-ray and HD-DVD from becoming very successful in the market so that they can present a digital download system capable of meeting the markets needs.