Posted on 02/27/2008 10:53:52 AM PST by Paleo Conservative
Blu-ray Disc may have beaten out HD DVD as the high-definition optical disc format to replace DVDs, but it now faces a new test against Internet downloads, market researchers Gartner and iSuppli said.
The two high-definition disc formats had battled for the past few years until Toshiba last week handed victory to Blu-ray Disc by announcing an end to its support of HD DVD. The company's decision came after a major Hollywood film studio and several retailers, including Wal-Mart, said they would back Blu-ray Disc exclusively.
But the victory for Blu-ray Disc may be short-lived if consumers choose to download high-definition content from the Internet, market researchers say.
"After years of a standards war, the major question for Sony and the Blu-ray camp is whether a physical format for high-definition still has any relevance to consumers in this era of Internet-delivered movies and video on demand," said David Carnevale, vice president of multimedia content and services at iSuppli, in a report.
Online movie download services from iTunes, Amazon, and others have gained traction in recent years and increased their movie, TV, and other video content offerings. The Internet gives consumers a choice of building a library of HD movies bought over the Internet instead of buying a Blu-ray Disc player and building a new library of movies-on-disc, said Carnevale.
"Physical media distribution could become a thing of the past," he said.
Blu-ray Disc could be further harmed unless prices come down quickly and more manufacturers start making players, according to Gartner. The market researcher said that most manufacturers will probably hold off on announcing new Blu-ray Disc equipment until the first quarter of 2009. In addition, consumers may also put off buying Blu-ray Disc players because DVD players that up-convert existing DVDs is already seen by some as a good alternative to making a big investment in high-definition discs.
"Most manufacturers are still trying to persuade consumers that high-definition optical discs are worth investing in, as many consumers and industry pundits see video-on-demand services and Internet downloads as viable alternatives," said Paul O'Donovan and Hiroyuki Shimizu in a report.
Blu-ray Disc faces fight against downloads
Victory for Blu-ray Disc over HD DVD may be short-lived if consumers choose to download high-definition content from the Internet
Call me old-fashioned and crazazy but I still want a ‘hard copy’ of my favorite films and music. LOL! ;)
I’ve been too busy scarfing up great closeout deals on HD DVD media to notice or care.
And do you have any recent films among your favorites? We don’t, because they aren’t producing anything worthwhile saving.
Yeah, I'd rather watch my movie on my 65-inch HDTV than my 17-inch computer monitor. So I still need to get my movie onto a DVD to watch it.
Well a 35mm print is several thousand dollars.
I have a couple new ones....but I buy a lot of the older film collections on amazon. Studios are coming out with several films in one package for a great price. I have a large frock drama (Masterpiece Theatre/BBC) collection as well. LOL!
No you don't. You could connect your computer or network to the cable box or tuner that controls you large video screen.
Well.....then there’s always THAT point...hahaha!
Very Nice, I am in the process of building a Entertainment center Comp and can’t wait to try it out with Netflix instant View on the Home Entertainment system.
Not planning on wasting $400 to buy their latest planned obsolete product.
Not really. You can network your HDTV to your computer. Apple's "Apple TV" box does it wirelessly.
SONY: continuing the tradition of snatching DEFEAT from the JAWS OF VICTORY.
Physical media also tends to stick around. Many XBOX 360 owners are dismayed that they send their unit in for service ... and when it comes back, it has completely forgotten about the games/etc. that the owner “bought”. Other “buy and download” forms make it hard (or at least non-trivial) to move your entire downloaded media library from one machine to another ... and usually requires that the original box still function (which may be the issue WHY you’re trying to do the transfer) to keep the collection. Backups rarely work the way one expects, with much software refusing to function on the new machine - if it made it to the backup media at all.
...but with a DVD, CD, or other physical media, the loss of the core computer does not mean losing all the content. (Having something capable of reading it, as I stare at my 5.25”, Zip, and MD disks, however, may be a problem. At least I can transfer content to new media before the whole format disappears.)
So called HD downloads are far from HD. They aren’t even 480p. BluRay is is 1080p. Play a download on your bigscreen HDTV and look at the crappy picture. They only look decent on a PC monitor of about 19-22in.
Well, my computer is in my study and my tv is in the living room. I don’t have cable (and won’t until there is an ala carte offering so that I can opt out of CNN, MTV, and about half of the other CRAP that you have to take with basic cable, and Ted Turner doesn’t get even a fraction of a cent from my cable bill).
You can also get receivers and some TVs with a USB input. Plug in or network your movies that you store on a $100 500 GB hard drive.
“Yeah, I’d rather watch my movie on my 65-inch HDTV than my 17-inch computer monitor. So I still need to get my movie onto a DVD to watch it.”
Video cards these days offer DVI and component HD outputs as well as multi channel audio.
And even BluRay is stunted to the trained (or cursed) eye. Compression artifacts abound if you know what to look for (and once you know what to look for, it’s awfully hard to turn it off).
Ironically, broadcast HDTV is the best source so far short of expensive uncompressed HD media.
It depends. I volunteer my services in qlty assurance for fansubbing Jap animes.
MOST of the subbers encode their subs in H264, but it comes down to resolution. The least H264 encoded animes are in 704 and NOT 1280. I only know a very few subbers who do this, and the best animes are encoded in 1280 which can be transferred/connected to a 50 inch in exceptional qlty.
This is incorrect.
I have downloads of movies and television shows in 720P and 1080i/p.
The big difference is the lack of DRM.
Lots of HDTVs have xVGA and/or DVI connectors. Just plug in your computer. I won’t buy an HDTV without one.
The master analog tapes also affect the final image clarity when transferred to HD format. The bigger the screen, the more noise you will get.
If you have an Xbox 360 and Microsoft and Netflix offer HiDef film downloads, why would you buy a BlueRay player?
Same here. I’m hoping it’s paranoia or greed and not just age. ;-)
My Samsung 50” plasma has the USB port, but it’s only good for images and MP3 files. Not a bad feature, but such a function would take too much processing power for movies.
I prefer to keep the functional stuff out of the panel and go with a media player. My HR21 DirecTV HD recorder does a pretty nice job and the Video On Demand feature (over internet) has proven to be pretty cool, even in Beta.
The Denon receivers with Ethernet, WiFi and Microsoft support appear to be a step in the right direction.
Me too! I’ve got an XA2 coming to my door tomorrow and am keeping an eye out for disk bargains.
If you have a 1.5 Mbit download speed it will take you around 111 hours to download the contents of a full disk. You might get better download rates than that from a cable modem if the network in your area isn't seeing heavy use and all movies won't take a full disk, but we are still talking about a movie taking most of a day, if not several to download.
You're also not going to be storing much of a video collection on your hard drive with movies being that large.
Blu-ray faces far more competition from the current DVD disks and standard definition movies than it does from downloads at this point, and for a considerable time in the future.
For downloading HD movies to be practical, consumers will likely need much greater bandwidth on their internet connections, and if they want to keep a collection of movies rather than simply rent movies, they are going to need Blu-Ray writers or something similar with which to save the movies.
How did this idiocy ever get buy the editors at Infoworld.
Because you want a PS3 too?
There's always going to be a need, at least in my book, for hi capacity data storage mediums. Cause ain't no way I'm using some on-line server storage/backup for personal information.
Do these writers have any idea how LONG it takes to download a Blu-Ray even over “high-speed” (6-8Mbits/s) connection? Even with fiber to the home, it’s time consuming.
Because what they call Hi Def is considerably lower quality that what Blu-ray calls Hi Def.
For less money than it takes to buy a DVD player of either format you can set up a PC with an HDMI video card to output to your 65-inch HDTV and play whatever format you want. The people who wrote the article know what they are talking about, any movie you can buy in Blu-Ray or HD you can download for free.
But the actual movie itself might only be 2-8 gigs of that space. The concept isn't any different than your typical 5-9 Gbit DVD, the actual movie gets ripped down to 700 Mb. I bet there was a time people said these would never be downloaded either.
You've apparently never tried to rip a standard definition DVD to a file or copy one. You usually can't fit the main movie on a normal 4.7 GB DVD without compression. Most of the standard definition movies you rent are on double layer DVDs that can store roughly 8.5 GB of data.
High definition movies take roughly 3 to 5 times as much room on the disk as standard definition depending on the frame rate.
Standard definition is 720x480p @ 30 fps. High def is 1920x1080p @ 24 fps, or 1920x1080i @ 60 fps.
The concept isn't any different than your typical 5-9 Gbit DVD, the actual movie gets ripped down to 700 Mb.
Sure you can compress it into an MPEG-4 file. However, you lose quality in the process. If you're just going to take an high definition movie, compress it, and lose quality, what is the point of high def in the first place, just stick with regular DVDs.
As I said in my original post, the real competition is from standard definition video, not from downloading high definition video.
My HDTV does a good job of up-scaling standard definition television, and MPEG-4 videos of standard definition look pretty good as well.
However, if I want crisp HD video, downloading isn't much of an option. Blu-Ray has that market.
How long before we can get a PC with a Blu-Ray writable DVD drive?
The Wii works around this nicely.
You associate your Wii with a Nintendo account. Any games you order from the Virtual Console are automatically flagged to your account. If your Wii dies, you just associate the replacement unit with your account and you can redownload the games at leisure, which isn't particularly burdensome...the largest game I've bought so far took about 2-3 minutes, and most of the older games only take a few seconds. This also allows for you to delete a game for a time to free up the room, and redownload it when you want it again.
Kinda ironic tho, the console least prone to dying is the one with the best provisions made for it.
I'm at work now but when I get home I can post a few Blu-Ray titles available for download and their file sizes. They range anywhere from 2 to 8 Gig per movie in the .mkv format and can be downloaded either in 100 MB rars or as 1 complete file. It may be a fairy tale to you but the guy who wrote the article and the people who make Blu-Ray discs take it very seriously.
I think much of this is projection of Hollywood's desire to be out of the physical disk business. They want to dispense movies to you via a network connection and ensure you pay for the privilege every time you view the movie. The recent yammering of the screen writer's guild about getting paid for content delivered over the internet was a foreshadowing of this future direction.
If my speculation is correct, Hollywood will lose a lot of revenue from small towns with poor broadband infrastructure. They will also lose revenues from people who object to a perpetual pay per view approach.
There are special media devices that operate using 802.11n wireless that will nicely couple your high def monitor in the living room to your computer network. They are specifically designed to carry high definition content wirelessly.
Overnight if you're willing to pay FedEx for the service. You'll pay a big price for the BluRay drive, but the software is already available to use it from Nero and Roxio.
But how much quality is lost when compressing an HD movie down to the size of a standard definition movie? Is there really an advantage of taking a higher resolution video that is encoded as MPEG-2 video, and compressing it additionally using something like MPEG-4?
I have no doubt that there are people out there that do it. Some people will think it will make the picture look better even if it doesn't. It's already hard to tell the difference between an unconverted standard definition movie and one that is natively high definition.
I guess perception is often the most important thing, so if consumers consider it a viable alternative, it is one regardless of if it doesn't make a lot of sense from a technical standpoint. It may be a fairy tale to you but the guy who wrote the article and the people who make Blu-Ray discs take it very seriously.
“Do you honestly believe you’re getting more image information in that 1.5 GB so-called HD movie you downloaded versus that 6 GB DVD movie?”
The HD labeled films I have are over 8GB in size, 1920x816 @ 25 frames /s The bitrate varies between 9500kb/s and 20000kb/s while playing.
They look just fine.
I just ordered Planet Earth (U.S. version) off the Discovery channel site for $29.99. Also, HDScapes is selling their HD titles for 6.95 at hdscapes.com.
Getting into HD DVD at the end of last year was a good thing for me. I will have a larger collection of HD stuff than some people who joined earlier because there were so many good deals available at the time I bought. Looking forward to some HD Beowulf this weekend.
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