A comparison of PS3 and 360 as media players

[eastmen]

Blu-ray retailers are starting to bundle free VoD movies with each Blu-ray movie purchase:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/02/vudu-wal-mart-and-disney-join-forces-add-a-free-streaming-copy/



These VoD services should just join the Ultraviolet platform. I remember Ultraviolet is created with Blu-ray in mind too.

Hmm. I have free digital copys for the first two toy stories that came out months ago on bluray ?

I much rather that than a streaming copy .

 

[patsu]

The streaming copies are offered by the retailers.

The digital copies are offered by the studios and platform holders (e.g., Apple, Sony)

Heck, you might get both with 1 Blu-ray purchase. ^_^

 

[eastmen]

The streaming copies are offered by the retailers.

The digital copies are offered by the studios and platform holders (e.g., Apple, Sony)

Heck, you might get both with 1 Blu-ray purchase. ^_^

wow they are really throwing the kitchen sink in with these blurays.

Disney store has had amazing deals.

Toy story 1 reserved with $10 off any purchase coupon to get me toy story 2 blu/dvd/digital for $16 with a $10 coupon to get me Beauty and the beast for $16 with a coupon to get me Toy story 3 for $16 which came with a coupon that will get me fantasia for $16 which will likely come with a coupon to get whatever disney title is first next year for $16.

These all have the blu/dvd/digital copy in them by the way. Now your saying in the future i might get even more free stuff throw in. Thats not bad. I only buy blurays under $10 (except disney animation cause my nephew will sit and watch that stuff )

 

[patsu]

If you have DVDs, you can also upgrade them to Blu-ray @ $5/movie.

The retailers have promos from time to time, you can get Blu-ray at various prices.


I went to Fry's on Sunday, saw a LG 2Tb home storage server with built-in DLNA and Blu-ray writer for $300-400. This is the type of NAS for me. ^_^
Will wait for price to drop further.

 

[eastmen]

If you have DVDs, you can also upgrade them to Blu-ray @ $5/movie.

The retailers have promos from time to time, you can get Blu-ray at various prices.


I went to Fry's on Sunday, saw a LG 2Tb home storage server with built-in DLNA and Blu-ray writer for $300-400. This is the type of NAS for me. ^_^
Will wait for price to drop further.

I have a 4Tb Nas and a 6x bluray writer on my pc. I've already ripped the majority of my dvds. Aside from a few blurays like back to the future trillogy , star wars trillogys , indiana jones trillogy I'm done with physical discs. The room I've reclaimed is staggering .

 

[patsu]

I go for the best deals.

As you mentioned, the cheap Disney BR movies are hard to resist sometimes. ^_^ We exchange and share discs amongst a group of friends.

Also don't want to maintain a PC at home solely for storage management. My kid, my wife and myself each have a personal laptop and that's it !


I already have plenty of boxes in the office. ^_^ But I want a Blu-ray writer to archive old media.

 

[patsu]

MUBI's up:
http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2010/11/03/mubi-is-now-live-on-the-playstation-3/

To start us off with a bang (and we do mean bang!), on November 20th MUBI will be premiering online and for free the new Mexican film Revolución. This film is incredible—one of the rare films to play at the Berlin, Cannes, and New York Film festivals, Revolución was made in honor of the 100th anniversary of Mexican revolution. The project was masterminded by the ten hottest young Mexican directors, from the established (arthouse master Carlos Reygadas) to the buzzed about and up-and-coming (Amat Escalante and Gerardo Naranjo), to international superstar Gael García Bernal, who shares directorial credit with his Y tu mamá también co-star, Diego Luna.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I have a 4Tb Nas and a 6x bluray writer on my pc. I've already ripped the majority of my dvds. Aside from a few blurays like back to the future trillogy , star wars trillogys , indiana jones trillogy I'm done with physical discs. The room I've reclaimed is staggering .

I'm in the same boat. And with WHS 2.0 feating stream anywhere for watching your videos from anywhere in the world (assuming you can get access to broadband), that just made optical media even more irrelevant for me. That combined with online VOD or digital distribution.

Regards,
SB

 

[patsu]

The boundary between packaged media and digitally downloaded media will just blur moving forward. ^_^
You don't buy an optical disc or a file. You buy a movie and can enjoy all the digital copies; or you rent one -- physical or virtual.

When you're far away from home, you can buy local Blu-ray/DVD movies there that no one has online rights to yet. If you have a PC, it should be piece of cake to watch it regardless of the region coding. Some of them may not even be region coded. ^_^


... or you borrow a disc for free from public libraries.

 

[eastmen]

I'm in the same boat. And with WHS 2.0 feating stream anywhere for watching your videos from anywhere in the world (assuming you can get access to broadband), that just made optical media even more irrelevant for me. That combined with online VOD or digital distribution.

Regards,
SB

I'm not that advanced yet , but i do have a sling box hooked up to my tivo. Which is great on vacation because we can tivio movies , stream netflix and other things. Was a great birthday gift from my gf last year. I will most likely upgrade the nas for what your talking about next year.


its just so much easier to be in my bedroom and surf my nas for a movie or go to the living room and do the same isntead of having to leave the rooms and go to the den to find a movie and bring it to the room and start it up and then with blurays sometimes it takes a few minutes for the movie to even start up. Its really a pain in the ass.

I bought 2 more 2TB drives from microcenter for $60 bucks a pop . I'm going to use these as back ups for the media. Storage space is extremely cheap and the whole set up is a little bigger than 2 shoe boxes. I used to have 3,000 plus dvds/blurays/hd dvds. That takes up alot of room in a house . Now I'm down to about 500 and dropping. My bluray colection will most likely top out at 100 discs and those will be movies i just have to have the best quality possible for and are mostly the classics.

 

[Arwin]

Yes I just checked it out. Some nice stuff on there and it is very pleasantly presented. The social integration and rating stuff is decently done. Lots of stuff I haven't seen yet, but a few I have and those were good like How To Get Rid Of The Others.( I have filmnet though which has shown most of the bigger titles here.)

 

[patsu]

Is Blu-ray startup still in the minute range ? I think the newer standalone players are faster than PS3 now.

We should also be getting multi-room playback for both packaged media and digital copies soon. Some people like it on their iPads. Others stream it to their studies and bedrooms. The source material should not matter anymore. The DRM policies will likely be the limiting factor.

EDIT:
Actually, come to think of it. If I'm far away from home -- like abroad -- besides scouting for good overseas movies, I'd be shopping for dirt cheap Hollywood movies to bring back. ^_^

Streaming full-length movies from all the way home via your home ISP network to overseas may still be unrealistic at this point. May be copy them before watching ?

 

[patsu]

Yes I just checked it out. Some nice stuff on there and it is very pleasantly presented. The social integration and rating stuff is decently done. Lots of stuff I haven't seen yet, but a few I have and those were good like How To Get Rid Of The Others.( I have filmnet though which has shown most of the bigger titles here.)

Yeah... MUBI touted themselves as the social movie site. They are supposed to focus on indie films ? That's something I'd like to see. Getting bored of Hollywood materials and formula.

 

[patsu]

It's Blu-con yesterday. I think Amazon was in a panel:
http://mesalliance.org/blog/2010/11/02/amazon-offers-keys-to-blu-ray-market-growth-at-blu-con/

Amazon.com opened the Blu-Con 2010 conference here by telling a room of more than 400 industry execs how they can expand Blu-ray Disc sales by giving consumers more titles and easier Internet connectivity.

Bill Carr, Amazon’s VP of music and video, invoked the voice of the Amazon customer, saying that “Blu-ray is a product customers love,” but that the format also comes up short, particularly in the area of selection.

“Broad selection is critical to signal Blu-ray is here to stay,” Carr told the Blu-Con audience. “Customers need to be confident in the format to build deep libraries.”

The retailer said that within five years of DVD’s introduction, there were more than 20,000 titles available at retail. By comparison, there are under 5,000 Blu-ray titles available today, he said. Amazon carries 150,000 individual titles on DVD, he said, and just 4,000 on Blu-ray. “It will be a great day when those numbers are the same, or Blu-ray is higher.”

After consumers adopt Blu-ray, they spend four times the amount on software that they did a few quarters prior to their Blu-ray purchase, Carr said. After the initial transition, spending stays high, but Blu-ray customers still buy as much as 50% of their movies on DVD, due to Blu-ray’s limited selection and price premium, Carr said.

At an average price premium of $10, Blu-ray accounts for a little less than half the sales volume of a title, Amazon found. But if there were no price premium for the newer format, Blu-ray might account for 90% of sales volume, according to the retailer.

Combo packs also stimulate Blu-ray adoption, Carr said.

He addressed hardware and the need for consumer education, noting that while Internet-connected Blu-ray players enable multi-format consumption, connection rates for Blu-ray players are still relatively low.

Firmware updates, and the lack of consumers getting the ones they need, generate many consumer complaints to Amazon, Carr said, recommending that more players need to ship with an internal wireless antenna.

“A connected Blu-ray player is an even better customer experience,” Carr said.

EDIT:
Correction -- Bill Carr keynoted Blu-con.

 

[patsu]

More comprehensive coverage on Blu-con:
http://www.bigpicturebigsound.com/Blu-Con-2010.shtml

Amazon again...

Another interesting tidbit is that for every 10% increase in price between Blu-ray and DVD, there was a decrease of 4% in the number of people picking Blu-ray over DVD. In other words, if the price went down, people would far prefer Blu-ray. Kinda a "duh" moment, but good to hear none the less.

Most interesting is how successful Amazon's Disc+On Demand program has been. This is when you buy a Blu-ray and you get to watch it instantly on Amazon Video on Demand. They've had so much luck with it, they're expanding it to 10,000 titles as of 11.2.10.

On sales, rental, ...

Ron started out, answering a question about sales, by saying that even though DVD sales were down 14% year to date, Blu-ray was up by 86% and overall sales were up 2%, as far as new releases go. Steve echoed that sentiment, saying that overall expenditures by consumers on entertainment (including games) is at an all time high.

Mike supplied the incredible fact that over 8 million copies of Avatar on Blu-ray had been sold worldwide.

When asked what they felt about the rental market, Ron replied that the overall trend was away from brick and mortar stores (like Blockbuster) towards Netflix and Redbox. That said, there hadn't been a trend away from sales to rental. In other words, even though the rental market has changed radically over the last few years, similar numbers of people were buying vs, renting discs.

Craig felt that his company's 28 day delay before Netflix and Redbox got a title was purely economic (most disc sales are within the first month of release). He could foresee a premium On Demand option in the near future that allowed for day and date sales on that medium.

Mike said that overall Blu-ray and Video on Demand are showing the most growth. Following that up, Ron said that his company definitely saw a 10-15% bump in sales when the disc was delayed for rental, a number that was eerily mimicked by Mike and Craig.

On 3D...

Dan mentioned something that is perhaps underreported and widely misunderstood by consumers: that current 3D TVs are the world's best 2D TVs as well. The technology that enables these TVs to present both halves of the stereoscopic image on screen quickly, without major ghosting or "crosstalk" also allows them to create a nice bright, detailed image when in 2D mode. And 2D mode is where most people will be using them, most of the time, at least until 3D content becomes more widely available.

Jim from Dreamworks felt that 3D would invigorate Blu-ray sales. This is because their movies tend to have a younger audience, whose parents would rather buy DVD so the disc can be played in the car or on a portable. But if the only way to bring home a 3D version of the film is on Blu-ray 3D, then parents might cough up a few extra dollars to do so.

Kris felt that Blu-ray 3D wouldn't be enough to push 3D on its own. That would take broadcast TV and game 3D content as well. Also, according to Kris, good in-store demos are vital. Later, he opined that auto-stereoscopic TVs were 7-10 years away, so there was little point in "waiting" for those.

Brian pointed out that most of the Blu-ray players Sony had been selling recently were 3D, so the installed base from a source standpoint is quite large.

... plus others, too much to summarize.

 

[eastmen]

3d is going to kill bluray. I keep seeing comercials to future proof your movie purchases with bluray 3d , but the majority of people i talk to , do not want 3d .

I just hope they can make a universal codec for DD and let your DD library work across devices easily .

 

[patsu]

3D Blu-ray ? Nah.... too early to have any positive or negative impact. As you can tell from the articles, there are other mundane things the Blu-ray vendors can play with to increase share.

I just hope they can make a universal codec for DD and let your DD library work across devices easily .

It's not the codecs. Commercial codecs are well behaved. The codec standards are well supported. It's the DRMs that fragment digital downloads.

 

[joker454]

I'm in the same boat. And with WHS 2.0 feating stream anywhere for watching your videos from anywhere in the world (assuming you can get access to broadband), that just made optical media even more irrelevant for me. That combined with online VOD or digital distribution.

I also have all my blu-rays ripped to raid, 117 of them on a 6tb raid, so I never use the optical discs anymore after they are ripped. However that doesn't really render optical media useless because the only way to get a really clean copy of a movie is still via blu-ray, and I'm guessing it will remain that way for the foreseeable future as I can't imagine Netflix, etc, versions having as good quality as the blu-ray versions. Personally I leave the download media services to those that can stomach the quality, and I'll stick with blu-rays ripped to raid.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I also have all my blu-rays ripped to raid, 117 of them on a 6tb raid, so I never use the optical discs anymore after they are ripped. However that doesn't really render optical media useless because the only way to get a really clean copy of a movie is still via blu-ray, and I'm guessing it will remain that way for the foreseeable future as I can't imagine Netflix, etc, versions having as good quality as the blu-ray versions. Personally I leave the download media services to those that can stomach the quality, and I'll stick with blu-rays ripped to raid.

That's just speaking for the fact we need a better way to distribute HD movies than a need for optical media. For example, if there were some sort of DRM that would allow you to purchase and load a digital copy of a movie at a retail location (target, 7-11, gas station, whatever) onto a USB storage device. Transfer it to whatever device at home (media set top device, computer, etc.). The DRM license would allow for reloading that movie at whatever location in the future should you delete it at home. That's assuming you don't have broadband without caps where you could just download it at home.

Would save millions or billions of tons of waste used in producing optical media as well as all those discs gathering dust. There'd be an upswing in flash devices or hard drives, but since those would be reuseable, it wouldn't generate nearly as much waste.

Regards,
SB

 

[Lucid_Dreamer]

Unless downloads and streaming can be guaranteed "downtime free" (almost zero connection issues from ISP to server), I'm not putting aside optical media. It needs to be, at least, as reliable as my power.