Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*

[MarkoIt]

Flash price declined a lot from 2001 to 2008.. now it's around 1$ for GB (in 2001 was 1000$ for GB). Demand is growing, but also production is growing.. if it get's 50x cheaper in the next 3-4 years (and it will), it's going to be on par with blu ray costs (someone was saying around 10 cents).
Optical player it's fixed cost, and a big one (5% at the beginning of the console cycle, but 10-15% now or even more at the end of it).

 

[specwarGP2]

Define relatively cheap? It was an order of magnitude more than DVD.

Well duh, DVD was 10 years old already in 06. BD ROM specification was only finalized earlier in the same year that it came out. Considering the newness and difficulty in duplicating BD, yes it was relatively cheap to make.

You're telling me all those $20 DS carts cost no less than $5 to produce? I find that hard to believe.

I was actually referring to devices measured in GB, but since you brought it up I think DS carts cost at least a few dollars to produce, which is pretty expensive for 256mb.

 

[-tkf-]

Dunno, you're the one who claimed that the consoles with more sales were the worst ones. What are you basing that on besides your personal bias?

So it was a personal attack after all, grow up. Sales envy had nothing to do with my feeling about Wii, i just think it sux compared to the 360 and PS3.

I mentioned one, that's plenty to make my case.

You did not mention a new format, but whatever. If you would base your claim on HD-DVD as the future format for the 720 be my guest.

Of course it did, it used over 200 watts to begin with, the 360 was just a bit less. The point is the power that the drive uses will never go down, it's essentially a fixed cost that will never go down.

And it was not a problem for the older generation either, your making problems up that isn´t real now or were in the past, where the power draw should have been higher compared to the rest of the system.
And if the power draw really was a problem we would have seen improved drives along with the usual improvements.

You keep using "free" in quotes. That's another way of saying its not free, which is correct, because its not. And cheap for the media, but expensive for the box.
I don't think you really understand what re-inventing the wheel means. And you might want to actually look at the numbers for flash before spouting off blu-ray numbers like they are impressive.

Yes, is keep using "free" like this, and let me just do it again then. "Hey i put a "free" movie player in you console, along with your Blu-Ray drive". Unlike, "Hey i put a Flash Format in your console that does not support "free" movie playback". It works just fine.

I argue that Blu-Ray is a viable and from what i can gather a cheap future format compared to flash media.
You think that Flash and DD will be the choice.
I did add that i would prefer your solution if it went through but i as i mentioned i doubt it can be made a reality.

And reading your post history you have a universal hate for Blu-Ray so i can understand that you go blind and do whatever you can to dig up half hearted facts and imaginary scenarios if someone waves the blu vicotory flag. Chill out, the future is going to be great and maybe even blu!

 

[eastmen]

BD50 was expensive in 2006 and 2007. But no games used BD50 until 2008. Considering that BD ROM replication was a fairly new and complicated thing, BD25 was relatively cheap to produce even back in 2006. Now its pennies/unit.

Flash can get cheaper per GB, but there will always be a floor... I think the consensus is $5/unit?

No one agreed with that . Flash is .50cents a GB to produce or less at this point . IF you were to buy flash in the tens of millions consistantly every year you would get it for less than than 50 cents in another year or two it will be half that cost.


The floor of flash is the packaging but as long as micron processes get smaller the amount of storage will go up compared to the cost of packaging and writing to it.

 

[Platon]

Game will start selling XBLA games and DLC in a six month trial. The beginning of something bigger. We are discussing so much what will happen next gen that we forget that games on flash might start already now to test the waters for next gen...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-09-game-selling-xbla-games-and-dlc

 

[acaeus]

Honestly? Yes. I'm pretty sure that MS, Sony, and Nintendo can safely ignore all potential buyers who don't have an internet connection. I would even go so far to say that they already HAVE! I would be surprised if the number of people that don't have an internet connection but have a current gen console is %1.

And you'd be wrong: (a quick search gives)

"New research from The Diffusion Group (TDG) shows that only 54 percent of all Wii owners have hooked up their console to the Internet, as opposed to 78 percent of all PS3 owners and 73 percent of all Xbox 360 owners."

http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2010/04/percentage-of-consoles-connected-to-the-internet-for-streaming.html

And that's US only, imagine other parts of the world where people have slower internet, or again, just don't bother about online gaming.

We are not ready for DD. I work in networking (internet infrastructure) and I can tell you that we are not there yet. It's the analogy of everyone going to the bank to get their cash at the same time.The only difference is that people *will* actually use the bandwidth (which is not the only limitation btw) at the same time--around 8pm on specific days of the week.

Finally formats don't last forever and I am sure Sony and the BD group know that. Precisely why they could try to accelerate adoption. Honestly, not the most probable outcome, but compared to some of the absurd claims posted around here...(HD-DVD comeback)...

 

[Platon]

And you'd be wrong: (a quick search gives)

"New research from The Diffusion Group (TDG) shows that only 54 percent of all Wii owners have hooked up their console to the Internet, as opposed to 78 percent of all PS3 owners and 73 percent of all Xbox 360 owners."

http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2010/04/percentage-of-consoles-connected-to-the-internet-for-streaming.html

And that's US only, imagine other parts of the world where people have slower internet, or again, just don't bother about online gaming.

We are not ready for DD. I work in networking (internet infrastructure) and I can tell you that we are not there yet. It's the analogy of everyone going to the bank to get their cash at the same time.The only difference is that people *will* actually use the bandwidth (which is not the only limitation btw) at the same time--around 8pm on specific days of the week.

Finally formats don't last forever and I am sure Sony and the BD group know that. Precisely why they could try to accelerate adoption. Honestly, not the most probable outcome, but compared to some of the absurd claims posted around here...(HD-DVD comeback)...

Well DD does not have to be only over the net, there would be the possibility of going to kiosks and load your game there to some USB memory or something like that. There are alternatives to downloading several GB of data through your internet connection.

And it feels with all the torrent sharing/downloading and all the massive video files being shuffled along the internet that a very small population of the internet users (the gamers) downloading a few GB once a month would not impact the whole internet infrastructure...

 

[hoho]

And that's US only, imagine other parts of the world where people have slower internet, or again, just don't bother about online gaming.

If by "other parts" you mean EU and Japan as pretty much the only markets big enough to matter then I'd say it's safe to say both have on average better internet coverage than US.

 

[corduroygt]

nobody cares about lossless audio.

More people buy Blu-ray movies than digital movies, HD and SD combined, and that's including the 100 million iOS devices and cable set top boxes, so you are wrong on that. I don't know if all of them can tell the difference, but they do care enough to choose blu-ray over digital.

This thread has just turned into a HD DVD sour grapes thread, because I'm willing to bet that pretty much everyone here who's against using Blu-ray in consoles bought into HD DVD in the past.

 

[hoho]

Here in Estonia I'm pretty much forced to buy physical disc instead of downloading stuff simply because no big streaming service supports us. If I had the chance I'd prefer DD/streaming any day over physical stuff just piling up in my shelves. Having 100Mbit uncapped downstream covering large majority of population basically for pennies makes it rather easy.

 

[Platon]

More people buy Blu-ray movies than digital movies, HD and SD combined, and that's including the 100 million iOS devices and cable set top boxes, so you are wrong on that. I don't know if all of them can tell the difference, but they do care enough to choose blu-ray over digital.

This thread has just turned into a HD DVD sour grapes thread, because I'm willing to bet that pretty much everyone here who's against using Blu-ray in consoles bought into HD DVD in the past.

How much of that though is caring about the quality and how much is it a force of habit? We have been buying physical media for a few decades whether it has been LPs, cassettes, CD or any other kind of disc, expecting all of the sudden the digital market to just squash all the physical media is a bit too much...

 

[corduroygt]

We have been buying physical media for a few decades whether it has been LPs, cassettes, CD or any other kind of disc, expecting all of the sudden the digital market to just squash all the physical media is a bit too much...

But that's exactly what the people suggesting a DD-only console for next gen are expecting.

 

[Gubbi]

The infrastructure isn't in place everywhere to go DD only. But in a lot of places it is.

Price for internet subscription has been more or less constant the past decade where I live, but speed has gone up quite a bit. I'm currently paying the equivalent of $45/month for 25Mbit.

DD is all about convenience. Being able to buy a game (often at half price), and play it 40 minutes later is just much easier than driving to the mall, go into EB games only to find out they are out of stock of the particular game you wanted. - And that is for impulse buying.

For new releases you could pre-load the game prior to release, and on release date get instant access to the game.

I could see three launch SKUs:

1. Optical+low amount of flash storage (8-16GB).
2. Like 1.) but with mass storage (hdd).
3. Like 2.) but without the optical drive.

Cheers

 

[Gubbi]

But that's exactly what the people suggesting a DD-only console for next gen are expecting.

Of course it is.

There has been a clear trend in music with falling sales of physical media and rising sales of digital download. That trend is repeated in the video content market and it is only natural to expect the same in the games market.

Cheers

 

[-tkf-]

If by "other parts" you mean EU and Japan as pretty much the only markets big enough to matter then I'd say it's safe to say both have on average better internet coverage than US.

I think it would be a big mistake to ignore the new and upcoming markets like China and India with 2-3 billion people.

Of course it is.

There has been a clear trend in music with falling sales of physical media and rising sales of digital download. That trend is repeated in the video content market and it is only natural to expect the same in the games market.

Cheers

Physical distribution of Movies and Music biggest problem was piracy.

 

[hoho]

I think it would be a big mistake to ignore the new and upcoming markets like China and India with 2-3 billion people.

Vast majority of people in both countries are living somewhere between dark and bronze age. The rest are in big citys where high speed internet isn't too much of a problem.

 

[AlphaWolf]

I was actually referring to devices measured in GB, but since you brought it up I think DS carts cost at least a few dollars to produce, which is pretty expensive for 256mb.

The capacity shouldn't really matter in terms of a floor. As the technology advances, higher capacity devices reach that floor.

 

[eastmen]

Game will start selling XBLA games and DLC in a six month trial. The beginning of something bigger. We are discussing so much what will happen next gen that we forget that games on flash might start already now to test the waters for next gen...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-09-game-selling-xbla-games-and-dlc

Gamestop has been doing the same recently.

Alot cheaper to stock cardboard with a code on it that has no value if stolen vs the actual games.

 

[-tkf-]

Vast majority of people in both countries are living somewhere between dark and bronze age. The rest are in big citys where high speed internet isn't too much of a problem.

Really, i would expect them to be behind. Do you have some info on this? maybe i should try and dig myself instead of just "expecting"

 

[eastmen]

More people buy Blu-ray movies than digital movies, HD and SD combined, and that's including the 100 million iOS devices and cable set top boxes, so you are wrong on that. I don't know if all of them can tell the difference, but they do care enough to choose blu-ray over digital.

This thread has just turned into a HD DVD sour grapes thread, because I'm willing to bet that pretty much everyone here who's against using Blu-ray in consoles bought into HD DVD in the past.

I think its a bluray sour grapes thread because some people refuse to believe that DD will over take blurays and people don't care about losseless audio.

I bet you anything that in the united states netflix is streaming more movies per minute than bluray is selling movies per minute.


The problem with bluray is its largely a fixed platform and so the codecs used will not be getting better and the disc space will not be getting larger.

DD is a diffrent beat. New codecs come out that offer better compression and image quality and they can simply add that codec to their support older players that can't handle it will default back to one they can , new ones will get better picture quality with the same bandwidth needs . Connection speeds go up and bitrates can go up also improving quality.

Right now its easy to say oh DD doesn't have this. but that wont be true forever. At one point digital download was 720p and now there is 1080p 5.1 movies on the zune market place for download . Its bitrate may not be as high as bluray.... yet but that hardly matters for the majority of users and its a gap that will continue to diminish year in and year out

corduroygt
Senior Member


Join Date: Nov 2008
Posts: 1,152

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quote:
Originally Posted by Platon
We have been buying physical media for a few decades whether it has been LPs, cassettes, CD or any other kind of disc, expecting all of the sudden the digital market to just squash all the physical media is a bit too much...

But that's exactly what the people suggesting a DD-only console for next gen are expecting.

no its not , the big 3 have been testing DD for the last 5-6 years and MS has been testing it even longer with the first xbox .

Consumers are getting more and more used to DD . Its not like when the record industry first moved to it in the very early 2000s . People are now used to buying music online and are getting used to buying books and streaming video thorugh netflix and buying video games on xbox live or psn .

I think it would be a big mistake to ignore the new and upcoming markets like China and India with 2-3 billion people.
Physical distribution of Movies and Music biggest problem was piracy

If they want to go DD only in the big 3 markets they can allways go optical in the smaller markets . It would actually help fight piracy since the other markets wouldn't have a way to rip the content and put it onto their hardrives and with a DD only system you'd allways have the software calling home.