Bill Gates: Both BluRay and HDDVD doomed for failure

Ok - now where in that article does Bill Gates say they're doomed to failure?

Of course the whole thing is rather ironic considering his very public coming out party for HD-DVD recently.

I guess that blew up in his face and this is round 2.

None of this is to say that I don't believe in digital distribution of course, I just find Gates' timing to be strangely face-saving in nature.
 
xbdestroya said:
Ok - now where in that article does Bill Gates say they're doomed to failure?

Of course the whole thing is rather ironic considering his very public coming out party for HD-DVD recently.

I guess that blew up in his face and this is round 2.
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whatever tickles your fancy
 
xbdestroya said:
Ok - now where in that article does Bill Gates say they're doomed to failure?

Of course the whole thing is rather ironic considering his very public coming out party for HD-DVD recently.

I guess that blew up in his face and this is round 2.

None of this is to say that I don't believe in digital distribution of course, I just find Gates' timing to be strangely face-saving in nature.
Click to expand...

It does seem that way. One would deal as much damage as possible before losing the game.
 
People abandoning physical discs and going download only is as far as computers at home needing more than 640K of memory.
 
He may be right.. putting aside whatever his motivation may be for making such statements.

AMD recently beat Intel for I believe the first time ever in monthly sales, mostly because home media center PCs with AMD 64 chips were the big sellers. Downloadable music is beginning to kill off music CD's for most people, I see no reason, should the necessary tech become widely available, that downloadable movies would not affect prerecorded video discs in a similar way.

Blu Ray may do well as a recordable media, but as far as pre-recorded content goes, I don't think anybody expects either HD-DVD or Blu Ray to be anything more than a niche product for bleeding edge videophiles.
 
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It's obvious that this WILL happen.
But in the end it's exchanging a "thing that doesn't work today but will next year" (that's BLURAY) with a "thing that doesn't work today but will in the next 10 years".

Before we have the structures in place for such a model, we will need optical formats.;

Now, whether DVD will be the dominant format till that happens, well, PCs still get software on bloody CD, and some things on windows STILL want you to have a FLOPPY disk for drivers (see SATA drivers for windows install) - whoever's responsibility that is - so that might be true.

It almost feels like BG is trying anything to make Bluray look bad. Support HDDVD cause it's "superior", then go back and say he's not supporting Bluray cause it's not "consumer friendly", then when people confront him about it he just goes "oh well both HDDVD and Bluray won't succeed anyway!"...

So what, we'll have CDs and DVDs till we have TB-levels of hard drives and 100MB+ internet connections?! Puh-lease!!
 
Well actually maybe we are closer than many people think. 10Mbit should be enough for a good lag free MM experience for a single person/single computer.
Gridcomputing experiments, I know of, is being done here in Denmark have succeeded in providing remote computing on a 200Mhz PC via a 10Mbit connection:
http://www.diku.dk/forskning/distlab
It's going to be interesting to see in due time, how the Grid computing capabilities of Cell will be used.
 
It's not that there aren't 8, 10, 12 even 24Mbit connections widely available from ISP's already.
It's that even though if you take some 12Mbit connection, it isn't guaranteed the wiring in your home is up to it, and I don't see many homes making big investments in rewiring just to be able to download their favorite movies.
 
rabidrabbit said:
It's not that there aren't 8, 10, 12 even 24Mbit connections widely available from ISP's already..
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Curious, but how widely?

Many of the higher speed services I've read about have been limited to certain areas. Usually in a country (barring some exceptions, I'm sure, like Korea/Scandinavian countries), nationwide the speeds available are a lot lower than that.

That said, I was just reading about trials starting for 24Mb connections in Dublin, which is surely a good sign :p (only a couple of years ago we didn't have broadband PERIOD).
 
My 10 Mbit connection at home will be upgraded to 100/10 (10 Mbit upload) in a couple of months. And it cost around 45$/month. You can also get 100/100 but that cost a bit more. Around 75$ if i'm not mistaken.

Though i'm guessing that it'll take quite some time before this is available outside of the cities.
 
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Bjorn said:
My 10 Mbit connection at home will be upgraded to 100/10 (10 Mbit upload) in a couple of months. And it cost around 45$/month. You can also get 100/100 but that cost a bit more. Around 75$ if i'm not mistaken.

Though i'm guessing that it'll take quite some time before this is available outside of the cities.
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Where, though? The market for movies is global ;)
 
Titanio said:
Where, though? The market for movies is global ;)
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Sweden. But i agree, it'll take quite some time before the end of physical medias in this case. But afaik, Bill G didn't say that HDDVD or BR are doomed to fail, he said that they will be the last physical media formats. Which if course might be wrong but that's another thing.
 
It takes me 3 to 4 days to download a 15GB (SDTV) Anime. Now this may be practical for DVDs and whatnot but High-Def material would be way to big to transfer. Also, ISPs want you to REFRAIN from dowloading 15GB of material (at all). Try dowloading 20GB every month and see what your ISP does (i've been walking on eggshells myself). Although, I think this disk based media may be the last before a better infrastructure is put into place for the Sharing of Digital Media (as Mr.Gates has stated). I just don't think where quite there yet.

Oh yeah...15GB?=75 Episodes

/me runs
 
I will say this: digital content delivery is in Sony's best interests (down the line) as well. I hope they don't lose sight of that one-time and future goal of theirs in the posturing that's sure to come in the next few years between MS and Sony (as their rivalry seemingly intensifies on multiple fronts). Sure I think they should push blu-ray as much as possible, but at the same time concurrently work on a robust means of digital distribution.

That is of course part of what Cell is about, and you'd think that with their own movie studios and Stringer at the head (who came from there) they can keep their fingers on the pulse; but companies have gotten bogged down in the present before, and certainly not to their benefit.

Sony and MP3 players comes to mind as an example of something they should have been on the forefront of, but instead got sideswiped.
 
xbdestroya said:
I will say this: digital content delivery is in Sony's best interests (down the line) as well. I hope they don't lose sight of that one-time and future goal of theirs in the posturing that's sure to come in the next few years between MS and Sony (as their rivalry seemingly intensifies on multiple fronts). Sure I think they should push blu-ray as much as possible, but at the same time concurrently work on a robust means of digital distribution.

That is of course part of what Cell is about, and you'd think that with their own movie studios and Stringer at the head (who came from there) they can keep their fingers on the pulse; but companies have gotten bogged down in the present before, and certainly not to their benefit.

Sony and MP3 players comes to mind as an example of something they should have been on the forefront of, but instead got sideswiped.
Click to expand...

It's an inevitable future, of that I have no doubt. And I think Sony will be making - or should be making - motions toward that in the near future, including with PS3. I doubt they'll take the opposite side of the fence on this issue simply because of MS - you could say they made this mistake with MP3, and I think they know that, and have learned from that. But everything that'll be done in the short to mid term will just be "introduction", really. I doubt it'd be in a position to replace a physical format for quite a long time, as far as most customers are concerned.
 
Until home internet connections reach 50 - 100mbit, physical discs will not be replaced.
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it's already begun. almost ever cable provider has digital "on demand" content that's starting to take a bite out of the rental market. and they've started adding extra content like audio comentaries and behind the scenes documentaries like we see on DVD's.
 
see colon said:
it's already begun. almost ever cable provider has digital "on demand" content that's starting to take a bite out of the rental market. and they've started adding extra content like audio comentaries and behind the scenes documentaries like we see on DVD's.
Click to expand...
There are people that like buying movies and owning them. Thats why I believe there will always be some kind of physical format. The same way a lot of people prefer to buy a cd, than downloading it from itunes.
 
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