Blu-ray is dead - heckuva job, Sony!
- Thread starter Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
- Start date
Really? All the new movies I have been buying are on Bluray. Lets see I bought:
Batman Begins
Dark Knight (preordered)
Wanted (preordered)
The Incredible Hulk
Iron Man
Matrix Trilogy
Transformers
and these are some of the movies I can think of. I guess pricing for each disc is still too high? I cant go back to DVDs after having seen Bluray perform!
Batman Begins
Dark Knight (preordered)
Wanted (preordered)
The Incredible Hulk
Iron Man
Matrix Trilogy
Transformers
and these are some of the movies I can think of. I guess pricing for each disc is still too high? I cant go back to DVDs after having seen Bluray perform!
How can one person be so horrifically wrong twice in the same life time? Train wreck logic leads the way yet again...
The argument is more that people care more about convenience than quality. See: MP3 versus CD/SACD/DVD-Audio.
I dont expect 25-50GB Blu Ray quality to be on download anytime soon. But 6-7 GB "hi-def" stuff (basically what is on Xbox live now) will probably be "good enough" for consumers.
Personally I think Blu Ray's success is inevitable. There should come a day when Blu Ray players are just as cheap as DVD, then, why would you choose DVD?
That said, Blu Ray is likely to win a much smaller market. Silver discs in general are a dying breed, this is in full effect in CD's, where Wal Mart and other retailers recently began to majorly downsize CD sections after years of falling sales, which is the beginning of the end. Theres an entire young generation out there to whom buying silver discs of music is a somewhat foreign concept. The risk (inevitability?) that spreads to movies is there.
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I don't believe that for one second. A download-able title that matches the PQ and AQ of a BR disc will simply not be feasible to the content provider. There will be several layers of compression. Not to mention internet providers are starting to place caps on bandwidth.
For renting media, it will be a good service but for purchasing media, I prefer to take the higher quality and not deal with the DRM.
Mintmaster
Veteran
Maybe compatibility?
Until all drives are BluRay (in your laptop, your cars, your portable player, your bedroom, maybe your friends' houses, etc.), there will always be an advantage to DVD. Your logic will work for young people just starting out on their own in a few years, but for everyone else with working DVD players it won't be such an obvious decision.
I also noticed you said 'should' instead of 'will', and with good reason. With low marketshare, I don't know if Sony and the BDA is willing to price players and discs as low as those of DVD, so you've got a chicken and egg problem.
The main reason DVD overtook VHS is convenience. Random access means no rewind/ff, and the form factor makes it easier to store and transport while being nicer to boot. Higher quality was just icing on the cake. Not only does BR offer no convenience advantage, but the quality improvement is not as obvious on typical TVs (even small HDTVs).
Digital distribution is here now, not coming soon. Rentals will be replaced by on-demand services from Comcast, AT&T, etc. They're just skimming the cream right now, but they are fully capable of charging less than rental stores while giving a higher cut to the studios. Once this becomes mainstream (this is truly inevitable), then you can decide whether consumers want physical discs or not.
I can't either and that's why I netflix them now. Maybe you're just starting out? but I've been with hi def since inception with over 100+ movies. The initial love wore off, sanity set in and competition set in. $25+ for new releases? yes I can hunt them down but you know, I've done that for 2+ years now and it gets tiring after a while. I rather just walking into a Best Buy and pick it up. I can't do that without paying a sweet premium.
I'm tired of chasing the great deals of titles and frankly there aren't many. If you've been there since the beginning, you'll see it's just the same titles going on sale repeatedly.
Take that aside, there's a major issue here with consumer acceptance. All of my friends have been over numerous times and watched many movies in HD DVD/BluRay on (now) a new 60inch Pioneer Elite Pro151 with a Paradigm 5.1 setup in a decidacted A/V room. The seating is 8ft away. Ideal conditons for BR to shine, right? And it does. They all enjoy it but for over 2 years now, not ONE of them has cared enough to go get their own. They still buy dvd's. They simply don't care and all of them are well off with majority in the tech field, thus disposable income and being luddites isn't an issue.
Outside of people lon enthusiast sites, where we believe our hobbies to be reality for everyone else, people don't care as much. I'll say what I've been saying for a while. If BR is to succeed, it'll be done through forced adoption, not consumer choice but if the prices comes down to DVD levels, then business model doesn't work.
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
Maybe if you are living in some has been 1st world country but not in the good ol Netherlands. I doubt size will be the problem. 4mbit is about the slowest you can get around here, im stuck with that now because of lame ISP's in this part of the country (had 20mbit back home for the same price...), no caps, no limits, and with that you can get like 40gb or so in a day.
Also size for providers is hardly a problem I think. Tons of people here have payed usenet accounts. You pay like 8 euro's a month and can download unlimited and full speed. So I dont see why a content provider cant do that at decent priceses.
For DRM, just drop that. Its useless anyway. Every teen these days can find whatever movie he want to download in less than 5 minutes. So what is DRM on your protected downloads going to do? make sure nobody copies them? yeah right, than the neighbourhood kid will just download it.
Betanumerical
Veteran
Blu-ray is dying, yet it outsold DVD's in Japan. What a odd death.
Im curious, if we are going to talk about Blu Rays death perhaps we should know a bit about how compression technology is scaling over time?
What kind of quality does say 5gb (Rounded out for ease of use) net you now in terms of quality/frame rate on a 90min movie compared to say 1 year ago? 2 years ago? 3?
Also sorry for the multi-parter but what are the obvious replacement options for Blu Ray in areas without highspeed internet? Would a flash/kiosk approach work for this type of content in areas without the needed internet infrastructure?
What kind of quality does say 5gb (Rounded out for ease of use) net you now in terms of quality/frame rate on a 90min movie compared to say 1 year ago? 2 years ago? 3?
Also sorry for the multi-parter but what are the obvious replacement options for Blu Ray in areas without highspeed internet? Would a flash/kiosk approach work for this type of content in areas without the needed internet infrastructure?
quest55720
Regular
I think it is greed by the movie studios that have hurt the format. Most people don't shop online and the price of blu ray movies in store are will outragous IMO. I see to many movies 29.99 or higher on the store shelves. It is time for the studios to just drop the MSRP of blu movies to close to DVD pricing. They want to phase out DVD because of piracy and other reasons. You are not going to get people to switch over at the current movie pricing. Player pricing will drop over the next year where people might consider blu ray. Most will reject it when they see the movie pricing.
But at least with VHS you weren't forced to watch the compulsory adverts
How about the netflix hd on xbox live. It may not be bluray quality but it seems that they are able to adjust the bitrate on the fly depending on your connection speed. So someone could take bluray transfers with perhaps new verisons of the codecs in a year or so and then have them scale based on your connection speed and get close enough to bluray quality for the average person not to care.
I have 120 hd dvds and 20 blurays. (about 80 hd dvds were bought in the fire sales ) but if i can start streaming movies that are inbetween my fios hd and bluray i might go for that . The nextflix hd on my 360 is very interesting to me
I have 120 hd dvds and 20 blurays. (about 80 hd dvds were bought in the fire sales ) but if i can start streaming movies that are inbetween my fios hd and bluray i might go for that . The nextflix hd on my 360 is very interesting to me
I believe music on physical media still outsell digital downloaded music today on a worldwide basis.
Prediction of Blu-ray's demise has been rampant these few weeks due to some analyst's "prediction", but I don't think it's over (Who's the author of that article anyway ?
) 4% of the worldwide market is not a small number to begin with. Recent movie and player sales continue to show an upward trend. The only short term threat is the recession.
I think I know what you actually mean here, but the way you put it is strange. You do realize that BR actually incorporates 2 layers of DRM, right? And in my specific case, I've spent far more time fighting with AACS DRM and its restrictions as present on HD-DVD and BR than I ever have with digitally distributed content.
5.1 audio is supported, yes. In the specific case of XBLVM downloads it is in the form of multichannel WMA that is transcoded on the fly to DD by the 360 (unless you have one of the rare receivers that can decode WMA bitstreams).
Anecdotal evidence:
A friend of mine just bought a $200 BR player. He's not the type to splurge on technology and though he's a movie buff he's not obsessive about quality either, but $200 was the magic price point for him. I'm thinking a combination of reasonable pricing, marketing and big content releases could definitely move some units and that BR is far from dead. It is OTOH also very far from succeeding DVD as the content delivery platform of choice and the longer it takes to do this, the less likely it is to ever happen. Should that happen, at least some BR players also make good (if expensive) upscaling DVD players.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
If HD-DVD had won they might have been able to drop the price. However, costs of creating new Blu-Ray duplication lines are significantly higher than those of HD-DVD. In time they might be able to get the cost of production and duplication down near that of DVD, but I wouldn't count on it anytime soon.
As I've said in the past. The war HD-DVD and Blu-Ray were fighting wasn't against each other, it was always against DVD. And for all things related to your general purchasing consumer, DVD holds all the cards. HD-DVD had the best chance of supplanting DVD, but unfortunately rather than studios passing on the savings of creating HD-DVD, they instead matched the price of Blu-Ray for greater return on investment.
A short sighted strategy that not only cost them the HD war but could also likely cause HD physical media to lose out to DVD.
Regards,
SB
that guy didn't know what he's talking about the first time, he still doesn't.
blu-ray sales are low because people are spending less in general. and their shifting more of their money towards saving/investing. movies are considered minor luxuries to the majority of people. most are content to go to the theater a couple times a month & just watch TV. the only titles which have done really well are blockbusters which people enjoy re-watching & showing friends.
when the economy gets more stable and the MSRP drops below $20 (w/ $12-15 being typical price) it will pick up. a $150 player doesn't mean much if the movies for it are $30-40.
blu-ray sales are low because people are spending less in general. and their shifting more of their money towards saving/investing. movies are considered minor luxuries to the majority of people. most are content to go to the theater a couple times a month & just watch TV. the only titles which have done really well are blockbusters which people enjoy re-watching & showing friends.
when the economy gets more stable and the MSRP drops below $20 (w/ $12-15 being typical price) it will pick up. a $150 player doesn't mean much if the movies for it are $30-40.
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