DVD Format War Already Over? 640
An anonymous reader writes "'Nobody likes false starts' - claims the assertive and risky article "10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed" published by Audioholics which outlines their take on why the new Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD formats will attain nothing more than niche status in a marketplace that is brimming with hyperbole. Even though the two formats have technically just hit the streets, the 'Ten reasons' article takes a walk down memory lane and outline why the new DVD tech has a lot to overcome."
They might have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
Another reason for failure (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Reason number 10 the most likely reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that HDTV is slated to replace NTSC come hell or high water. And those high-dev DVD's really do look nicer on HDTVs.
'course when the deadline actually rolls around, does anyone think the switchover will actually happen? I forecast indefinite extensions, myself.
No, no, no! (Score:5, Insightful)
I fundamentally disagree with this statement. Most people now have at least heard of HDTV; there have been plenty of adverts for high-def digital cable and satellite services here in the UK, especially in the run-up to the World Cup (which can be viewed in HD with the required equipment).
I'm also pretty sure that people buying larger TVs today are buying HDTVs. The big thing about it is the 'Wow' factor of these sets. With a good HD source, the massive screens are pretty amazing. Now, people bought enough DVDs of old VHS tapes for a huge back catalog of old (and oftentimes, shite) films to be released on DVD. What is to say it won't happen again?
Personally, I believe it is far to early to tell what will happen. But, no matter what Audioholics says, High definition IS the future and it WILL take over eventually.
Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe there will be a demand for HD DVD and Blu Ray when HD sets are a lot more common, but not until then.
Re:They might have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
I backup all my DVDs onto external hard drives and throw the shiny discs into the closest. The flimsy plastic is really only good for a couple of uses before scratching, fingerprints or other marks degraded them.
HD DVDs would be useful as a transient storage container for transporting data between locations, because its eay to transport and after copying the data to its real location it can be thrown away. But not as a backup. Same as DVDs today.
Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual uptake rates for HDTV are anemic. THats likely to continue for the rest of the decade. People are replacing dead TVs with HDs, but not running out to buy HDs (and not always replacing with HD, since there's still a huge price difference). Until the price difference drops dramaticly, and we give it most of a decade for the old sets to break, we won't see a significant market penetration.
10 really good reasons plus a new one (Score:5, Insightful)
But they forgot another one - most Americans don't have, and don't want to buy, an HDTV set that would even need either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, nor do most consumers see any reason to pay twice as much for the same product they can use today.
Is this true in a few years? Perhaps not. But it's true today.
Which leads us to the conclusion that both Sony and our other player decided to fight this battle early, after what happened to them when Beta and VHS fought - the stakes are so high they're trying to front-end the decision, but both sides ended up trying to steal a march on their competition, resulting in two formats way too early for consumers to be interested in either.
Congress will ensure at least one format succeeds (Score:1, Insightful)
The change won't be as well pronounced as VHS to DVD, since VHSes couldn't be played on a DVD box. However, HD-DVD / BluRay will not be a DVD-Audio. With DVD-Audio, congress didn't mandate we all switch from stereo to 5.1 systems. Had they, my feeling is you would have seen a slow but steady uptake, as I am sure you will with the HD formats. Further more a CD sounds pretty damn good right now, but there is a lot to be longed for in the interlaced crud that comes off of DVDs, the air, and cable.
Re:They might have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar to DVD... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mass confusion. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats whats going to kill these formats.
You have HD dvd players (upscaling) that dont play HD-dvd's, Tv's are HD ready, HD compatable, what HD, 720p, 1080i/p? Component, DVi, HDMI, HDCP, region codes or not... Can I play my CD in my HD-DVD, my blu ray in my car..?
Your avererage consumer, ne average sales guy doesnt know the answers, it its new expensive and confusing it wont sell.
Re:10 really good reasons plus a new one (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that the various companies pushing "HD" movie formats are *radically* overestimating how many HDTV sets are actually out there. Most people I know don't own an HDTV. Most people in the U.S. don't own an HDTV. Most people in the U.S. don't *have* the disposable income to buy an expensive set. And as the article said, if you don't have HD channels, then the picture is worse.
HDTVs won't be everywhere until *most* of the content on regualar broadcast TV/cable is in HD, and the sets are under $400 or so, and HD DVD players drop to under $100. And that's a long ways away.
Plus, many people just bought new TVs in the last few years, since the price of 32" CRTs dropped through the floor. They're not about to upgrade.
Talk about your mountains out of molehills (Score:3, Insightful)
Get a fucking grip people.
Re:No, no, no! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:#3 is the killer (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah you left out one:
- more robust forms of DRM
In my mind, this is the real motivation behind the HD-DVD / BD camps -- they aren't trying to sell consumers on HD quality, they're trying to convince Hollywood to adopt the format based on how well you can lock it down. Then, just kill of DVD's. Why entice consumers when you can *force* them, right?
Of course this scheme will fail -- you can't convince Hollywood to embrace a new technology (for any reason) because they are scared of change and hate risks. You have to drag them kicking and screaming into new technology.
480 lines ought to be enough for anybody (Score:2, Insightful)
Reason 11 - no one cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Great. I can see the zipper on the back of Darth Vader's uniform, or the edges of Spock's ears. Big flipping deal. DV-Audio died for the same reason quadrophonic music died: who listens to music in that chair set up just so? Outside of audiophiles, no one.
This is technology without a need or a demand.
Re:No, no, no! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It has a richer tone (Score:1, Insightful)
Reduced dynamic range
Wears out
Huge
Sounds terrible.
Yeah, I can see how you like vinyl better.
wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong, and this is why this whole article is useless. Remember the first time you used a modem, how you thought "this is how all information should be transmitted", and when you tried to go out and tell everybody about it, their response was basically "leave me alone kid, I'm reading the newspaper here"? 10 years later, and people are starting to realize that "OMFG, newspapers might become obsolete!!!!?" Pleople like their technology at least 5 years behind of its time.
I'm not really defending the new formats (and I won't buy into them until they sell me a drive that can play both formats for = $100), but a bunch of guys saying "we don't need some new fancy format, we're fine with good old DVDs" sounds familiar.. Lets talk again in 5 years.
Re:Another reason for failure (Score:5, Insightful)
Zip files, 120MB floppy (whatever it was called): Expensive, more reliable, more storage, more features, etc., FAILURE.
DVD: Cheap, convenient, and sufficient for most people.
HD-DVD: Expensive, higher res, more storage, etc. FAILURE?
Re:They might have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
Under what conditions? Sealed in an air-tight, moisture-proof box? Handled with gloves like any fragile document from the 13th Century? The cheap media most people buy is about as reliable a hard drive.
Crap. No other word for it.
I've been backing up on hard drives for over four years now - in fact, I now have 8 hard drives purely for dedicated backups (well, I have a 1.5TB media library). Every now and then I need to restore a file that has been accidentally deleted or corrupted and I have yet to go to one of my drives and find it unusable.
Granted its only been four years, and yes, hard drives are not archive grade storage mediums. If I wanted archive quality I'd go back to backing up on tape drives - that is the only proven archive media in the industry today. I've gone back to DVDs and CDs that I haven't used on twelve months and find they are unreadable - let alone four years. I'm sure there are people on /. that have had working hard drives for 7, 8, hell 10 years+.
Even audio CDs don't last more than a couple of years, particularly if you do something ridiculous, such as actually use them. Who here as a pile of audio CDs they bought in the 90s that are degraded beyond use?
Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost. Those high def DVD's really do look nicer on ***BIG*** HDTVs. On smaller ("regular size") tvs dvds and hddvds look pretty much the same at normal viewing distances.
Admittedly 'big TVs' are in right now, but its going to be a *long* time before everyone has one. (If ever; some people are perfectly happy with a 20", 25" or 30" set.) Plus, for someone to be won over by an HD media format, he's going to be looking at his other playback devices -- his laptop/portable dvd player, the one mounted into the back of the seats in his SUV, the one in his bedroom, the one at the summer cabin...
Even if he has a big screen in his living room, the fact that the disc won't play anywhere else will be an issue. Tapes lingered on for years beside cds partly because they were recordable while cds took ages to get there, and partly because all our 'walkmans', 'car stereos', 'ghetto blasters' and other devices still used them. We could buy the CD, and make a tape to use in our other players until the rest of our world caught up.
Can we easily do that *that* with our HD purchases? Nevermind perserving the "HD" Can we even easily hook up a CD burner or SVHS VCR to our HD player to make copies? Can we rip them to our PSPs, and iPod videos?
The whole HD format just isn't looking to be very user friendly. That's going to hurt it. I think there's a very decent chance it will be repeat of the "LaserDisc".
Re:The Markets Will Determine The Winner Of This W (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reason number 10 the most likely reason (Score:3, Insightful)
The MPAA members and other studios will start in a few years to release their blockbuster movies HD-ONLY and THEN we will see "joe sixpack" switching to the formats in droves... they'll have to upgrade to get "matrix 4" or whatever.
Not to mention the writing controls which will make it more difficult to use these sweet new large-formats for archival purposes, and the discs will probably be even cheaper (in quality) than dvd's are, meaning they'll last about six months if that.
no my friend, the "**AA" want you to get in on this more than anything... their business model depends on it.
One over the top claim (Score:5, Insightful)
This is so full of it.
If they had pushed out CD's to replace them with DVD-A standard then the DVD-A DRM would have been cracked..
As it is now most people dont use it so there has not been a huge impetus to crack it.. yet it has already been effectively circumvented through that windvd crack.
this guy is a starry eyed idiot if he actually believes that drek he spews.
Re:The Markets Will Determine The Winner Of This W (Score:3, Insightful)
They will buy neither to avoid getting stuck with what may be the next Beta.
I don't quite follow this. Beta got trounced by VHS largely because the consumers found the image quality acceptable, given the longer recording times. It's the consumers that made Beta, well, Beta.
If consumers don't find that the new formats offer enough, compared to what they have, then they both will become the next Beta.
That's the alpha and omega of it. (sorry, sorry everybody.)
What is the porn industry doing? (Score:3, Insightful)
The porn industry!
I understand porn is a big percentage of DVD sales too.
While I agree with most of the points of the article I would like to hear
what the big producers in the porn industry have to say.
When the price hits $100 I'll buy one for my computer for backup.
Re:wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting the compression right is hard (Score:4, Insightful)
There are some big problems with Blu-Ray. Getting the compression right is hard. I was watching a Blu-Ray demo at the Sony Style store at the Metreon in San Francisco. Now this is Sony gear in a Sony retail store set up by Sony employees playing a Sony demo disk in an environment intended to show the technology at its best. And I'm seeing blocky areas of bright light jumping in the background in a concert video. It looks like the compression algorithm has trouble with camera rotation.
Some of the content looks great; some looks terrible. It's painfully clear that you can't just dump the content into the compressor and expect good results; it's going to become another labor-intensive step in post production, at least for a while.
I have to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
I also wouldn't count too heavily on tapes as being "proven archive media". Have you ever heard of people having to "bake the tapes"? That is because a lot of tapes that are only a couple of decades old have started to seriously degrade. Also, you can't just throw tapes into a non-climate controlled environment any more than you can a CD. About the only area that a tape has greater reliablity than a CD is when they are tossed in a pile on a desk without being put in a case. And that is only because the tapes have a built in case.
Re:They might have a point (Score:4, Insightful)
For the most part I agree (Score:4, Insightful)
For someone with a similar large format setup, this technology is a worthwhile leap in quality because I can see the lack of resolution and compression artifacts inherent in many DVD transfers. Having a large display surface area makes noticing such issues much easier even for novices. However, those people who are content with their Sony and Hitachi consumer level television regardless of the display technology involved (tube, LCD, and Plasma) probably won't see the difference nor will they care.
I'll go through the points quickly...
1. Nobody likes false starts
I agree that the Toshiba HD-DVD player is lacking in terms of usability and quality, but it is a Toshiba and a first generation product so bugs are expected. It would be rather unfair for me to compare to my US$10k+ Meridian 800 series [meridian-audio.com] DVD player that has gone through a number of revisions for refinement to a first generation DVD player from many years ago. Even if they were both new and unused, products and implementations improve with time. However, even the Toshiba HD-DVD "budget" player with its superior resolution still makes my combination of Meridian 800 with line quadrupler look soft in comparison.
This technology cannot simply be written off even though I am disappointed 1080p isn't available. For a majority of consumers, the difference between 1080i and 1080p will be even less noticable than the jump from 480i/p to 1080i. Even for an enthusiast this isn't a problem until the new 3-chip DLP solutions capable of playing 1080p are widely available from Marantz and Runco. I also find the lack of HDMI is a blessing in disguise. Sure, we can't run 1080p and multichannel audio over one cable but the amount of copy protection possible on that interface makes me cringe. The fact that movie houses have a right to protect their content isn't in dispute, but the very notion that with the flip of a switch any component can be rendered useless through key revocation makes purchasing expensive and esoteric a much larger risk than it should be. If nothing else, I expect the esoteric ultra-high end companies will produce (and they have in the past) a better interconnect format but that won't make a difference with Joe Public.
2. Format Wars Don't Sell Players
Agreed. This curse hit SACD and DVD-Audio as few years ago. The initial bickering and lack of material made buying into either format a liability. Furthermore, there were artists on both formats that I liked which weren't available universally across formats so I bought machines that played each format. Other technical problems such as no individual channel volume and delay adjustments and the lack of a single digital output made hooking up the player difficult for consumers. Meridian and others made a proprietary single interconnect but this wasn't available in any budget machines.
Arguably, the general public doesn't care about multi-channel audio because CDs are good enough. Besides fanatics such as myself, who here has both an SACD player and a DVD-Audio player? Not many. Penetration of these formats into the market has been very slow and nearly non-existant. Interestingly my car has a DVD-Audio system from the factory but the manufacturer probably did research and realized that their target demographic probably has the disposable income to play with such formats.
3. HD DVD and Blu-ray are NOT Quantum Leaps in Technology
From the article: "Consumers, most of whom rarely know how to properly configure their players or home theater systems, are perfectly content with their current DVD players..." (emphasis mine). The general public doesn't care. Many times I see my friend's te
Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that (Score:5, Insightful)
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole problem with today's entertainment industry!
Re:They might have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
Not me, unless you count "two" as a pile. And those two failed because I let them bang around in my truck and get scratched to hell, not because they were played or otherwise magically rotted.
Given much less care than LPs or cassette tapes, virtually all of them play as well now as they did when I bought them. ExactAudioCopy does occasionally report an error or two when I'm ripping them. I'd estimate that 90% of my discs are error free, and the rest are mostly 99% or better (EAC figures.) And while I don't deliberately manhandle them, I'm far from a paranoid audiophile with alcohol swabs and white gloves.
And as far as burn-'em-yourself discs, I've not had any data discs degrade on me (that I'm aware of.) Those, I definitely treat better than audio discs, with limited handling and their lives spent inside clean CaseLogic CD folders.
As for hard drives, I certainly haven't had the good luck you seem to be having. If I have an older drive that is powered down for a couple of years, the chances of it spinning up seem to be far from 100%. And that's not just cheap Maxtors I'm talking about (although Maxtor is no proof against failure), I've had it happen with a number of server-class SCSI drives, too. While it's certainly not a 50% fail rate, I'd guess that long-term stored hard drives seem to have only about a 90-95% chance of spinning up again.
No medium is perfect. And there's another point I've not mentioned yet, and that's the availability of readers / interface electronics. If I had backed up all my valuables on an old Winchester drive, what are the chances I'd be able to read it today? First, I'd have to find a working machine with an ISA bus, video card, possibly a monitor, a keyboard, and some kind of boot drive. I'd need to scrounge a copy of DOS, although pirating an ancient one off the Internet seems pretty doable (but creating a bootable disk is less simple.) Then, I'd have to find a WD503 ISA card for it, and cables. I'd probably have to come up with a network card, too, so I could get the data off the machine.
Of course, these same arguments will hold true for CDs and DVDs at some point in the not-too-distant future, as well as any current hard drive communications bus. Maybe it won't be BluRay or HD-DVD that spells doom for the CD/DVD/hard-drive backup plan, but it will be something.
Re:Yep, it's the Laserdisk all over again (Score:4, Insightful)
It already exists. It's called "the internet".
I remember reading this somewhere, and I totally agree with it. By the time this is settled it will be like the battle between Floppy cameras and Smart Media cameras: both lost and were obsolete.
There are those rumors about a Netflix set-top box, or that they will finally integrate into TiVo. That's what is going to happen. It's clear as a bell. After all, once the pipes get big enough, why should I bother to pay $20 to buy a disc I'll watch once or twice when I can pay $2 to watch it each time I want, when I want. That's what PPV is, but instead of having 100 movies to choose from, I'll have Netflix's whole inventory. ANY movie. Like those old Quest commercials: "We have every move ever made in every format in every langauge starting any time" (or something like that).
The only DVDs I watch I get from Netflix because I don't like buying them. Why should I pay $20 for a movie I'll watch once, or $50+ for a single season of a TV show? If Netflix released a set top box (or makes my TiVo do it) so that whatever is in my queue is automatically downloaded on to the drive during the night or whatever, I'll be happy. Watch what I want, when I want. And because hard drive space is cheap (DVDs are only 9 gigs tops, uncompressed) they can pre-load more than the 3 movies that I would currently be allowed to watch (based on the plan I pay for).
Let the early adopters and studios sort it out. My way is more convenient. It's cheaper (you can P2P the popular movies between boxes) and there is no distribution. My way has no postage, no delivery, no "I'll go to the store and buy the movie tomorrow". No broken discs, no scratched discs, no lost discs.
When there is a winner in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war, I hope they enjoy it. They'll have a year TOPS before the average consumer passes them by for set top boxes and the iTheater store. The only chance they have is with high-def content, and bandwidth and the ability download films 24/7 will nix that advantage pretty soon.
Re:The Markets Will Determine The Winner Of This W (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The Markets Will Determine The Winner Of This W (Score:5, Insightful)
In the case of VHS vs Beta, consumers didn't have a reasonable other choice. If they wanted to videotape Star Trek episodes, they had to pick one or the other. So the decision wasn't whether to buy, it was what to buy. And VHS killed Beta because of the extended recording times.
However, there's already a choice that's a clear market winner - DVD. Players are cheap, (I can now get a DVD with stereo audio and DVI for $30) media is cheap (movies cost ~ $10-$20) and it's widely supported.
So the choice consumers make is not "Which HD-DVD to buy?" but rather "DVD or one of them expensive, risky HD thingies". If they go DVD, they get all their movies and titles, decent video/sound quality, and don't pay too much. If they go HD-whatever, they get marginally better video, no noticable difference in sound, and a limited, high-priced movie selection.
Which would YOU buy? I don't know about you, but I'm in NO HURRY to adopt HD-DVD - I might end up buying an LCD TV in about a year to replace my aging 19" CRT...
On a side note, I've gotten to where I just don't like DVDs anymore. I have 5 kids and a busy career. When we rent DVDs, we end up paying late fees a good percentage of the time. When we buy them, they often get scratched or lost. I don't have time to be a "DVD cop". But a Dish Network Pay-Per-View is easily recorded on the DVR and played over and over, with no media to lose, no trips to the local video store, and no stupid envelopes to mail back. (a la NetFlix)
When we want a movie, we buy it on PPV. The selection still isn't fantastic yet, but it's just so much less hassle! IPTV is definitely where I'm going to go, as soon as it's available for my DVR!
My vote for the next media format: IPTV on-demand, with a DVR or iTunes. The real question is simply: does Apple have the gonads to actually penetrate the living room, or are they content to just be a cool fad?
Upconvert DVDs Look Good on HD (Score:4, Insightful)
Chris
The deadline is not for HDTV but for digital TV (Score:5, Insightful)
All that would be required would be a new receiver box. I've heard that they are even considering subsidizing these receivers for everyone, since the sooner they can complete this conversion, the sooner they can auction off the current analog TV spectrum for billions upon billions of dollars.
Re:They might have a point (Score:3, Insightful)
As for tapes - there's some on the desk near me from 1983. People read tapes that age all the time with care (I think a lubricant is used to stop flaking) and tape technology has improved a lot since then. A SDLT320 (160GB) is not even a big tape anymore, and you can throw a lot of tapes in a big plastic tub with a lid and keep it in an air conditioned office and trust them later.
Re:No, no, no! (Score:5, Insightful)
For that matter my parents, who do not work blue collar jobs and do make more than me, still don't own a large HDTV and I'm not sure they ever will unless I get them one as a present. It is simply in the "too expensive" category. In their world, TVs are meant to cost a couple hundred bucks, and they don't care about the pretty picture. They've been to my house, they've seen Discovery HD on a nice TV with nice sound, it's just not a priority. So it *IS* expensive in terms of being "more than most peopel want to pay for it". Something is cheap when people feel like the price you are asking is less than it should cost. No matter what the absolute price, if they see it as not worth what you are asking, it's expensive.
Re:Mass confusion. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They might have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a decent backup cheap, either optical or cheap hard drives are fine for a few years - just store them in a different building than your PC.
If you want to backup something important, put a tape in a safety deposit box. Just verify your backups when you make them, as cheap tape drives will go bad without any indication that they're no longer making usable tapes. (Good tape drives read after writing, to avoid the problem.)
And always remember: RAID is not backup. Neither is anything you can accidentally delete, or have trashed by a virus, or whatnot. A hard drive isn't a backup until it's disconnected.
Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that (Score:5, Insightful)
As an anecdotal response, I know of no person with a HDTV. Not my family, not my friends, not my coworkers. I know a few people who have travel LCDs; everyone else has SDTV CRTs. A lot of people have LCDs for their computer displays (that's what things come with now), and most of the people I know that upgraded specifically to a LCD run dual-head with a CRT for graphics work.
HDTV is really just another example of the industry killing it's upgrade path with stupidity. It's a noticable, but not incredible, increase in quality. They screwed the early adopters, it's still too expensive, and the entire product landscape is crippled by DRM. Who wants to spend three times more money to get a slightly better looking picture, but that they can't use to do what they can already do with their older equipment?
Also, the AV Science Forum isn't exactly unbiased, either.
Reasons 11 and 12. (Score:2, Insightful)
11. There's crap-all to watch. Who really give's a hairy hoot if you can see "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" in 1080i, 480p, or 1b (1 bit). Hell, if forced to watch in one of these formats, give me the blinking white dot anytime.
12. It'll be obsolete technololgy. By the times the tech companies are done bickering over the best format, and there's buy-in from the major studios, and a significant number of titles have been published, and the desired price-point has been reached, and HDTV has made a significant in-road into consumer's houses, the "next big thing" will be available.
HDV (Holographic Versatile Disc) [wikipedia.org] offers nearly 4TB of storage on a single disc. It's currently beyond the price-point of any sane consumer, but could easily hit a rational consumer price before Blu-Ray or HD-DVD seriously take off.
Re:wrong on so many fronts... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people don't want to spend four digits amounts for a TV set. They go to the store, they see a $300 TV that's the size they want, and they buy it. Maybe they really want a LCD for some reason, so they buy the $450 20" LCD. Most people see the prices as 2x - 3x more than a CRT, and say forget it.
Extremely few people are willing to spend the $1800+ to have a 1080p TV. That's just an absurd price to pay for television. It's especially absurd when you realize that $1800 buys you the low end.
Also, direct view *MEANS* CRT.
Here is a page from May of this year: http://www.cnet.com/4520-7874_1-5108443-1.html [cnet.com]
The basic sentiment from that page, and most others, is that LCD is getting cheap because it's the worst on tech on the market. My own experience confirms this, even. CRT looks better and is cheaper. DLP looks almost as good as CRT, and is comparably priced and sized to LCD.
Basically, people *don't* care about HDTV, and the early adopters *did* get screwed. All of that HD tech the big money spenders bought won't work right because it lacks the industry DRM infections. They industry then went and confused the hell out of the market with all different versions of HDMI, confusing terminology left and right, and different vendors abusing what *had* been established terms.
Re:They're already screwing up. (Score:4, Insightful)
In those comparisons, you notice that the up close visuals of people are nearly identical, but the backgrounds, where people aren't really looking, look much sharper. This could very likely be an artifact of the video compression on the DVD vs. the newer compression on the HD stream. The color space is noticably better on the HD version too, but that could be for the same reason.
Re:They might have a point (Score:3, Insightful)
With on-demand and TIVO and cheap storage (750GB drives are under $250 - that's 100+ DVDs), DVDs and other plastic discs are going to become relics just like CDs are quickly giving way to files you download and store on an iPod or equivalent device.
It took the huge success of iPod and iTunes together to finally push .mp3 players out of the doldrums and into the mass market because of all the RIAA bullsh*t, but now the horse is out of the barn. The market is finally starting to realize that it isn't the record or tape or disc that really has value (despite all the fancy packaging), it's really just about the music. And that's just data.
The disconnect between content and storage media has finally gathered momentum, and by the time HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have their kinks worked out that disconnect will be complete. That's the main reason I don't see 100 million consumers adopting one or the other of the HD formats. As the iPod clearly shows us, having thousands of plastic discs around just doesn't make much sense anymore given the patently superior storage technologies now available to us.
Re:Another reason for failure (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is so many assuming they will stay very expensive?
Anyone remember what CD's and DVD's cost in the beginning?
Not to mention their respective recorders.
Re:Yep, it's the Laserdisk all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, the pipes won't be big enough for HDTV in reasonable download time for well-over a decade. Just calculate how many days it would take to download a 50GB movie on your connection.
The consider you'll need to buy a second line, or upgrade your speed, since your connection will be effective unavailable as you are downloading each movie, for DAYS at a time. Internet access isn't free.
Then consider how much money it's going to cost companies to pay for their own pipes to let you download 50GBs from them, and try to figure out how that will turn into a $2/movie business model.
How is maxing out your connection (which you pay for) for several days more convenient than NOT wasting your connection, and getting the disc in 1-2 days as Netflix currently does?
Bullshit. Bandwidth is massively expensive. There is too much variety in movies to expect several people to have them available when someone else wants to watch. ISPs will rake Netflix over tho coals for having their customers uploading 50GB files. Far too many users are behind firewalls and NAT routers for this to work. Nobody is going to max-out their upstream, all day, every day, making their connections useless. Asyncronous connections mean you need 10+ people who have the movie, and are willing to share, for every 1 person that wants to download it. Nobody is going to want to pay for Netflix, pay again with all their downstream bandwidth, pay again with all their upstream bandwidth, wait several days, etc. It's complete nonsense, until bandwidth is orders of magnitude cheaper, everyone has connections that is orders of magnitude faster, etc.
Bandwidth is FAR more expensive than postage, and you'll have pretty much all the same delivery problems.
Yes, and far worse than now.
In other words: Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. And, Bullshit.
What strange, magical, mystical world do you live in?
Re:Yep, it's the Laserdisk all over again (Score:3, Insightful)
In my comment above yours, I did the math for 20GB, although HD-DVDs coming in between about 22-25GB. Unless my math is wrong, a 6Mbps Comcast cable connection could download a movie in about 6 hours, which means about 4 hours of waiting if it's a 2 hour-long film. That's 10 hours of waiting over my 3Mbps AT&T DSL.
Additionally, since the majority of HDTVs only have pixels to actually display 720p, the file size for those users can be only 11-12GB, meaning just one hour of buffering/waiting for the 6Mbps connection.
The consider you'll need to buy a second line, or upgrade your speed, since your connection will be effective unavailable as you are downloading each movie, for DAYS at a time. Internet access isn't free.
But how much bandwidth does the average user use while surfing? Next to nothing. The box downloading the movie just needs to find out the maximum available bandwidth and then scale back a bit so there's 128kbps available, or if it plays nice, have it adjust as needed. Even if the average user has P2P-using children, that could be limited to 50kBps.
Then just like Netflix has users select movies they want to watch soon, this box should come with a 300 or 500GB hard drive that downloads movies before the users get around to watching them.
Then consider how much money it's going to cost companies to pay for their own pipes to let you download 50GBs from them, and try to figure out how that will turn into a $2/movie business model.
So how much is the market rate for large customers for 12GB or 24GB? I agree that $2 isn't going to happen. My video rental store charges $3.50. How about that?
Re:Mass confusion. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that the vast majority of average users, and even a very healthy percentage of people who consider themselves technorati get brain haze when they have to look at all the combinations and standards the HD movement has cranked out there.
The studios are more interested in preventing you from copying a disc than getting you to be able to use the player. (See the whole downsampling, HDMI-whatever interface requirements and all that)
Want to see a smash hit HD format for discs? Come out with one that:
a) Doesn't care what kind of connector is between the player and the TV, so it will work with more sets.
b) Will easily show an improvement over DVD even on SD TV's. (tricky there...)
c) Costs about twice what you can get a decent DVD player for (In the $250-$500 range)
For reasons the article mentioned very concisely those three things will never meet in a player.
And for the studios, if you think whichever media format you endorse won't be cracked you are smoking something that is in all likelihood only legal for medicinal purposes where you live.
Re:10 reasons they won't win, 1 reason they will (Score:2, Insightful)
Once a format is out there, it is hard to let it go, and if consumers don't buy HD-DVD or BR-DVD, then stopping selling DVD's means stopping your sales. DVD was the fastest growth media format ever, faster then Tape, CD, VHS. With DVD Players costing as little as $39, they are about to saturate EVERY home that has a television set or two. Stopping DVD sales won't prompt someone to replace their $39 DVD player with one for $999 that plays only half of the movie releases out there, especially when most of the "new" releases are poorly dubbed older movies nobody cares about.
As an "avid consumer" (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think there is anyone who cares LESS about HDDVD/Blueray.
I can't tell much of a difference between Progressive Scan and HDDVD as demonstrated in the store (except the usual here is a CRT bubble with a DVD playing, and a $9,000 HD Plasma with a HD-DVD playing, see how much better?)...
I have a 2000 lumen 1024x576/1024x768 projector (yeah I know it is not 1080p, but it is still higher quality than I need) and HD HBO/Starz/Network channels with an HD-DVR (which is the only DVR my cable company offers otherwise I would have a much better Standard Resolution Tivo), so I have seen a lot of movies that way and I just could care less about the barely perceptable differences between these and DVDs, and I am definatly not an average consumer.
Hell I have a decent VCR (most VCRs are crap) and it is connected in with SVideo, and I can tell you that some of the old VHS tapes don't look that different from DVDs.
I guess I am just not "in" to quality that can only be measured by reading the specs on the box.