Broadband to Kill Off DVD? 609
Elteto writes "Just when we thought the DVD could not be any more ubiquitous, Serge Tchuruk at the Alcatel Forum in Paris announces that the days of the rapidly adopted medium are nearing their end. The increasing availability, affordability, and speed of broadband will contribute to a more efficient delivery method of media content. Will DVD join LaserDisc in obscurity?"
Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
And backups!
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me cynical, but I can't help but believe that streamed movies will be prefixed with 20 minutes of un-skippable ads.
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
People buy DVDs because:
1: They hve pretty covers (and usually extra bits on the DVD).
2: They're viewable in guaranteed high quality on a cheap piece of hardware.
3: You don't have to be connected to the net to watch a DVD.
4: You don't have noisy cooling fans in the background when watching a DVD.
5: If you hate the movie, at least you get a great coaster for your money.
A competing format may well help lower the cost of the disks though, which would be a great boon to us all.
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
7: I can watch the movie without some 3rd party knowing I'm watching the movie.
8: I can resell the movie if I don't like it or if I grow tired of it.
9: I can lend the movie to my friends.
10: We can watch 3 different movies in 3 different rooms at the same time without fear of running out of bandwidth.
11: It is easier for my 2-year-old to choose a movie by looking at physical cases than by browsing things virtually in a computer.
12: The movies are explicitly protected by my home-owner's insurance from theft or wholesale damage, because it is tangible. What happens when some
13: The movie is protected from editing (including censorship, for countries like China). Imagine if the only versions of Star Wars (original trilogy) you could access were the "special editions", because that is the only thing Lucas wants you to see.
Dan East
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, with screen that are beginning to have the look of paper, I imagine ebooks will become much more popular.
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still very difficult for a lot of people to attach value to 1s and 0s that don't come in a pretty container. It's obviously more convenient if you you have all your movies on a hard-drive, but it's definitely lacking something.
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Insightful)
Eveything needed for this is in place except for cheap terabyte drives which are inevitable and not very far away. Online distribution and HD-DVD will both be h
Re:Physicality (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I don't think it's physicality that's stopping books from going, but: * DRM (I can lend a friend a book, I can't lend a friend an e-book (without breaking TOS))
* e-book readers at a decent size (the small screen of a PDA is somewhat disuasive)
* cheap e-book readers
* Cheaper e-book prices: Why should I pay the same for an e-book as a normal book? It doesn't cost the same to make.
* Availability (more and more books are being offered as e-books, but many books also aren't).
Having said that, when available, I buy the e-book.
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Physicality (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
Terrible comparison. eBooks COULD have taken over the world, but technology is holding them back. Screens are still poor technology for reading, every e-book reader out there is propritary, and DRM is a sure way to stop adoption of anything.
If videos are offered without those impediments, they have a good chance of replacing physical media.
Re:Physicality (Score:4, Insightful)
On the same token, I've had a full glass of water spilled directly onto my PDA (which I use as an ebook reader) while it was running (and charger plugged in no less) and after quickly shutting it off and letting it dry out before using it again it still works great.
"crumple pages etc of it up" ... if I applied the same force in crumpling a book as it'd take for my PDA to flex at all it'd rip the book in half.
As for burning... Unless the flame was placed directly on the touch screen with an open cover I seriously doubt my PDA could be damaged enough to stop it from working by a fire that wouldn't destroy enough of the book to make it unreadable.
For the record, despite how easy ebooks are (or could be) to obtain, I prefer reading printed books as well... but some of your reasoning is complete bullshit.
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Physicality (Score:2)
I bought 2 CDs yesterday. I am uninterested in DRM or lossy-only formats.
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Insightful)
I like my physical media, and I'm willing to pay more for it.
I buy about 100 CDs a month. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
No, CDs will not die off. At least not quite yet. There is something more rewarding about having an LP or a CD as opposed to pointing to a folder which represents a a few sectors of your hard drive in such an order that they can play 'Blueberry Hill'.
DVDs have been able to be downloaded quickly and easily for the past couple of years, but you're right, burners are not the norm yet. At the very least, you will still want to back up your music.
I still buy a LOT of CDs. My appetite for new music is insatiable to only several degrees below financial ruin. I usually buy the CD, convert it to MP3, then listen to that. I'm still uncomfortable buying albums on iTunes because, well, I just paid money for a file. Paying $0.99 for Guerilla Black's 'Compton' is basically a drop in the hat, so I don't mind. But I'd rather keep "important" works in a format which is at least already backed up. Even if I keep all my CD cases in a box in the basement and all my discs in binders.
The problem then, is not so much with CDs as it is with iTunes - economically, it makes sense - but for $0.99 I'd like to get more than what amounts to a really good FM recording.
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, a 128kbps download will just not please some people. Audiophiles want the maximum quality they can get, and if they want it digital, they will rip it themselves to their own specifications.
Re:Physicality (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm, this seems to go against the Slashdot dogma that MP3 downloads increase CD sales.
Re:Physicality (Score:2, Insightful)
The point is you have 2 datapoints. Not enough to draw any conclusions from at all.
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Funny)
You, sir, have obviously never worked in government.
Downloading song isn't the same as a movie (Score:2)
If I tryed to download a DVD, let us be generous and say it's a single sided dual layer of data so what 9.4GB?
That'd take what, a day or so?
I don't know what 'broadband' these guys are talking about but until I can click a button and have a movie in a few seconds it will not stop me from using Netflix or buying a movie
Where are you going to store the data? (Score:3, Interesting)
Where are you going to put it?
Okay, so you've got a nice fat hard disk on your computer. That's just great for storing your first 10 or 20 movies that you buy for delivery via network. But where do you store all this data after that?
I have, at a guess, about 500 DVDs (and increasing rapidly), and really my collection isn't that big compared to a lot
Re:Physicality (Score:2)
1) some people (including me) have been collecting for a long time, and have acquired nearly everything they like.
2) some people prefer film on DVD's (better value) or video games.
As I said, I've been collecting cd's since 1986. There are only a handful of artists I enjoy that are still producing new material --- when they release it, I buy it. On rare occasions, I will discover something new, and make a purchase. But, for the most part, I have what I like, and only buy about 6 or 7 cd'
Re:Physicality (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty much the same way. The problem, however, isn't that I'm happy with what I have, and don't want any more. I'd love to hear new music that I really like, just like I like reading books that I've never read, or seeing good movies that I haven't seen. The problem is that there just isn't much good music left; almost all music produced lately is crap.
Re:Physicality (Score:2)
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate renting. I would much rather purchase something to use at my pleasure than to rely on some promise that the thing I want will be there five years from now when I want it again.
That desire falls off, of course, at a price point. While I might like my own tile saw, for the four times I've needed them I've rented them at $50/day, rather than spend $900 on a comparable quality tool (mostly because they're large and I don't want to store them.)
However, I definitely see it as a price po
Re:Physicality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Physicality (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Physicality (Score:4, Insightful)
This would be a fine point, except for the fact that in most situations, with the speakers and headphones that most people use, the quality of the two formats is almost indistinguishable. The average user has a $300 iPod hooked up to a $15 pair of headphones. The relatively minor difference in quality is going to be muddled over by the poor output of his cans.
Hence mp3 won out because convenience was all that John Q. Public knew to judge by.
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Insightful)
it's funny that he should say that given that the Apple argument has always been that their "higher quality computer" is only losing the PC arms race because of interoperability/price issues (both could be seen as convenience)
Re:Physicality (Score:2)
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Informative)
In France, thanks in particular to Free.fr, broadband ADSL access is now very common and efficient.
For instance, with the Freebox you get 10Mbps (Down), 1Mbps (Up) (really!) + TV (MPEG2) + Free IP phone to every "fix" French number. The cost for that is 30 euro/month (around $39).
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Physicality (Score:3, Informative)
The funny part is that it was actually Steve Vai versus himself. The karate kid knows neither karate, nor shredding.
Why do I know that? Probably for the same reason you own the damn movie
Laserdiscs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Laserdiscs (Score:5, Interesting)
I do however, know plenty of people (my parents included) who don't see a need for board band, but still go to blockbuster to rent a dvd every once and a while.
DVD's aren't going anywhere.
Re:Laserdiscs (Score:3, Insightful)
Netcraft (Score:4, Funny)
Wouldn't that be Discraft? (Score:2)
(Yeah, I know Discraft makes "flying disks" and "frisbee" is a name brand. It's funnier the way I wrote it.)
laserdisks and beta (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe.. (Score:2)
If given the choice to pay for and download movies online, I'd be all over it.
When I buy a game or a movie at a store I download it at home, because it's easier to mount an image than find and insert a CD or a DVD.
It's so much easier to manage files on my computer than CDs and DVDs in meatspace.
Re:Maybe.. (Score:2, Insightful)
And I suspect that the movie companies would be all over you too, or would that be own you, as you would be one of the first to accept the fact that on-line movies will have DRM written all over it....
CDs aren't dead... (Score:3, Insightful)
i guess it's "hip" to try to be a visionary by predicting an early death of something.
Re:CDs aren't dead... (Score:2)
Q. What does CD-ROM stand for?
A. Consumer Device - Rendered Obsolete in Months.
Who needed CD's now that we had Zip disks? 100 megabytes, and rewriteable!
in a word, No. (Score:5, Interesting)
not just a fast connection! (Score:2)
I'm amazed that people will use online only solutions for mission critical applications. I am aware of agency management software for insurance agents that is completely data offsite. If the dsl goes down, they would be playing solitare on the computers.
eric
Re:wrong (Score:2)
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people have used DVDs and DVD players? Or have a DVD drive in their computer?
They may be going the way of VHS or casette tapes (or at worst 8-tracks), but they're not going the way of LaserDisc any time soon.
TV noobs (Score:5, Insightful)
"Honey, why won't the ethernet cable fit in the coaxial input?"
Wait, that would be MPEG, not NTSC streams...
HA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Broadband cannot replace DVD's. I don't see a day where accessing large amounts of data is as guaranteed as having a disc with everything accessible right then and there. I know I would rather have my DVD available than rely on some server that may or may not go down when they feel like it.
I also enjoy being able to boot a device not connected to the intarweb with a DVD. I don't see DVD's going anywhere, unless Blu-Ray/HD-DVD manage to oust it (this will still take many a year for the prices to even out)
Re:HA! (Score:5, Informative)
I like a lot of foreign and art films. Even for a director like Alfred Hitchcock, there are a lot of his films I can't get from On Demand or haven't been shown on cable (unless hacked up and notably abridged on commercial networks) in years. I'll keep buyin DVDs as long as I can get films like "La Strada" on DVD, but have trouble finding it on cable. While this may be a small market, I think the overall idea is a reason why people will always by some type of physical media, even if it's a memory stick with music or video on it. If you buy it, you've got it forever, and aren't dependent on a cable system or other content provider for it.
A few years ago, Hurrican Isabel hit and many people in our area had no power for 2 weeks (it was 9-10 days for me). I spent a lot of time doing yard work I hadn't had time to do (I do programming at home, as part of my own business, so my hours are funky), and in the evenings I'd go out to bookstores, just so I could go some place with lights that felt civilized. For me, being able to put a CD in my boom box during the day and hear music I liked was a small part of what kept me sane. If I had only downloaded music to my hard drive, I would have had a much smaller selection to listen too.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I know I really like having a physical media that my music and movies are on, so I can play what I want when I want.
No (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:3, Informative)
So, it'd probably be more accurate to say that Blu-Ray will kill off DVD Players, but not DVDs themselves.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
So don't plan on BluRay replacing DVD anytime soon. Consumers have a long history of resisting format changes until the benefits outweigh the costs. To complicate matters even further there's still a battle over which standard, BluRay or HD-DVD will win the battle. Unless one or the other deals a knockout punch early on, they'll both end up losing to the old format of DVD. As I've already said DVD is "good enough", and there's a large segment of the market that doesn't want to get burned with useless equipment (i.e. Beta, and 8-track).
Re:Not Soon (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that most people would be loathe to replace many DVDs with HDTV format ones, except their very favorite ones.
Then what do you put.... (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy is an idiot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Short answer: No.
Come on people. This article is just plain stupid. I can see the DVD being upgraded, for more storage capacity (see blue-ray [blu-ray.com]), I can see the DVD fading away gradually (like VHS); but saying that Joe Sixpack will suddenly stop buying DVDs and use, say a broadband connected Tivo-like-device, is ludicrous. Technology lingers. That's why Microsoft has to build in special modes in their OS to run older programs. People still use legacy technology! Hell, I still have a tape player in my car.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The article doesn't talk about Tivos, Internet TV streams, or some new emerging technology. In fact, it doesn't really mention anything!
I'm not sure how articles like this end up on slashdot. I should write an article: New Power Source will replace Gasoline!
Hey, put me on slashdot!
Re:This guy is an idiot. (Score:3, Interesting)
Consider this. Whenether any technology is relatively unpopular (aviation in 1899, video dow
Well duh... (Score:2)
But I have a feeling i will be buying the Blu-Ray HDTV DVD extended version of LOTR
In fact i'd be the shire on it...
No, you're wrong. (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, No, it will not pass into obsurity anytime soon. The reason is, unlike laserdisc, DVD actually has a sizeable installed base. That means, that the next gen format will support DVD, and the gen after that will probably do so aswell.
Broadband never everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, people have large collections of DVD. Why I want to wait even a few minutes to download something when I can just stick it in my DVD player. More likely, by the time that DVDs take a few minutes to download, I will have my entire DVD collection sitting on a massive harddrive in a media jukebox anyways (provided some corperation doesn't make that illegal, anyways) and I can watch on demand, just like downloading. Except I don't have to pay extra bandwidth fees (if applicable) or anyone else any money who wanted to charge per viewing (since they can).
Re:Broadband never everywhere (Score:2, Informative)
There are people today that watch "live" TV through their ADSL connection. Forget about downloading, or waiting minutes. This is an Mpeg-2 stream, at a few Mbit/s, except it's true video on demand over ADSL.
DVD will survive for all the portable applications mentioned above, but if you look at how many people just want to watch movies from the comfort of their living room, that's the ADSL market.
The funny thing of course is that for whatever obscure reason, the ADSL bandwidth i
Rogers Hi-Speed ISP Certainly Thinks Not! (Score:2)
Not much of a surprise, actually... (Score:2)
it sounds more like what he wished would happen instead of what he really believes will happen.
Media companies wet dream. (Score:3, Interesting)
The truth of the matter is, people enjoy having physical copies of their media to represent their collection. And its a good backup. I don't think the medium will be replacing the media anytime soon. Just expect storage to get larger in capacity, and smaller in physical size.
Yes and... (Score:5, Funny)
No freakin way (Score:2, Informative)
I own 0 downloaded movies. I own about 40 DVDs.
I have broadband and the cable company still makes me think twice before downloading big files because of their usage caps. If the cable company sold the movies directly it would be closer to functional, but watching movies on a computer sucks. It's basically just PPV on demand.
Re:No freakin way (Score:4, Funny)
Death of physical media predected ... again (Score:3, Insightful)
First, the idea that we will throw away out current media has been floated since the days of the floppy. It's always a correct prediction, but only because a better physical medium comes along.
Second, the idea that we're going to be OK with just using storage on the Net and not having any physical media on which to store our data sounds good, right up until the first datacenter fire that loses me last week's data storage. It's also a terrible idea to keep your wares and copyrighted porn on someone else's servers
Third, PRIVACY. There's no single reason why networked media will never win over good-old local storage that beats the desire for privacy.
Re:Death of physical media predected ... again (Score:4, Interesting)
Not if its RAID-ed across the 'net.
It doesn't have to be stored in one single place.
You could have clusters of servers across the internet and any, say 4, of which can give you your data.
Given enough redundant servers and its safe until the Big One.
Privacy?
You have your private key locally, don't you?
The datastream could be encrypted right to the point where your viewing whatsit has your keyring plugged into it. Or your finger, or whatever.
Re:Death of physical media predected ... again (Score:2)
Yeah.... (Score:2)
Mono vs Stereo [monovsstereo.com].
Things that broadband can't replace: (Score:5, Informative)
2) Ease. Buy a player. Rent a DVD. Put it in. Play. And there's no crossing your fingers that it doesn't crash, no reconfiguring of the stupid screen saver to not interrupt the movie, and no stupid "remote control" that keeps getting in the way of playback every time the mouse gets bumped.
3) Physical portability. MP3s finallybecame famous and widespread when you could move them around in a player no larger than a pack of cigarettes. Granted, DVD's are physically larger, but you can carry 20 DVD's in a portable CD-wallet...Come to think of it, I suppose you can do that now on some portable DivX players (100 min. movie = 700MB * 20 movies = 14 GB 20GB players). But DVD's are (right now) less cumbersome, but I don't think they'll stay that way for long.
Re:Things that broadband can't replace: (Score:3, Informative)
2.) Downloading a dozen movies requires less brainpower (for those who have done it before) then operating a large, sharp metal machine, driving it a quarter mile, and returning.
3.) DIVX encoded movies fit more on a DVD than MPEG2 movies.
But you make some good points.
Quality argument is crap (Score:3, Informative)
Further more during the encoding you can enhance the image wich would be to costly to do during live playback but doesn't
No. (Score:2)
Things to keep in mind:
DVD's do not require an internet connection to work.
DVD's are portable (watching a movie on a laptop during a flight?)
DVD's are not lost when your hard drive fails.
DVD's are paid for once.
I think that DVD's will continue to be the medium of choice for poeple that buy movies. But for ren
Uhhh, Consider the Source (Score:5, Insightful)
I was thinking the other day... (Score:2)
Not in the UK... (Score:2, Informative)
In the UK at least, where BT's infrastructure seems to be roughly analogous to a whole lot of pieces of string and lots of tin cans, neither case is necessarily true. BT is currently implementing broadband caps (15gb is one of them... plenty for lots of email and webbrowsing, DVDs? Not so much). Whilst other companies are holding off sooner or later I see broadband once again being a metered service. Damn BT. Crap infrastruc
newspapers and magazines and MAIL r gone right?? (Score:2)
who the hell is this guy? he's a freakin loon.
Movies on Demand (Score:4, Informative)
DVD will fade away, but not for those reasons. (Score:4, Interesting)
The DVD format will probably die out (and by DVD format, I mean the current DVDs and all their logical sucessors, like BlueRay, etc). It will not be convienence of broadband that will kill them, however, it will be our changing consumption habits.
When my parents first starting buying CDs in the 80's (they were around $25.00/disk then) they accumulated them carefully, picking what they like, and checking carefully that what they were buying coresponded directly to the LP orignals they were used to. They listened to them one at a time in an old Pioneer CD player (25+ lbs, lasted over 20 years before it died). By contrast I, and others I know, like to have our music quickly. I find and download files, burn tracks, buy CDs on a whim, digitize them and deemand that they all be available to us at once on small portable MP3 players. I keep my music on my laptop and it follows me wherever I go. My parents and I use music in fundamentally different ways, and we expect different things from our music.
The same thing will happen with DVDs. The easier something is to use the more people will use it. The day will come when our culture comsumes such a quantity and variety of media that streaming, downloaded, or otherwise transmited movies will make much more sense for our livestyles. We will wants LOTS of movies, want them now, and want them everywhere we go. DVDs are nice, but they are also bulky. Our whole collection can't travel with us around the globe or fit in a hand-held player, or a car theater system. But these things are in development and in small circles in active use. These lifestyle changes will be the driving force toward a new file-less format.
That doesn't mean that disk are dead. That day will come when we have a 100% reliable, superfast, globally accessable storage and transmission network that you could feel cofortable uploading media to and knowing that it would still be there is a couple of centures. (I'm not holding my breath). Until then there must always be a hardcopy of some kind, if only because encodings change so quickly that we need a "master" to rip from.
One possible way: lifetime rights to virtual dvds (Score:5, Interesting)
A lifetime liscense to a virtual DVD, backed by the right to make personal copies and make unlimited downloads with copyright fees waived.
You can have your DVD and buy it in a brick and mortar store if you want to drive there and pay for their overhead. You can get a physical DVD like now but you are also paying for pressing, color printing, distribution and inventory costs.
You can download to your hard disk but don't have to worry about burning it at home, though you would be able to do so for all content with open source tools, nor do you have to worry about renting a data center or keeping a RAID jukebox in the basement.
Your purchase would give you a transferable, resaleable, unlimited right to the product, for all resolutions/file sizes up to that of the purchased product, though you might have to pay a one-time encoding fee if the format you desire is not on the publisher's server.
You could likewise easily order rights to various printed materials, audio interviews, bromides, "making of shows", television versions, etc. linked to it, whether by the same publisher/distributor or not (thanks to automated searching over google, blog listings, or other mechanisms). Some people may opt to only purchase time-limited liscenses but smart people will go for a "lifetime" or better yet perpetual liscense, and no company except maybe the biggest mega studio will begrudge it, considering that if they have higher quality masters they can remaster for even better than DVD quality.
To me this is far superior to what is currently available. The current problem is you do not know when the DVD you buy will deteriorate, and publishers similarly have ticking time bombs. I don't happen to use DVDs but I do buy the same books over again.. just like I rent the same VHS tapes many times, and know I can do so again for a few bucks even if my player eats one (happened before), I have bought the same (scifi) books many times over the years as I move around and am unable to carry them all with me. So I would definitely pay for a lifetime right to a work, plus the guarantee of durability.
Such a system would also allow us to show dvds to friends or trade with them at no charge. In fact I believe it would be cheaper to have no copy protection at all, and simply guarantee that a given customer id would always be able to get a fresh copy of a work, even if issued by someone else. We would all win.
I envision studios making a deal with insurance companies to put digital masters in escrow, and one day these will all end up in one place and accessible freely to the public (when copyright expires) minus perhaps distribution fees (if indeed the fee is not negligible by then). When you consider that even TV is going or has gone digital, but there is just too much of it to archive or it has been too hard to do so, you can easily envision the same system being applied to TV and other media. Also considering the costs that broadcasters will have to pay to go digital, this is a good way to finance it (better than the hostile takeover being financed by U.S. a securities company that is being played out in Japan this past week).
I have been waiting an awfully long time to be able to access past years of TV shows and if I can easily "bookmark" a scene I am watching on live TV instead of rushing to hit the record button and missing bits of it, that would be worthwhile. Then a whole genre of websites would spring up to index the shows and scenes that could be accessed, and we would be bathed in a real digital ocean of our shared cultural history, which would be as broad as the entire world and as deep as the earliest decades for which the media have survived.
In this vision, broadband access to the Internet could indeed be said to have beaten the dvd, itself an evanescent instantiation of a physical specification, since broadband will ensure that the physical item you purchase and treasure will remain with you for the years to come.
No bloody way (Score:4, Informative)
2. When my ADSL connection goes wonky and I can't get on the net I pop in a DVD and waste some time waiting for it to come back up. If they deliver my entertainment over ADSL I'm going to be foaming at the mouth when the damn thing falls over.
3. I will never put all my eggs in one basket.
4. I can browse DVDs on the shelf and pick up a couple when shopping. On the net I'm already bombarded with crap so how am I going to choose what to watch? Sometimes all you need is 3 bad movies and 1 good one to decide what to watch.
5. Never underestimate the power of impulse buying and a physical product. Many dotcoms did exactly that.
HAHAHAHA!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
I have Broadband - YOU FUCKIN BETCHA!!!!
And what is my precious bandwidth?
All of 326k!!!!
Yep. And that's on a good night. Tonight is fucked -I'm barely pulling 280 right now.
Now: it's 2005, and I can barely get 326 on DSL, thanks to SBC. And these clowns want to pump 1080i into my house? Even if you compress the living fuck out of it, you're still nowhere NEAR what I can do on DSL. And Cable is BETTER?
Well, let's see: Cable's kind of dodgey around here, thanks to a 900 foot tall TV tower cluttered with all manner of telecommunications transmitters. My wife can't even open the door to her car with the remote...
But: It's a Nice Place to Grow Yer Kids Up, only without the churches and liquor stores...
So Cable sucks.
And these clowns want to put HD over broadband.
Bunch a' maroons I TELL YA!
By the time I can get enough bandwidth into the Spoilsport rat hole to do that, I'll be too old to fuckin care, and it'll be TO HELL WITH THE LOT A YOU - YA YOUNG PUNKS!
I'll be sittin' there with my DVD collection on my multi-terabyte RAID array entertainment computer, which will be in the form of the Lenovo Home Pro, which was sold to me for 99$ at Fry's 2 (the original was burned down 20 years earlier, during the food riots of 2015, during the second American Civil War.) and it frickin ROCKS - my entire music collection and video collection on a raid. I bought them, ripped then (there is NO perfect crypto) and now I get to see and hear whatever the fuck I want, when I want.
but, I hate it when i get unstuck in time like that.
And I'll still clean all the seeds out of my pot using the gatefold cover to "Close to the Edge" by Yes. Even when I'm 90.
RS
The DVD age has only just begun! (Score:4, Informative)
None of these arguments are reasonable. {note to grammar eagles, I'm assuming the word 'none' is an adjective of the noun 'arguments' so the verb 'are' must be plural. Please don't tell me 'none is' should be the correct form.}.
-DVD players sell for $30-$50, which is less than a single month of broadband. DVDs sell for the same as a pizza.
-Studios are in the process of converting every film in their archives into DVDs for sale or rental. Speciality video stores in every city will have titles that will never be available on-line. Broadband pay-per-view will always have the Star Wars flick from two years ago, but suppose you want to see Brian De Palma's The Fury or the original version of Swept Away (which is so much better than Madonna's version)?
-A physical disk means something. It has value. You can play it over and over without damage. Stop it and play scenes again. Sell it, trade it, lend it. Broadband distribution of films will never have this characteristic.
DVD's are challenged not by Broadband pay-per-view, but by the physical limitations of getting the physical disks of ten of thousands of movie titles distributed. Partly this will need a change in mindset. Filmmakers have to be willing to distribute their work on DVD. They have to be willing to accept that the vast majority of people who will see their work will see it on a video screen, not in a theater.
For example, every year my fair city has a 'film festival'. Prints of a hundred or so films are brought from all over the world and shown once or twice in a local theater for $10 each admission. Then they disappear; most never to be seen again. Suppose for $10 you could buy a six-pack of DVDs of your selection from this list of 100 films. Rare and interesting films would get much wider distribution and acknowledgement.
This is where the natural advantages of the DVD format will become apparent. The people who say that Broadband pay-per-view will wipe out DVD in the near future are just making wild statements to get their names exposed in the media.
DVD and mpeg4 codec nicely works together. (Score:4, Informative)
Having a complete set of the Ghost in the shell episodes on one DVD is great. What is the point of using comercially available discs and/or media broadcasting services, when their content is usually not very different from DVD rental shops?
If I wish to watch some Nick Zedd videos, or something with equally unusual content, I have no chance to find them outside p2p community. So, what these media CEOs could offer me? They're outdated already.
Downwho? (Score:4, Interesting)
Downloading, of course, is a foreign concept to most people. While my dad is computer literate, my mother has never touched a computer, and she wouldn't know what the f*** a download is. Literally, she has no concept of it.
If downloading becomes the norm, it will happen through the cable box. Again, the cable box is a box hooked to the TV, a concept everybody understands.
Not likely, they have different uses (Score:3, Insightful)