The article is the usual post made by ex-HDDVD fanboys. Not only does it include the usual pointless "HDDVD was so much better than BluRay" comment, a dead giveaway for that kind of troll articles. But it also tries to get people to believe that DD will deliver the same quality as BRD and soon ...
It is funny how the angry supporters of a now dead format contradict themself.
1st they claim that DD HD is already sooo good ( talking about 1.5 mbit/sec itunes "hd" shows that is a joke, really) that BluRay won't be needed (remember, bluray offers a 40mbit/sec datarate for the video). And a few lines later they claim that upscaled DVD looks as good.
Ain't it funny? the 6mbit/sec DVD is claimed to look as good as the 40 mbit/sec BR, and at the same time the 1.5 mbit/sec wannabe HD DD stream is ALSO looking as good?
Talking about a split personality here? Get real, todays "HD" streams are a bunch of over-compressed low bandwidth expensive toy. They even fail to deliver the SD DVD quality of 6mbit/sec and that with a more than double pixelcount for the material if its only 720p. At 1080i its 6!!! times the data that is compressed with a lossy codec to fit into a stream that is only a quarter of what DVD offered. The picture quality of itunes HD is appalling. Especially compared to a BluRay version of the film.
The article also claims that a Sony rep said that BluRay is not good enough and won't be considered for a soon to be released follow up format. Way to spin a perfectly pro-BR interview into anti-BR propaganda by completely warping the statements of the rep to the opposite he was stating. The rep stated that BluRay is so good, it will be more than enough to even service the future 4k video format, therefor they DON'T NEED another format for the foreseeable future. And the comment about the next format not being BluRay was regarding the physics of the system. You can't get any smaller than with a blue laser diode. Hence there is NO PHYSICAL WAY for a optical disk to get more than bluRay. The rep stated that IF there would be a follow format someday in the future it will not be an optical disc, as optical disks reached the physical limits with bluRay.
Additionally the topic starter, being of the anti-bluray faction, claimed that there was a no win situation for Sony. Completely ignoring that BD managed to TRIPPLE its market share compared to DVD in less than a year. BD now stands for 12% of the home video marketshare after only 2 years to the market, rising faster than any other format so far.
PS: another counterpoint to the usual DD is teh futurez babble is that you can easily sell 500k BluRayDiscs for a homevideo launch, lets say Transformers3.5, on a single day. You only have to stock up in front and sell it at every store around. People can all buy it and watch it at the same time that day. Heck it wouldn't matter if 30 million people decided to watch a BRD movie at the same time, like a Saturday evening. But try to imagine 30 million people streaming movies at the same time from itunes .... via the crappy Internet lines people have. Filling up these bandwidth caps of comcast etc ...
Lets assume the BEST for you DD fans, lets assume in 2012 EVERYONE has a fibreoptic 50mbit Internet line at home. And lets assume HD streams will only stream at 20mbit/sec, thats HALF of what Bluray delivers in picture quality.
So 30 Million customers stream a 20mbit movie on a Saturday eve ... thats a mere 600Tbit (TERRABIT!!!) per second itunes would need to send through the backbones. Thats about 65 times the traffic the WHOLE WORLD INTERNET uses (roughly 2000-3000 PetaByte per month = about 9TerraBit/s)
Ok, obviously its impossible to stream at 20mbit to a grand number of clients, lets stay at the lousy ugly 1.5 mbit itunes "HD" version .. Sorry, but even at 1.5 mbit the Saturday evening would gross at around 4 times the traffic/sec of the WHOLE WORLD as of 2007.
Streaming HD movies will stay a niche product for the foreseeable future. The reason being that the needed bandwidth is just not there, and even IF it where, no single server farm or provider would be able to serve that amount of data.
