| endimion said: first of i'd like to say nice try... but you are the one living maybe not in your own buble but just taking in account an extremely limited choice of alternatives to BR... puting BR as the most likely emergent tech in the future and imo it's were your analyse fails....
1) about connection speed... well maybe in north america... and you are right.... i pay 100 bucks for a 3mbps cable connection and extended cable which i think is a pure rip off... for more than half the price back home i have more than 6 time that connection speed in DSL plus about 200 channel with some in HD a free landline telephone on which I don't pay for outgoing calls to another lanline and don't pay for incoming calls at all... and if the connection crash for X reason I have a free dial up connection as a back up... so yeah in 3 years I expect a all bunch of countries outside USA maybe that will be able to have 100% live stream HD capabilities.... for a small cost now even with lower connection... why would you have to be in 100% live streaming ???? you can buffer part of the movie and start watching it while it keeps DL... the time it takes me to go buy a BR at wallmart or to go to blockbuster if it's still open I would have started the movie back home....
now if I'm on trip and I want to take movies for the kids... I certainly will not choose a poor option such as disc support BR HD DVD DVD or anything in that shape... why should I... when I can have a terrabite HDD for cheaper than the cost of an equivalent disc capacity in one of those format ????
no netflix ???? like I waited to be in US to watch stuff online ???? that's odd... north america is well behind in terms of internet capabilities compare to japan and europe which are the 2 other main market for either console or movie distribution.... I've been living here for a while I love the country.... you are the first economic power in the world but if there is an area where you are well behind it's definately telecomunications...
2) good point but cost of production of a BR and ways of distribution doesn't justify the switch yet... and once again if they chose to make a switch I hope to god they won't do it on scratchable short lasting life span disc... you realise CD DVD or BR have all a shorter life expectency than the good old floppy disk ???? that stuff is a joke and should be totally wiped out of the computer industry in my geek opinion.... in the future I expect to go to the store with my USB disk buy a software through a vitual machine DL it on it go back home and use it.. certainly not buying a disc... or even better leaving my ass at home and go online buy my soft DL it and run it.... like I already do for most products... without taking in account that we are going faster and faster towards the cloud computing concept.... another topic but still tgood to keep in mind for our equation.... do you think they all spend millions for R and D in that field just to please there nerdy needs ???? do you think in the current economy and ecologic condition developing more and more expensive tech will be the way to go... in addition to the ecological impact... and trust me politician and companies are taking it in account seriously... not that they really care about the outcome... but they see their a way to save money and most of all green is the new marketing trend for the century... in other words IT SELLS
2) yeah you are right again but blinding yourself to 2 options stay with DVD or go BR... I discard both... being both retard unriable un efficient options.... I expect my next gen console to have a proeminent HDD and being able to stock at least 30 games on it that I'll have DL online or through the same vistual distribution concept in store.... and have maybe a BR and DVD player but for the saoul purpose of backward compatibility... any other choice from them will deceive me greatly... and just prove my point that they are just trying to make money out of their useless investement instead of offering us the best option and the most cost efficient...
so yeah I see your point and would have agreed 5 years ago... but at the speed tech is going in telecoms... and storage capacity for the price... BR is a pure marketing joke.... any way you look at it... you are talking about 100Gb on the next gen ??? I expect the memory card to be that size and the HDD at least 10 times that.... come on I know I'm a bit of a geek but I had close to a terra already 6 years ago you can find HDD of 1 TB for less than a 100 bucks today imagine in 3 years from now....
so enough with the BS already all the tech for what I'm saying is out there... they don't need much R and D implement them... look at the archos 7 yeah it's expensive still... but it could be a lot cheaper... especially in a box the size of the XB or PS with no screen integrated... so yeah keep fighting over your format war and avoid my statements.... discs suck and that's it... the future is not into optical media... and if they keep that direction they are just being retarded... in my opinion they won't but hell who knows they did come out with the HD dvd and BR when it was absolutely unnecessary and not cost efficient... but I doubt they'll do twice the same mistake just for the sake of flashing in the eyes of the customer this time look what it cost them.... remember the 2 HD consoles ARE FIGHTING FOR THE SECOND SEAT!!!!! |
Hmm, let's try to make some order. The way I see it, we're mostly disagreeing on the required timespans, not on the actual processes.
I _do_ agree that we'll move to a different digital support, leaving behind the optical discs... but not in the next 3 years, and the next 3 years is when the specs for the next gen of consoles will be laid down.
I _did not say_ that BR is the best medium to take with you in a car trip. OBviosuly you would go with an HD of some kind. My point 1) was against previous posters who said that pure streaming is the way to go as in "my media content is in the cloud". My point was: for reliability you want a local digital support of some kind.
And again the Netflix remark was in response to previous posters talking specifically about the xbox360 delivery strategy.
Estabilished that we need a local storage, my point 2) was that BR was an obvious back-compatible way forward. A bigger capacity optical disc is a trivial answer to the problem of delivering Hd media content. _Of course_ in the future we'll have petabytes of hard disks and greater bandwidth, but that's not the point. It's been now 3-4 years that hi-def capable tvs are gaining a substantial share of market, and thus the request for hi-def media content has been rising. What would have been 3 years ago the response to this request according to you? "Please buy your 1080p TVs, we'll deliver the content you could now enjoy to a big-ass hd when it is economically sound and we have the bandwidth everywhere... let's say in 2012-2015"
And my point 3) was that _right today in feb 2009_ the dvd is not a good enough solution for delivering games to current-gen consoles, much less nesxt gen. I did not see an answer to this issue, by the way, unless you think that _right today_ in MS r&d labs they should spec next xbox so that when it comes out in like 2 years it will download the next gen games (I expect sizes of the order of 100-200 Gbs) into a big hd. How much viable does it sound to ask your users to download 100-200 Gbs, wherever they are in the world, in 2011?
Again, it's not in the concepts, you see, it's in the involved time spans....
PS:
As a last remark let me call bullshit on a minor issue, ie when you said that CDs, DVDs and BRs are less durable as a medium than floppy discs. I have used floppies since the 5 1/4" ones on my c64, and I still have hundreds of my 3 1/2" Amiga floppies. Last time I checked about 1/5 of them were unreadable, because magnetic recording on floppies degrades over time.
At the same time not one of my hundreds of my pressed CDs or DVDs has ever become unreadable, and I know that Blu-Ray even has a much better coating rendering them much harder to scratch.
Optical drives suck for many other reasons: power consumption, noise, mechanical failures, laser head lifetime. But the lifespan of the actual disc medium is not really one of them when compared with the life expectancy of Floppies or Hard Disks.
