selnor said:
It costs around £1 for me to watch HD 720p films off Live right now. For me to watch 720p Blu Ray film it costs me £17.99 brand new or £5 rental. Now do the math. From here on in on my Xbox 360 I ( and my friend ) can play all your existing DVD's on it and have the choice to play HD movies at a fraction of the cost of even buying a DVD. You'll be saving yourself literally thousands of GBP by using Streaming services for the rest of your life instead of rebuying collections every new format. August brings me here in the UK Sky via my 360. With HD 1080p streaming coming to it's the complete package. I will never need to buy another film. I'll save thousands like I said in my lifetime. Thats a new car, or holidays. College for my daughter. £5.99 gets you as many films streamed as you want when you want monthly in America. UK service is now not far away. And 1080p film access as good as what this thread shows is astonishing. And it ran in Dolby Digital 5.1 without a pause. Impressive to say the least. My point was is Blu Ray will never hit even half DVD marketshare now. People will likely stick with DVD. Those who can afford Blu Ray likely can afford a good internet connection and will be able stream for less than half the price Blu Ray would cost you in your lifetime. Picture quality is now a moot subject. What we all just saw was amazing picture clarity. |
Your statement was about owned DVDs and re-buying them in BluRay, now you moved to talk about rental.
Now if you want to rent movies all your life instead of owning them, that's ok. You could do it last year for less than two euros per DVD, you will be soon be able to have more or less the same price for BluRay rental, you will likely have great prices with streaming offers. But the rent/own issue is orthogonal to the support/technology issue.
"Picture quality is now a moot subject. What we all just saw was amazing picture clarity."
This shows you clearly missed the whole point of the article and the demo. This was not about the picture clarity per se.
This "new technology" is about dynamically changing the bandwidth to allow smooth coping with network hiccups and start-time buffering. It's not like they introduced an exceptional new codec that reduces the bandwidth you need at a given resolution. You could stream 1080p yesterday and with no hiccups if you had a big enough buffer and a beefy PC. This "smoothstream" tech is nice in that it degrades gracefully if your bandwidth availability goes down or your CPU can't decode fast enough, and that will be useful for the 360.
But actually in the article it states that the VC1 codec it uses has lower picture quality (at this low bandwidth) than the H264 one usually used in Flash. Its advantage being that it is less CPU-intensive.
And btw, it's still about one tenth of the bandwidth available on a BluRay.
