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Forums - Sony - HD DVD is dead; Blu Ray will lose the war

Cobretti on 05 January 2008

Quoting original post

"They will no longer have to spend money to manufacture discs, they will be able to control its
distribution more carefully, enable stronger DRM and even better, get revenue each time you want to watch the movie as the downloads will more than likely be limited to one or two showings. Want to watch it again? No problem as long as you agree to pay another small fee."

I am sorry but why the fuck should I have to pay each time I want to watch a movie? That is why I buy dvds. There are some movies I watched on my dvd over 100 times. So I rather buy it outright and own it.

I have no objection to owning a digital online version. But i refuse to pay these so called small fees everytime I want to watch it. I want to be able to won it outright.



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Gamerace on 05 January 2008

I prefer having physical copies of my movies, but unlike ssj12 above, I will not pay to re-buy my movies in another format. And that is why I'd probably switch to VOD or downloading before Blu-ray. Especially when I can no longer get a new VHS to replace my existing one should it break. I'm not buying 100 movies again - forget it. But if someone offers a subscription service - $20-40/month watch whatever movies you want or X# of movies/month, then that becames a no brainer to replace them.



 

smgod2 on 05 January 2008
rocketpig said:
Smidlee said:

If I'm not mistaken not long after the PS2 came out DVD players became very cheap. Why do you think it will be any different with Blu-Ray players?

Also in order to downloaded movies (unlike music) you got to have boardband which isn't cheap in itself.


This is a common misconception when talking about the current format war. DVD standalone players were already under $150 and were selling by the millions before the PS2 released. I'm not saying that Blu-ray will fail but the circumstances are much different this time around.

I forsee one of two things happening:

- Blu-ray penetrates the market and by 2012 or so, starts rivaling DVD in media sales.

- Blu-ray fails to gain enough steam before a new, improved physical media releases and ultimately succumbs to this new format.

Either way, physical media will always exist, though not to the extent we've seen with DVD. DLC will take a portion of the market, the real question is how much it will take.


 Agreed.



end said: ps3 is already a failure, even if it goes to number 1 at the end of this generation.

NYANKS said: And please, if Nintendo can recover from the mind blowing pwnage dealt to it by Sony over the last ten years, I think Sony will be fine.

The Church of Freeman

All in all your just another brick in the wall.

FinalEvangelion on 05 January 2008

I think there will be a market for both downloads and physical media. Some prefer one or the other.



"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY."  --Hermann Goering, leading Nazi party member, at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials 

 

Conservatives:  Pushing for a small enough government to be a guest in your living room, or even better - your uterus.

 

Smidlee on 05 January 2008

Even then I would say downloading movies would be more acceptable when we get Blu-Ray burners.



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Mars on 05 January 2008

Whatever your opinions are they mean nothing, facts are Br has the support.

movie studios
electronic giants
computer manufacturers

Br has major industry support, downloads and HD-VOD do not.




sieanr on 05 January 2008
mkis007 said:

ok 3 reasons why any sorta download format wont work : must have some super copy protection, which as a dl is much harder to do. even disc are having trouble dowloads can be copied with the a simple click. same reason games are not put on memory cards (they wouldbe mass copied).

Secondly, i am not going to wait a month to dl hd movies. they are bigger than dvds some get up in the 40gb's. And until t1/2 is cheap no one will wait that long. i get about 300kbs. theres no way.

Thirdly, all ur doing is swapping 1 HDD for another HDD! High-Definition Disc - for Hard Disc Drive! it will cost the same ...more even considering ull have to buy a new hdd for every 3 movies. with a disc u get 1 movie 1 disc at 20-30$ and going down! (faster when all companys adopt 1) its called supply and demand; it only takes 1 company to make all the other companys drop their price. This is evident in Walmart(always low prices) and Sony's (puting the best blue ray player out at the cheapest price) tactics. So no, disc format is not dead and will not die until internet speeds are way faster and easy to pay for.

 Dowloads are a thing of the past ...not the future.

You honestly have no idea what you're talking about.

First iTunes style DRM seems to do a decent job and its something most people don't bother with. Also the 360s downloadable movie service has DRM that I dont think has been broken. But I'm just assuming that you aren't very computer literate since copying things isnt as simple as you make it sound. Oh, and you must have just ignored the idea of set top box downloads.

Secondly, Bluray movies are 1080p and 7.1 audio and sometimes use a compression algorithm thats shitty form an efficiency standpoint. 1080p and 7.1 are nice, but those are niche features that most consumers don't care about or can take advantage of, so 720p and 5.1 would be fine for a download service. A real world example of this would be mp3s, which are always lower quality than CDs, but almost universally preferred by consumers. At the end of the day convenience wins out over quality. Also remember the xbox movie rentals are usually in HD, and those top out around 7gb. 

Third; you must not have read the article as well. The system described is one where you rent a movie for a day, thus needing a large HD to store hundreds of movies is irrelevant.  

About the bolded part -  I said wow. Having one format means less competition, which means there is less incentive for prices to drop. As for the supply and demand part, just, wow. Take an econ class, or read about it on wiki, I'm not wasting my time.

And if downloads are a thing of the past then why did CD sales drop 20% this holiday over last while digital music sales saw a 45% boost? 



Leo-j said: If a dvd for a pc game holds what? Crysis at 3000p or something, why in the world cant a blu-ray disc do the same?

ssj12 said: Player specific decoders are nothing more than specialized GPUs. Gran Turismo is the trust driving simulator of them all. 

"Why do they call it the xbox 360? Because when you see it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away" 

Garcian Smith on 05 January 2008

Blu-Ray will become the LaserDisc of our time. Anyone else remember LaserDiscs, those huge vinyl-record-sized things that came out in the '80s? Well, they were expensive and offered few benefits over the dominant media of the time (VHS tapes) aside from a modest increase in picture quality. As a consequent, they caught on with videophiles, who hailed them as the Second Coming, but nobody else. (Of course, videophiles would hail snake oil as the Second Coming if Samsung or Sony promised it would improve picture quality...) Everyone else stuck with VHS tapes until a media format with enough benefits over its predecessor - DVDs - came out.

Sound familiar? As of right now, only videophiles care about HD movies, because there's so little of a benefit from them compared to an upscaling DVD player. As a consequent, DVDs will win the format wars, and they'll stay dominant until a new format comes out that offers sufficient benefits over them such that people are willing to upgrade their entire movie collection.

That's how Blu-Ray can win the battle, but lose the war.



"'Casual games' are something the 'Game Industry' invented to explain away the Wii success instead of actually listening or looking at what Nintendo did. There is no 'casual strategy' from Nintendo. 'Accessible strategy', yes, but ‘casual gamers’ is just the 'Game Industry''s polite way of saying what they feel: 'retarded gamers'."

 -Sean Malstrom

 

 

rocketpig on 05 January 2008
Mars said:
Whatever your opinions are they mean nothing, facts are Br has the support.

movie studios
electronic giants
computer manufacturers

Br has major industry support, downloads and HD-VOD do not.



 Downloads don't have support?

Tell that to Apple, Microsoft, almost every major studio, and within a year, Sony. 




Or check out my new webcomic: http://selfcentent.com/

Smidlee on 05 January 2008


Sound familiar? As of right now, only videophiles care about HD movies, because there's so little of a benefit from them compared to an upscaling DVD player.
I can see a huge difference between upscaling and Blu-ray movies.  It's not even close.  In fact I can tell a big difference in Blu-ray (off air HD) compared to "on the air" HD channels let along upscaling DVD.