“Sony Corp. won the home movie DVD format war, but the consumer-electronics giant faces an even tougher battle persuading shoppers to buy Blu-ray discs in an industry which is looking to the download era,” Kiyoshi Takenaka reports for Reuters.
“But Sony has become heir to that fortune at a time when more consumers are bypassing stored movies and games altogether and downloading them,” Takenaka reports.
“‘We believe it is highly likely that the Internet will become the mainstream method of distributing visual content, in the same way as with music,’ Mitsubishi UFJ Securities analyst Yukihiko Shimada said in a research note,” Takenaka reports.
“Industry specialists say, however, it will be quite some time before telecommunications infrastructure becomes strong enough to allow people to download high-resolution feature-length movies with reasonable time and costs,” Takenaka reports.
“Sony does have its eye on this market too. Sony CEO Howard Stringer said in December he sees its PlayStation 3-based online content distribution service, the PlayStation Network, as a key growth driver for the Japanese company,” Takenaka reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “balanced” for the heads up.]
Mr. Reeee said
“1.) There’s NOT enough bandwidth, in the US at least for the foreseeable future, to allow for Full-HD downloads in a reasonable time. How long would it take to DL a 50GB movie at current speeds? What would happen to your cable signal if half (or even 25%) of the people in your neighborhood decided to download Full-HD movies at the same time? Exactly.”
Go to any torrent site and enter in “720p” or “1080p” in the
search bar. An 1080p 2 hour long bluray rip is about 8 gb in
size. A 720p 2 hour long movie is about 4gb in size. I keep all of my movies on my HDD and most of them are bluray rips…that I acquired legally (in my country legally anyway).
rdbvideo said
“4. People aren’t going to want to download their wedding videos to archive on a hard drive (that will die someday).”
If you keep the hdd you use to store your data in an external usb enclosure and only use it to store and view your data, it’ll probably outlast a bluray disc. I remember I lost a tonne of data from scratched dvds back when I used them to backup my data. I had a dvd which was 4 years old and all the data on it was corrupted (no scratches it just got old). I understand blu-ray is suppossed to have superior scratch protection, but… I’ve never had a hard drive fail on me. Also, I keep two separate hard drives with the same data on them in external enclosure and just synch the data between them. It’s very unlikely that both will fail at the same time. And if I get a new bigger and better hard drive, It’s simply a matter of copying and pasting the data between them.
Plus, it makes sense to have a folder just for stuff like wedding archives that you can change whenever you want.
Not to mention that the largest capacity blu-ray disc is only
50gb. You can buy a hdd from 750gb to 500gb for a reasonable price (a 1 TB drive too if you’re willing to pay).
Anyway, you could always hook up your computer to a digital tv to watch your movies rather than having to burn them.
Anaknipedro said
“If a Hi-def movie could have been compressed to 5Gb without quality loss, it would have been done already and put on a standard DVD. Blu-ray movies already use cutting edge compression, you won’t get a Hi-def movie down to 5 or 10Gb without the picture looking like crap. It ends up defeating the whole purpose of Hi-def.”
When it comes to formats in the bluray-rip scene it’s unusual seeing big files in an avi container, usually they use the mkv container (matroska/x264) because it has a better compression for the videos. I’ve watched a x264 rip, one HD rip, it was 8GB and it had a video bitrate on 11000kbps (usualy from 3000kbps to 8000kbps for the same releases in an avi container). Those 4.3GB or 8GB releases are very good quality in my opinion (I’m a prefectionist).
Physical media is dead. The future is going to look like something very similar to apple tv. Everyone will carry their data on their devices or in external containers. People are just going to download movies and hook up their computers to their tvs to watch them.
I’m personally betting on flash being the storage option of choice.
Thanks to a few, for schooling the many, on what’s really going on out in the wild. HD downloads are here already (or so they say
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“Blu-Ray Disc’s biggest video and audio advantages are real, but will be lost on many HDTV users.”
That is clearly a matter of opinion and, even worse, it’s stupid because it’s someone’s opinion about other people’s opinions. It will depend on every viewer to assess things for themselves and decide if they agree with that conclusion.
I don’t.
“Since the majority of HDTVs sold before 2007 were not capable of displaying true 1080p output—most were capped at 720p or 1080i—the superior video quality of the Blu-Ray versions of movies won’t be noticeable on such sets, and the difference between the Apple TV and Blu-Ray versions will be less noticeable.”
I call this a pointless BS comparison. A proper comparison needs to be between HD media and standard definition TV/DVD/downloads/etc. And, again, it’s a mater of opinion as to whether or not the differences are noticeable.
I say they are clearly noticeable.
Now… as to whether or not that’s as important to others as it is to me, I can’t say. I’m not that arrogant or stupid.
“If you’re using a TV without the ability to display 1080p video—especially if you don’t have a receiver capable of decoding the Blu-Ray Disc’s DTS-HD signal—an Apple TV rental will be an almost complete substitute for renting the Blu-Ray.”
More BS. I have a 2005 62″ Mitsubishi DLP that ‘s 1080i and I can quite easily tell the difference.
“…I lost a tonne of data from scratched dvds back when I used them to backup my data. I had a dvd which was 4 years old and all the data on it was corrupted (no scratches it just got old). I understand blu-ray is suppossed to have superior scratch protection, but… I’ve never had a hard drive fail on me.”
I presume you’re speaking of a recordable DVD, which are not the same as a retail DVD containing the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Retail DVDs (and I presume BR discs) are pressed, not burned. Recordable “burned” DVDs can be a bit finicky when attempting to read them with a different drive than the one which recorded it, and the different recordable formats (+R, -R, ±R, +RW, -RW, ±RW) don’t help matters any.
And if you’ve never had a harddrive fail, then count yourself extremely lucky… because you are.
There’s an old saying, “It’s not a matter of “if” your hard drive fails, but “when.”
Don’t trust valuable data to just harddrives. I had two external drives (bought at the same time) fail with a few days of each other, just a few weeks after they went off warranty. Both were made by the same maker, one with a high reputation for the reliability of their drives.
@ nobodi
Check out the web page I refer to. It wasn’t much of an opinion, it was closup photos of the screen resolution with a Nikon. Look at the pics. They have them all side by side.
Sorry, a 1080p disc will not magically display more pixels on a 1080i TV. It will only display what the TV can do.