“With the fall of HD DVD, Blu-ray has assumed the throne as the next format of choice, but its reign will be short-lived,” Erica Ogg blogs for CNET.
“Blu-ray won’t enjoy the same decade-long dominance DVD did after it succeeded VHS. But that’s not because there will be other challenger physical disc formats. Rather, instead of buying discs from Amazon, Best Buy or Wal-Mart, people will begin getting their entertainment in the form of digital downloads in larger volumes,” Ogg reports.
“To the chagrin of disc patent holders, discs are not the only way to consumer high-definition media now… Apple recently upgraded Apple TV to include rentals–standard definition and HD–and a way to bypass the need for a PC to watch films on a living room TV,” Ogg reports.
“The biggest roadblock is of course bandwidth, which causes the process to be long and painful and ultimately not worth it for many. But that will change. Consider, for example, this scenario,” Ogg reports. “Using Fios from Verizon, it’s possible to currently download several episodes of a TV show at approximately 5 megabits per second, or 625 kilobytes per second.”
“Assuming a one-hour high-definition TV show (with commercials) is around 5GB, that requires 1,388,888 kilobytes per second or 1.38 megabytes per second to watch,” Ogg reports. “So Fios is about halfway there about at best, and Comcast’s 100 megabit per second connection, which it promised at CES would be a reality by 2009, could pull it off.”
More in the full article here.
I’m yearning for an alternative to cable. I HATE Time Warner in New York, and there are some shows I like to watch live, so I don’t want to rely on BitTorrent to just download them. I would love to be able to download HD shows from iTunes if they were available.
I have rented a few movies. No complaints regarding speed here. It takes maybe 30 seconds before I can start watching. But usually I am aware I want to watch a movie well before I sit down and watch it, so it’s half done or more before I hit play.
I rented one to watch in a hotel recently, on my Mac, not Apple TV. It was crappy wifi from the hotel, and it still started playing in 30 seconds or so.
Written on my iPhone while on the toilet.
The Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD battle took too long. They were to preoccupied to see the likes of AppleTV getting a foothold.
Sorry big media, disks are obsolete.
For most people with a standard 1.5 to 3.0 broadband service, SD movies will begin playing from Apple TV within several minutes.. However, HD files can take 3-5 hours.
As long as the FCC and legislators stay in the pockets of the telecom companies the kind of broadband required for the transfer of HD video content is going to be a dream for most Americans. It is 2008 and I live in Seattle and I cannot get fiber-optic broadband. There are some neighborhoods downtown where cable isn’t even available. The telecoms have a strangle-hold on everything lest a penny might not fall into their pockets. And governments are hopelessly inept on this issue. Maybe the Swedes and the South Koreans will be skipping the blu-ray experience. But many Americans will be buying DVD and BRD movies well into the next decade.
Are they kidding?!? What is the percentage of current US households with broadband fast enough to do this? 1% or less?
Until virtually everyone has at least 10-20Mbps broadband, plus huge multi-terabyte hard drives to store of all this material on, downloads will never even come close to threatening Blu-ray. We’re talking 5-10 years down the road from now at least.
You got style. Plucking away a response in the middleof a logging operation! Watered my eyes! Log on brother.
Crap article. Women should not write about technology.
@Macintosh
Glad you didn’t poo poo the article!
After the giveaways to the bandwidth providers by Congress for the last decade, what we have is a disgrace. Compare US connectivity to the EU and to Korea, Japan, &c; they are an order of magnitude ahead of the US. Many places in Japan have 100mb speeds as the norm, while the typical US user is lucky to see 2mb. So Blu-ray has nothing to worry about for the next decade.
Is she any relation to Ogg Vorbis?
The future direction of Disc vs Download lies in the hands of whoever controls bandwidth.
Simple equations – Increase speed and allow large downloads = Cable. Limit bandwidth (or charge excessively for it) and no speed improvement = Disc.
my apple tv does just fine over an old g type wifi router. I started to watch F4-SS in HD in about 2 minutes after purchase. the disrupted industries should be very afraid. the movie moguls and rental guys are dead center in Apple inc.’s crosshairs.
I’m surprised nobody has thought about the possibility of just downloading a movie while you sleep.
Yeah, instant gratification for renting an HD movie over the innertubes is out of reach for most people. But not if you rent it a day or so ahead of when you want to watch it.
Think about it. I see iTunes has the new Coen brothers movie out, so I start to d/l it, knowing I won’t have a chance to sit down for another day or two. By that time, my HD movie is 100% d/led and I don’t sweat my relatively slow connection.
What I really want someone to work on, however, isn’t movies but TV shows. Let me subscribe to 5-10 of my favorite shows, download them when my connection is normally idle so I can watch them whenever I want and I will be all over it like flies to honey.
What about those of us that want to watch all the extras and commentaries on a 5 disc set like Bladerunner? There is definitely a place for downloads. I have been watching HD movies for years through pay-per-view, but there are still many titles I buy because I need long term access. We are still talking about renting at this point with AppleTV, and like Stevie says about music subscriptions, people like to own, and I think this will be a split market for some time to come.
I hope you guys don’t have anything against blu because it’s here to stay. I’m a Mac power user and a blu fan.
Tom Strong … your name obviously refers to your back, not your brain. Lay off the steroids and the radical religious right services and try something enlightening. As sexist as you are, you and Pat Buchanon(sp?), you may never conclude that most women are pretty close to “as good as” most men in most things … falling short in such essentials as lifting engine blocks with their teeth or writing their name in yellow in the snow … but you might learn to shut your mouth when your true nature starts to show.
@Macintosh
Read on my iPhone while sitting on the toilet.
A LOT of people are going to want to hang on to a tangible object. Blu-Ray will still be here and going strong 10 years from now. It’s going to take a whole new generation of computer users (mainly under 30) to see download sales surpass physical sales.
Erica Ogg should search far and wide for a guy to marry with the last name of Vorbis and then hyphenate her last name.
That would be sweeeeeet.
Anybody who thinks downloads look better than Blu-Ray doesn’t have their HDTV set up right. No way a 5GB download is going to look better than a 50GB disc. Downloads might replace discs some time in the future, but definitely not soon.
Every tech generation is different. The VCR revolution was different than the DVD revolution that followed. LP records had different repercussions than cassette tapes that followed, and they were different than CDs. So, the story of Blu-Ray will be different than what came before.
However, most of the importance of Blu-Ray will be for storage. OK, we have faster delivery of big media files than ever before. But that means at least SOME of those file will be kept. Not all those movies zipping around the web will be rented. Where will they be kept? On hard drives. But hard drives break, and that breakage means the loss of greater and greater amounts of data. One could lose one’s entire video collection.
There’s a need to store data in a manner not prone to mechanical breakdowns. Tape is too slow and too unreliable. Blu-Ray is IT right now, it just has to arrive at the right capacity (at LEAST 30GB per disc, though more will always be desirable), with the right backup software (Time Machine seems like a good start) and of course at the right price (which seems inevitable).
@ carson chang & Rob… You couldn’t be more right.
While the government and cable industries are busy paying each other off, it’ll be YEARS before there’s sufficient bandwidth speed and coverage, to retire physical disks. The cable company monopolies were created to limit choice and maximize profit. The US and local governments… inflicted with rampant and limitless calcification, inertia, stasis, petty squabbling and greed… they were more than happy, or completely clueless, watched it and enabled it to happen.
Places like Korea, much of Europe, Japan are physically small with centralized village culture, so wiring the entire country up for fibre is not such a daunting task. Unfortunately, the United States has massive landmass and scattered population, with single-family homes widely spaced… except for perhaps the Northeast.
Plus, the wired infrastructure (the entire infrastructure) of the US is a mess. Renovation and restoration are far more costly than starting from scratch. That’s why some of these supposed third-world countries are so far ahead technologically: they never built 19th century robber baron inspired infrastructures. They jumped from horse carts and head baskets straight to late 20th century technology.
We’re choking on our own success.
Rob, I know its hard to fathom, but Apple found a way, I have no idea how, to make this work beautifully for anyone who has a dsl/cable connection. That’s most people right now.
If you mean by “downfall” a disastrous failure (like HD DVD) then Erica is wrong. (hey, words like “downfall” gets clicks)
Blue-ray will sell tons of players and discs . . . & make a nice profit.
But like newspapers, radio, and network TV (ABC, NBC, CBS) they will have to live with a bigger pie that has smaller slices.