Apple’s iTunes Store “is the largest retailer of music in the world and when Apple announces that customers are now renting over 50,000 movies and TV shows per day, and you’ll get a sense of why Apple is stalling on Blu-ray,” Danny Gorog writes for APC Magazine.
“There’s likely to be one winner in the HD space, and the less legitimacy Apple (who is the leader in the video production space via its Final Cut franchise) gives to Blu-ray, the less likely the format is to succeed,” Gorog writes.
“In Apple’s world of course, all media should come via the iTunes cloud. And if it doesn’t come from iTunes it should be created or ripped by the user. In Apple’s world, the more media that consumers purchase from iTunes, the more powerful and valuable its formats, platform and hardware proposition becomes,” Gorog writes.
“Apple is stalling on Blu-ray for as long as it can, and consumers don’t care. The longer Apple can hold off Blu-ray the better its chances of dominating the market for video and TV show downloads, like it does for music,” Gorog writes.
Full article here.
The reason Apple is slow to embrace Blue-Ray is the same reason that the original iMacs just came with CD-ROM disk drives and no CD burning capability. The hardware was just too expensive at the time.
Obviously Apple needs to pay attention to Blue-Ray and get onto the ground floor with this technology (at least software support) if anything, for the sake of production people who need Blue-Ray for their video/movie production. The Mac needs to continue to be the hardware that you get if you’re creative.
As for AppleTV being the savior for Apple to not invest in Blue-Ray, that’s kind of short-sighted. People have been grumbling about AppleTV support for years. People have been buying HDTVs in mass and eventually, Grandma and Grandpa will buy their Blue-Ray player, not an AppleTV.
Someone asked which was more empowering for the consumer: driving to a store to try to find a disc or just picking it off a menu to watch?
I’d like to ask that question slightly differently.
Which is more empowering: driving to a store to find a disc to watch (or to a friends to borrow a disc) and putting it in the player’s disc tray or hoping that Steve Jobs will consent to allowing your chosen video to play on his closed proprietary box?
iPhone anyone? Only what Steve (and Apple) allow to play in their closed proprietary box. Kinda like the Apple TV.
Don’t get me wrong. I have two iPhones (3G) and think it is great. But I don’t want it to be the only phone out there.
I don’t think it’s Apple that is against having Blu-Ray support in MacOS X. I think it’s a combination of the movie industries paranoia with pirated movies and Microsoft agreeing to their insane demands of having DRM implemented throughout the operating system. Apple can’t afford to do the same thing without crippling the platform for 6 months to a year (as all 3rd party drivers would need to be signed by Apple, new hardware with “protected” outputs (hell, built-in LCD screens probably would also need “protection”), plus add a couple hundred dollars in cost to each computer actually supporting it.
blu-ray would be awesome on the Mac. I have a Blu-Ray player (I had an HD-DVD player before) and I am very happy with it. Much better quality than AppleTV.
i’m with the anti-blue ray camp. Not just because downloading is better or that ssd’s will prevail. But in order to license blue-ray for the mac, apple needs to implement systemwide encryption in both the hardware and OS X. (Google Vista’s DRM to protect premium content. it’s not just about microsoft aiming for domination. It’s the MPAA too) I am not willing to take a performance hit for a format that will be eclipsed by technologies that already exist.
But I can see the point for blue-ray when used by pros. Hopefully apple will release something for you instead of something that will affect all macs across the board.
What about Blu-Ray as a data backup tool for the Mac Pro or iMac? It has real value if it is rewritable. Particularly at 50GB or so per disc.
@ElderNorm
I agree with most of your statement, except the part about the small screen not showing a benefit for BD movies. Apple does have displays that show true HD resolutions or greater (aka 23″ & 30″ Cinema Displays and 17″ MacBook Pro w/ high-resolution display). I’d love to watch BD movies on my 30″!
With the way things are now, Apple TV HD can’t hold a candle to BD 1080p. It’s not even close… it’s about the same lousy level of quality you get with cable HD. Until bandwidth opens up everywhere — and that’s going to take a long time, give us BR capability in FCS and support it in Leopard. I agree for storage it’s not the right option for everyone, but I’d like to be able to deliver an HD video option to my customers — and that can’t be done on a mac right now, without purchasing a lot of extra software and hardware.
@ MikeK
Currently, But, just like CD-R and DVD-R Media the price of BR-R will drop quickly as the number of burners increase.
Hard drives are mechanical devices and even setting on a shelf un-used they have the potential to become unusable. While failure of an un-used Hard Drive would be rare by anyone’s standard it is still a potential risk. You burn a back-up to any type of Optical disc and it has permanence. Even if the Drive fails the burned the disk a new BR-R/BR-RE or equivalent drive will read the disk just as BR-R/BR-RE drives today read and write DVD-R and CD-R standard disks and the next generation of standardized optical drive will be able to read todays standard BR-R/BR-RE Disks.
It’s about economics of scale currently yes, a 1TB Hard disk is cheaper then 1TB of BR-R or BR-RE media A factor at play in scale Many More 1TB Hard drives are made them BR-R/RE drives and Media. As Computer hardware manufactures start using BR-R/RE+DVD-R/RW/DL+CD-R/RW drives in place of the Current DVD-R/RW and DVD-R/RW/DL drives the media prices will fall just as DVD-R/RW/DL prices did. While DVD-DL prices are still higher then say a standard DVD-R they have and continue to fall just the DVD-R prices do. BR-R/RW prices will follow as more BR-R/RW drives are made and media sells increase. In a year after wide spread adoption by Manufacturers of PC hardware the per disk price for the BL-R/RE media will drop by more then 50% shortly after that BL-R media will be about the cost of todays DVD-DL disk or less.
Rob,
Porn looks way to real in Blu-ray. I’m warning you. DON’T TRY IT!!!
MobileMe can’t replace BluRay unless Apple takes the cap off the upload speed, it takes forever to upload just short HD videos! MobileMe = Crap, still.
If apple can put in BR without all the extra DRM crap hogging my processor and system (regardless of what I use it for), I might start to consider if it is worth having. As it is, it is not even something to look at.
You are all missing one point BR also has fully uncompressed audio. Not to mention most people are not going to just adopt downloading movies from the internet. People are happy with their DVDs and it is easier for them to make the move to BR than to down loading. People want something in there hand for their money not a download.
The ONLY reason someone would want Blu-Ray is for storage.
You can get blu-ray players as cheap as $330 and combo player/burners for about $530. My living room is cluttered with useless legacy equipment. I don’t need another peice of hardware that will give me about 2.5 years of life before it goes to the landfill. I have a 1TB Time machine, a 330 GIg HD a 100GB Mac Mini and Mac Book (black) that I just boosted from 160 Gig to 240Gig. My building is about to go live with Verizon Fios and I alread installed an over the air HD antenna for local ATSC programming. Once I repair my 50″ plasma I’ll be all set. I think I can live without the blu-ray revolution for now.
Aside from the much higher video datarate on Blu-ray, HD downloads (nearly all of which aren’t even at 1080p resolution) are also limited to 384k Dolby Digital. This audio resolution is actually lower than the 448k DD and 756/1.5k DTS tracks that accompany DVDs.
Blu-ray not only supports the newer DTS-HD and Dolby TruHD lossless formats, but it also allows for uncompressed 7.1 PCM audio encoded at 192kHz/24-bit resolution. This is a bit-for-bit transcription of the audio master, with no compression or other signal alterations that lossy formats like Dolby Digital will give you. 384k DD is an audibly inferior format that’s optimized more for storage efficiency than audio quality (for one thing, 384k DD economizes bits by channel joining the high frequencies above 10k, which is well within the audible range).
Those who say who cares about Blu-ray, are also accepting mediocrity in their video and audio presentation, when far higher resolutions are available through Blu-ray.
VCR and 23″ CRT please.
As long as Blu-Ray and other HD formats are CHEAPER per GIG than HARD DISKS then I am going to want them to hurry up and give me Blu-Ray.
I looked at modern tape; don’t cut it; too much hassle and not that cheap.
I am sick of burning 50 DVDs to archive one project.
I am not a big fan of blue-ray and would not spend extra money to get blue-ray DVD’s. But, the idea the the video disk is dead is just not true.
Move past the geeks, techies and fan-boys and you will see that most people don’t want to bother with downloading movies, more equipment and so on. They want something simple like putting the DVD in the slot and pushing the play button. They don’t want hassels.
Also, if you have been following the problems with the cloud, networks, copy protection, etc., you know that there are advantages to actually owning the physical DVD and not depending on somebody’s promise to deliver a movie on time.
A lot of you people are missing the real issue. Downloads will never replace physical media and here’s why. Bandwidth Limits. Time Warner has already publicly started capping people’s downloads. As time goes by this will spread. Right now they only do it in select markets but once they get the process “dialed in” expect it throughout their infrastructure. so no matter how good a HD looks people are not going to like having to pay for the file, then pay again to d/l the thing.
I want my BluRay drive.
You can mass produce Blu Ray disks for less than a buck. It’s going to be a long time before ssd or hard disks hit that price.
And the drives will hit the same price as a DVD burners today. it used to be that you’d debate whether you really needed a DVD drive or dvd burner in a system, and maybe went with the legacy CD drive. Now you don’t, it’s just standard.
It’s hard to fathom Apple’s resistance to offering it as an option as almost all other PC manufacturers do. Perhaps Steve just wants to keep that RDF going, insisting that crappy over-compressed “HD” downloads are the same as Blu-Ray.
If people haven’t seen the difference they can keep saying that they’re the same. Once they do actually see itunes and Blu-ray side by side, they’ll never be happy with iTunes “HD” content.
I want blu-ray on all my macs. It is the new standard, and you can’t compare it to downloads. There is a difference in quality.
Who cares about Blu-ray on Macs?
Uh I do. I’m tired of using several DVD’s to burn large files.
Apple should have the “do you want to split these files over multiple disks” option in the Finder like it is in iTunes.
Silly Apple.
If we are talking about HD video whether it be blu-ray DVDs or downloads, it really depends on the content. Movies tend to be shot at 24 frames per second to soften it. I have a 71″ Samsung HD TV and on some movies that I have done side by side comparisons I can’t see any appreciable difference between HD and DVD (be it download or Blu-ray disc). On the other hand some content, like the movie Arctic Tale which is a documentary with animal shots and landscapes was drop dead stunning in Blu-ray.
players in church? Or did you mean en masse?