HD DVD, Blu-ray content to be degraded for analog sets

[Spanky The Dolphin]

That issue is addressed on some DVD-phile websites. I stumbled across a thread at one board discussing what the next gen HD media formats would do to the minds of the public at large. Many noted that those who have a huge DVd collection would most likely keep it and do with the fact that the pricier, but better built DVD players will up-convert the image on HD screens from normal DVDs so it's still better quality, just not HD-DVD or Blu-ray. Only the real movie maniacs will throw all their DVDs out and start anew, which could costs thousands of dollars for a decent sized collection.

And then what do they do 5 more years down the line whenan even better format comes out? This is why it is pure idiocy to jump in and keep up with new technology. The fools that went for Betamax found that out, even if it was a better product. The people who have plasma TVs today will find that out. I expect the same will happen with HD media formats too, as it happened with Mini-Disc and the Philips CD-i.

Well, The Digital Bits had an interview with the president of Pioneer's American branch at this year's CES, and his consensus was that BR and HD-DVD will at first be picked up primarily by cinephiles, basically function as an analogue for DVDs to what laserdisc was for VHS. And that is specifically the target market they'll be aiming for for the time being, and that DVD itself will remain for quite sometime.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

That's an interesting analogy, since Laserdic never amounted to jack shit, just like these new formats probably won't either.

[Glocksman]

That's an interesting analogy, since Laserdic never amounted to jack shit, just like these new formats probably won't either.

Well, around the time that LD seemed poised for a real takeoff in the 'cinephile' market (after years of neglect, other vendors than Pioneer were picking it up), DVD was announced, and that was the death knell for LD.

The problem BD and HD-DVD will have is that if the hires output is crippled due to DRM, why replace your existing collection?
There were plenty of reasons for me to replace the shitty VHS movies I had with LD versions, but why would I replace a DVD with a crippled Blu-Ray?

[Darth Wong]

It should also be noted that one of the primary drivers behind the adoption of DVDs was their special features and menus, not the video quality. Indeed, I know many, many people who don't give a damn about the picture quality differences and who switched to DVD only because they thought the extra features and convenience (such as not having to rewind) were so cool.

In contrast, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will offer nothing in terms of new features to consumers other than superior resolution which won't even be noticeable except on high-end TVs, and even that will only happen if the consumer jumps through all sorts of industry hoops. It just doesn't seem worthwhile to me.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

The problem BD and HD-DVD will have is that if the hires output is crippled due to DRM, why replace your existing collection?
There were plenty of reasons for me to replace the shitty VHS movies I had with LD versions, but why would I replace a DVD with a crippled Blu-Ray?

Although complete replacement of existing collections, at least as Pioneer is concerned, is not the actual short-term goal of either format.

[Admiral Valdemar]

There's only so much more information you can process. Look at the Ultra High Definition Video NHK developed from scratch in Japan. You're talking about 7,680 × 4,320 pixel resolution with 22.2 channel audio! That's resolution so high, the human brain sees it as reality (Fry's comment about HDTV having "better resolution than real-life" in Futurama springs to mind). People got motion sickness from watching the screen, to say nothing of all the audio data being pumped out, 22 surround speakers anyone?

That is ridiculous technology. So ridiculous, it would take terabytes to even put a 90-minute movie on disc, which may be possible with UV laser holographic discs in the future, but nowhere near now.

The real die-hard cinephiles would love this, despite how redundant it is. TV won't ever get it given the number of channels needed to broadcast one HD channel, forget UHDV. So really, where does one draw a line? The limiting factor is the human senses, which we seem to have met already aurally and now have visually.

This probably explains why Superbit DVDs didn't do too well. These were aimed at the connoisseurs who wanted the best video quality, at the cost of extra features (which I confess to rarely caring for anyway). For standard TVs, DVD will reign for a long time yet, until some other factor gets HD off the mark such as bigger game storage needed. Until then, a decent HD player with up-convert technology will make those with HDTVs happy as clams over keeping their normal DVDs with an improved visual resolution.

[Arrow]

That is ridiculous technology. So ridiculous, it would take terabytes to even put a 90-minute movie on disc, which may be possible with UV laser holographic discs in the future, but nowhere near now..

Holy shit. That's pushing 200 MB a second.

[Admiral Valdemar]

The 18-minute video was around 3.5 TB.

[Arrow]

The 18-minute video was around 3.5 TB.

Whoops, I didn't see the 's' on "terabytes". So with the new info, that's 3.3 GB/s. God-Like! That's well in the realm of expensive FPGA processing. How many hundred's of thousands of dollars does this system cost?

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'd try millions, given they had to make the system from scratch and there's only one in the world.

[Loner]

There's only so much more information you can process. Look at the Ultra High Definition Video NHK developed from scratch in Japan. You're talking about 7,680 × 4,320 pixel resolution with 22.2 channel audio! That's resolution so high, the human brain sees it as reality (Fry's comment about HDTV having "better resolution than real-life" in Futurama springs to mind). People got motion sickness from watching the screen, to say nothing of all the audio data being pumped out, 22 surround speakers anyone?

That is ridiculous technology. So ridiculous, it would take terabytes to even put a 90-minute movie on disc, which may be possible with UV laser holographic discs in the future, but nowhere near now.

I read about that a year or two ago. Wasn't it film of driving around the streets from a car's point of view? I think that's what caused the motion sickness.

[Arrow]

I'd try millions, given they had to make the system from scratch and there's only one in the world.

I mean just the parts by themselves, not the development costs.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

If I were a betting man, I'd wager that the format that replaces DVD won't even be a physical disc. Once the Internet-2 gets up and running and enough people are on it, it becomes feasible to stream HD content. So instead of buying a physical disc, you simply have a set-top box with an easy-to-use remote interface, that streams the chosen movie or show from a server. Most people won't even realize that the box is connected to the internet unless someone tells them.

The consumer gets to watch whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and the content providers can provide it at a massively reduced cost, charging whatever the market will bear. There will be pirates, of course, but mostly among people in their teens and early twenties who wouldn't have been willing or able to pay the subscription cost anyway. The ordinary person won't get in on the pirating act because most people don't want to use their PCs for shows and movies. Most of the reason there's so much piracy today is that the industry refuses to offer a digital alternative.

They could charge on a pay-per-view basis, and then also offer a monthly subscription, with rates similar to current Cable and Satellite TV offerings. This would replace both broadcasting and physical formats, make the consumer happy, cut costs for producers, raising profits, and be feasible within the next 10-15 years. Will it happen? I don't know. But it should.

[phongn]

If I were a betting man, I'd wager that the format that replaces DVD won't even be a physical disc. Once the Internet-2 gets up and running and enough people are on it, it becomes feasible to stream HD content. So instead of buying a physical disc, you simply have a set-top box with an easy-to-use remote interface, that streams the chosen movie or show from a server. Most people won't even realize that the box is connected to the internet unless someone tells them.

Internet2 (properly the Abilene network) is an academic network only. High-speed video-on-demand will probably be through private high-speed networks like fibre-to-the-neighborhood or fibre-to-the-premesis.

[Edi]

If I were a betting man, I'd wager that the format that replaces DVD won't even be a physical disc. Once the Internet-2 gets up and running and enough people are on it, it becomes feasible to stream HD content. So instead of buying a physical disc, you simply have a set-top box with an easy-to-use remote interface, that streams the chosen movie or show from a server. Most people won't even realize that the box is connected to the internet unless someone tells them.

The consumer gets to watch whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and the content providers can provide it at a massively reduced cost, charging whatever the market will bear. There will be pirates, of course, but mostly among people in their teens and early twenties who wouldn't have been willing or able to pay the subscription cost anyway. The ordinary person won't get in on the pirating act because most people don't want to use their PCs for shows and movies. Most of the reason there's so much piracy today is that the industry refuses to offer a digital alternative.

They could charge on a pay-per-view basis, and then also offer a monthly subscription, with rates similar to current Cable and Satellite TV offerings. This would replace both broadcasting and physical formats, make the consumer happy, cut costs for producers, raising profits, and be feasible within the next 10-15 years. Will it happen? I don't know. But it should.

You're completely disregarding the very human desire of owning things. A lot of people are not going to be happy unless they have the content they desire on a physical storage object that is in their possession. It gives them a tangible sense of value for money (perceived if not in fact real, but that is beside the point) and it also makes them less dependent on an infrastructure system that is not going to be universally available (geographical realities mean restricted availability because building the infra is no trivial task) and which might suffer from technical faults, bandwidth issues and such.

Systems based on storage medium in the customer's possession are not going to go away anytime in the near future.

Edi

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I don't think that would be an issue with a subscription model. If they tried to set it up like DIVX without the disc, it probably wouldn't do so well. But if you could pay Cable TV rates and watch whatever you want, however many times you want, I don't see a big market for physical discs.

As far as technical faults, it shouldn't be inherently harder to maintain than existing Cable or Satellite TV. Obviously, some rural areas won't have it for a while, but that's not going to grind the wheels to a halt. I'm not saying physical discs are going to go away, but they could become a relatively small market.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

You can't change thousands of years of human nature, Arthur. People like to own physical objects. They like to be able to see it up on a shelf and be able to touch it. TDB's interview with Pioneer also touched on the whole subject of VoD, and neither could see such a format replace physical home video mediums any time soon, if ever at all. The only thing it could possibly replace is the rental system.

I might as well post the whole interview in general:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/ ... rview.html

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Of course people like to own physical objects. That doesn't mean they will spend the extra money to buy something they already have, just to be able to hold it in their hands. When the technology improves enough that it stops making sense for the average person to maintain a collection of something, he won't. Physical media will be a videophile market. Not dead, but not really significant, either.

Keep in mind that I'm not talking about the same kind of VoD that they talked about in the article. They're talking about stuff we're likely to see in the next 5 years. I'm talking about things we're likely to see in the next 10-15, and I don't see these new formats replacing DVD in that timeframe. Not with a format war, and not with both shooting themselves in the foot with DRM. I think we'll see a transitition from DVD to VoD, with physical media being relegated to the videophile market.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

I'm sorry, but I just simply cannot see that happening at all. I mean, it's just simply inconceivable and too radical and counterintuitive.

[Xon]

The sad part is TV crts SUCK SHIT compared to PC monitors. They just dont have the physical resolution that PC monitors do nor the preformance.

Plus the extra cost is mindblowing( and obviously budget blowing )

WRONG..... try finding a 34inch computer CRT hdtv for $1000 .. both Panasonic and Sony make one...

That 34" TV crt has less physical resolution than a PC monitor for the given size.

Modern PC CRTs/LCDs go upto 2048x1536, which blows away 1080p, and they are physically smaller thus the number of pixels per area is much higher.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I'm sorry, but I just simply cannot see that happening at all. I mean, it's just simply inconceivable and too radical and counterintuitive.

What's so counter-intuitive? You put out a set-top box that streams from a massive server-farm. Those servers contain every movie and every show ever made within reasonable limits. People pay on the order of ~$40 a month for programming with commercials to ~$60 without (the Cable and Satellite TV markets show that this is roughly what people are willing to pay). The consumer wins because he or she gets to watch what he or she wants, when he wants to. The producer wins because it is much cheaper.

Of course, there will still be networks, since nobody wants to have to choose what to watch from a nearly infinite selection every time they sit on the couch, but this content can also be streamed. The system probably won't even be aimed at replacing DVDs, but people will realize that once they have the subscription to the on-demand service, buying a DVD means paying for something they already have. I will conceed that my timeframe is arbitrary and we might not see it for 20 years or more, but if something is cheaper for producers and preferred by consumers, it's going to happen.

It's not like this type of thing is unprecedented, either. Mp3's are quickly replacing CDs among young people, even though people have to get them one at a time for ridiculous prices, or from illegal sources. If the RIAA wisened up and authorized a company to put out a subscription-based service that allowed you to download or stream any song ever made at a high bit rate, they'd probably make a bigger profit than they do selling CDs. Why is it such a stretch to imagine the same thing for video?

[Edi]

I'm sorry, but I just simply cannot see that happening at all. I mean, it's just simply inconceivable and too radical and counterintuitive.

What's so counter-intuitive? You put out a set-top box that streams from a massive server-farm. Those servers contain every movie and every show ever made within reasonable limits. People pay on the order of ~$40 a month for programming with commercials to ~$60 without (the Cable and Satellite TV markets show that this is roughly what people are willing to pay). The consumer wins because he or she gets to watch what he or she wants, when he wants to. The producer wins because it is much cheaper.

You're assuming economies of scale on the scale of the whole of North America, as well as cultural and linguistic uniformity, which just doesn't exist everywhere. Europe for example is divided between five or six (seven if you include Russian) major (as in, 30 million plus speakers) languages and dozens of smaller ones (between 1 and 20 million speakers). For most of these countries, you need either dubbing or subtitles for everything that's in English, you need separate server systems per linguistic division, you need the infra and there simply are no Europe wide networks operators who can do this sort of thing. Operating licenses for such companies need to be obtained separately in every country and there are all sorts of other obstacles (e.g. regulatory differences) that just massively cut into any even theoretically possible profit margins.

It's not like this type of thing is unprecedented, either. Mp3's are quickly replacing CDs among young people, even though people have to get them one at a time for ridiculous prices, or from illegal sources. If the RIAA wisened up and authorized a company to put out a subscription-based service that allowed you to download or stream any song ever made at a high bit rate, they'd probably make a bigger profit than they do selling CDs. Why is it such a stretch to imagine the same thing for video?

Were you born that stupid or did you have to practice? Let me lay it out for you in simple terms: Volume of fucking data required. Take a look at the amount of data per a single MP3 file or even an album of 15 to 20 songs in MP3 format, vs the size of even a single movie or TV episode in high quality video formats. There's a big difference there. It'd help if you had some idea of network design, load bearing capacities and so forth, but think of the public road networks. You can't just cram an arbitrary number of cars on them and increase the traffic by an order of magnitude (never mind several orders of magnitude) without completely fucking up the system. Your proposed system would cause this to happen unless the infra was massively upgraded first.

Your solution is simply not practical.

Edi

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

You're assuming economies of scale on the scale of the whole of North America, as well as cultural and linguistic uniformity, which just doesn't exist everywhere. Europe for example is divided between five or six (seven if you include Russian) major (as in, 30 million plus speakers) languages and dozens of smaller ones (between 1 and 20 million speakers). For most of these countries, you need either dubbing or subtitles for everything that's in English, you need separate server systems per linguistic division, you need the infra and there simply are no Europe wide networks operators who can do this sort of thing. Operating licenses for such companies need to be obtained separately in every country and there are all sorts of other obstacles (e.g. regulatory differences) that just massively cut into any even theoretically possible profit margins.

Once it's technologically possible, it should be cheaper to do it over the internet than via broadcasting, even if you did have to do it separately in each country. It's not like any of that stops cable companies from turning a profit. Besides, if there are different localizations, you just need separate files, that's all. As far as regulation goes, if regulation is standing in the way of big business raking in the dough, then you can expect the regulations to change in a New York minute.

Were you born that stupid or did you have to practice? Let me lay it out for you in simple terms: Volume of fucking data required. Take a look at the amount of data per a single MP3 file or even an album of 15 to 20 songs in MP3 format, vs the size of even a single movie or TV episode in high quality video formats. There's a big difference there. It'd help if you had some idea of network design, load bearing capacities and so forth, but think of the public road networks. You can't just cram an arbitrary number of cars on them and increase the traffic by an order of magnitude (never mind several orders of magnitude) without completely fucking up the system. Your proposed system would cause this to happen unless the infra was massively upgraded first.

Your solution is simply not practical.

I'm smart enough to actually read and comprehend a person's post, which is more than I can say for you. Since you missed it the first two times, I repeat that I'm talking about something that's not going to happen for 10-15 years, maybe 20. Given that we've come from Usenet and fucking gopher with 300 baud modems in that time, I hardly think massively upgraded infrastructure is an unrealistic expectation.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

You're also still just ignoring the fact that people, not just those who actively collect things or pursue a hobby, like to own things as physical possessions. You can't just wave that fact away with your hand and say, "oh, that'll change in 10-15 years," because it frankly just won't: it's human nature. The same reasons communism doesn't work on a long or large-term scale also apply to merchandice and ownership.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I'm not ignoring it. I'm saying it's less important than other factors. Young people are showing a preference for mp3's over CD's, in direct contrast to the principle you keep pointing out. That's because mp3's have characteristics that make them superior to CD's, and those characteristics are more important than the fact that people prefer something they can hold in their hands.