Blu Ray Faces Fuzzy Future

The biggest news at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January was not the birth of a new product but the death of one.

A decision by Warner Brothers to withdraw support for the HD DVD video disc format sent shock waves through the electronics industry and appeared to hand the future of home entertainment to Blu-ray, a rival format.

The move set the stage for this year's Consumer Electronics Show, which starts Wednesday under the dark cloud of a recession and a sharp downturn in consumer spending. Nearly two million square feet of convention hall will be stocked with the latest mobile phones, portable music players, digital cameras and expensive flat-screen televisions.

But many eyes will be on Blu-ray, which for the first time has the floor largely to itself as the heir apparent to the DVD. Over the last decade, DVD players and discs have generated tens of billions of dollars for Hollywood and the consumer electronics industry, so the pressure for a blockbuster sequel is high.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[Novista]

Sony's cash donation to Warner Bros and others didn't hurt their chances, either ...

[Birdman]

I think whomever wrote this has not looked at Netflix streaming video, first off it is NOT HighDef, and with the upcoming changes by ISP's to cap downloads and charge extra for more download capacity will make movie downloads an UNDESIRABLE method for obtaining the latest movies or programs. No I think that Blue ray or any other optical media has nothing to worry about. Not unless there are changes made to the iternet for one isn't there speculation that we are already at capcity? Adding movie downloads will overload the system not to mention who can afford another 20 to 40 dollars on top of their High speed bill now?

[Tom95134]

Downloading sounds great until you realize that the major ISPs, e.g., Comcast, AT7T, etc., all have established monthly maximums for the amount of data that you can trasfer over the network to your home. They did this because people have been using P2P (peer-to-peer) transfer programs and using up bandwidth in both directions and, while targeted at the uplink direction it also impacts downloads. Yeah, the download number they "give" you sounds like a BIG number but downloading movies uses a lot of bandwidth per movie. (It also takes some time.) Comcast, for example, doesn't even have a website location which you can go to and see how much of your monthly allocation you have used. They also "throttle" the amount of bandwidth you have access to and If you exceed the magic number for a few months you are simply shut off.

The crazy thing is that companies are coming with products and promotion programs that push you to use more and more bandwidth.

To top it off, the downloaded quality may be okay and look as good as a DVD but doesn't really touch what Blu-ray is capable of doing.

[TurtleGuy]

Not only that, but these networks were designed years ago, without regard to the fact that high-bandwidth applications would need to be handled at some point in the future. Considering the state of the economy, there is no way any ISP out there is looking to update equipment, or re-architect their edge/core network design. ISP's are in this to make money, so they put as many subscribers as humanly possible provisioned on a single node, which is a recipe for disaster when everyone wants to use their connection.

Kinda like all the hype surrounding plugin hybrid cars, where you can plug in your car and push energy back into the grid for a financial incentive. Too bad the entire power infrastructure of our country was never designed to handle it. It would have to be rebuilt from scratch to accomodate that technology.

Both concepts are good examples of technology where society isn't ready to adopt it yet.

[GerryS]

Sony was one of the inventors of Blu-ray. Didn't Sony invent and push beta-max till it's demise ?

[mick7191]

Sony didn't license the rights to Beta like they did with Blu-Ray. Beta collapsed under the weight of Sony's arrogance. That is why we ended up with VHS because the market was diversified. Beta was supposedly superior to VHS as far as quality goes. I just bought a Blu-Ray and the quality is astounding.

[Hirnlego]

It might happen again. I hear the license fee is .. not a small sum for bluray.

[UtahLiberal435]

It's too bad that Beta didn't win out over VHS, it was DEFINITELY a superior media, which is why high-quality analog video was shot on Beta SP tapes for years. Transferred to VHS, it looked like hell.

Sorry, the internet's not generally fast enough for high-quality video viewing. And given our telecom 'deregulation,' it won't be up to speed anytime soon. Sure, if you live in Manhattan, maybe. Most areas of the country can't even get decent DSL at present.

This is where government standards should step in. If Blu-Ray is better, that should be the mandated standard, and if Sony wants to charge excessive licensing fees, well, the FCC can simply de-license their products for U.S. markets. For a market of 200 million, they'll negotiate.

It's time that corporations weren't allowed to set the national agenda. Our government needs to start charging them for access to us as a market, instead of letting them run us into the ground.

Here's a very relevant example: One of the biggest reasons for political corruption? The high price of campaign TV advertising, which is necessary if you want to reach tens of millions of voters. Free political ad time to qualified candidates should be mandatory if you want an FCC-issued channel. Period.

No signee, no license, no access to market.

And it should be the same with other new media storage and transmission genres.

[MsCanadian]

Way too expensive for me.

[tomas0808]

Me too. Unneccessary

[BobsNotWorking]

The skeptics are right. Optical media is a dead technology.

[Hirnlego]

It will be, but not yet. Not everyone has harddrive space enough nor do they have fast enough broadband to download high quality releases. Plus of course many countries have ISP which provide caps on maximal downloads.

[Sundialsvc4]

Trust me: Blu-Ray is stone dead. It just hasn't stopped wiggling yet.

Internet distribution of media is the future .. the only future. Look at "Apple TV," and similar offerings. These are the future.

Why? "Cost of goods sold equals Zero."

Think back to what happened to "Shrek-2." The studio printed too many plastic boxes and too many plastic disks. It had to restate its quarterly earnings as a loss when retailers shipped them all back. But face it: "a movie is software." So is music. You should not have to put the stuff in a warehouse. Ever.

Media companies are fixated with the notion of "someone's gonna steal my stuff." They worry about it so much, they make it hard on themselves to Sell the stuff. They not only continue to impose Plastic Disks upon themselves, they seem content to make it Expensive Plastic.

So... while the moguls fret over "which will it be ... cassette tape or 8-track?" someone walks into the hall wearing an iPhone. The moguls barely notice.

[Birdman]

In case you have not noticed but ISP's are implementing download caps, and if you were to get a HD quality program most projected caps by ISP would amount to 3 movies a month, that is assuming that the movies werer availble in HD which they are not. Lastly the internet is purported to be at or near capcity so a whole new design would have to be implemented to accomidate the increased bandwidth necessary for HD quality video. lastly only about 20 to 30 percent of the country even has access to highspeed, maybe in 10 years your predictions will come true but not until some major changes are made first.

[Dystopic]

In My HS Setup my receiver had a Faroudja image processor that will upscale any video input to 1080P, works great and makes normal DVDs look pretty close to Blu Ray.

Faroudja processors, in the laser disc era were always amazing and expensive, but well worth the money. Now to have it integrated into a receiver, it's even better. Not nearly as expensive as it once was.

Most people cripple their HD setups by not using HDMI, nad instead using the coax component video, which degrades the image greatly, compared to HDMI. Nice thing about HDMI - 1 cable for audio and video.

There will always be a physical format, even 20 years from now.

[TurtleGuy]

You lose no image quality using analog cables, as long as they are shorter than 3 ft.

[filo]

Blue-Ray is still too expensive for now. Just the blank media costs between $5 and $10. When the prices come down then I'll check it out.

What good is hi-def video when you have lo-def eyes??

[Hirnlego]

"What good is hi-def video when you have lo-def eyes??"

You really can't see the difference between normal dvd and bluray?

[ErnestineBass]

Nope. Not enough to justify the price deferential anyway.

Given the declining state of the economy, if the industry madates Blu Ray as the standard format, they're insuring their own demise. No doubt about it.

[JoeBlough]

The real difference is in the sound, as far as I can see.