Quote:
Originally Posted by Chad Rouch
Yes, it is. It will come a lot faster than a lot of us on this forum want to believe it will. It's just the next evolution though. Just like way back when the only way to watch uncut, full-length movies at home was on HBO. And then it was VHS. Laserdiscs tried to be a thing but they never went mainstream. Then DVD/Blu-ray upped the ante with regard to quality and electronics manufacturers were able to sell us increasingly sophisticated equipment.
Streaming is just the next natural progression. And its quality will improve. It already has over the last 10 years. It started with just SD streams and now can go full 4k with HDR and Atmos. Lossless audio will eventually come just like it finally came to the online music providers like Spotify and iTunes.
And then it will move on to the next natural evolution. Progress in inevitable and it should always be embraced, not feared.
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Streaming is more likely to get worse rather than better. People keep forgetting the ISP's data caps in the US are very restrictive for most people. So dropping bitrate/serving lower-quality streams helps with that. YouTube as an example streams extremely low-bitrate/highly compressed videos. They've actually been re-encoding most/all of their catalog of old videos from ages ago over the past several years, so the bitrate it serves now is actually less than the same exact videos it streamed many years ago. There's a lot of discussion about that on Reddit and I've seen it first-hand myself. Same videos, much less bit rate now than years ago, and they look far, far worse than they did previously. Even their new videos are horribly over-compressed.
Sure they stream 4k too now, but everything is miserably over-compressed. Their 1080p streams have laughably low bitrates.
Taking our ownership away from us by dropping physical media so the only way to see our favorite films/shows is through their streaming networks is not something to be embraced.