Quote:
Originally Posted by cyniclaus
Wow, what an optimist! BDs have been out since 2006 and we still have problems getting decent transfers/remasters of many films. We still haven't transitioned from DVD (95% of U.S. households own a DVD player but Blu-ray is still around 20%...half of which are PS3s). The related problem is display technology since people have just upgraded to flat screen, 720/1080p sets. Most the people I know, even film lovers, have trouble seeing the difference between upscaled DVD and BD on their 42-47" screens. Studios are not going to waste money on expensive 4k masters in the near future just to try and sell them to 2% of the population. At best, we may see a format aimed at the HT crowd that will have very limited penetration much like Laser Disc did, but even that is likely years away, especially in this economy and the risk-adverse environment that comes with it.
Consider that it took 9 years from the introduction of DVD Video for BD Video to be released.
Finally, bear in mind that VOD/streaming is growing at a rate that exceeds BD penetration and it represents a strong trend away from physical media that will certainly not prevent affordable 4k from making its way to HT, but will inevitably delay it if only from the impact on BD sales that will make studios leery of investing in next-gen platforms.
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I agree on your point about on demand services such as VOD. currently, as I am aware,VOD provides 1080p video with surround which is apparently very nice, but not bluray quality which I believe in 2-3 years will become the standard for physical media. Say VOD allows videos to be downloaded and streamed with 30mbps video and DTS-hd audio, the us internet infrastructure, in it's present stage cannot handle the bandwidth. First off all, the film would take up 15-20gb to stream, which for some people would take a few hours or so but for others take way too long. And if the country did turn to virtual media, think how cooked the bandwidth on all cable lines would be.
So in order for virtual media to replace physical media, the government or cable companies would need to seriously up the bandwidth and speed and also allow large amounts of data per month (do you guys have true unlimited).
This is just my two cent though