Why I think M$ is Barking up the wrong tree.....

[Matt X]

I hope this thread is kosher in this forum (it says "no HDDVD"), but I think this falls under "General Discussion" -
This topic has been discussed alot lately, meaning the motivations/market strategies being pursued by the players in this format war (i.e. M$ supporting HDDVD as a prelude to downloads). I was talking about it w/ a friend who is a fence-sitter, waiting for a victor - he stated he would LOVE to jump in now, but the whole thing seemed petty and stupid to him. When discussing M$'s apparent motivations, he first made a statement - "downloads will NEVER happen" (i disagree, I think they'll happen at least to SOME degree...), then stated that people love to hold/have physical media too much to adopt downloads widely (I think it will acheive niche status at best).
My thought, as Devil's Advocate, was "well, WHY won't it ever happen?" I then looked at it as a child of the 70's where owning physical media really had an artistic peak, in the form of LP's - people LOVED to collect records and care for them and admire album art - basically, they not only invested $$$into the physical medium, they invested TIME.
Why do I mention this generation? because for a long time now the segment of the US population w/the consistently highest disposable income is Middle-Agers. I'm nowhere near middle age (nor near their income , I was at the tail end of that generation), but I think I understand that those who derived pleasure from owning physical media will continue to pursue physical media - I think that's why DVDs became so popular, they provided physical ownership that provided quality that lasted longer than VHS. So that's why I think M$ is Barking up the wrong tree by supporting HDDVD - their ultimate goal of downloads will only reach niche status at best, IMO

[Gremal]

I think one need only look at digital audio to see how wrong your friend is.

TVs are getting bigger, but they're also getting smaller. Podcasts and movies on your iPod or handheld device are going to be a big part of what studios provide. How this will impact the HD formats remains to be seen, but with SACD and DVD-A being completely dwarfed by MP3 downloads, death is one very possible outcome for any optical, high resolution format.

[Elandyll]

Thing is, Mp3's have been around for what ... 12 years+ now?
The first commonly available mp3 portable player (right after the Mpman), the Diamond Rio (I had one) is close to 10 year old !
The I-pod ... 6+ years old !

What do you see when you go to a store with an audio section? audio CDs.

How come?

It's because we are physical animals. Of course digital downloads are very practical, be it on your cell phone ofr portable player, computer etc.
But when it comes down to owning stuff, we like to go check it, for it to have a nice cover, possibly a booklet, and if it's a gift we want a nice presetnation and possibly something collector.

In an all digital world, when you go to a store (if ever), all you will see is rows after rows of .. gift cards.

No thanks.

[Phane]

I think everyone is comparing movies to music and thinking that the whole movie industry is going to go the way MP3's made music go. I think that's a very bad assumption. Music consists of several songs and usually people would buy a CD for only 1-3 songs. MP3's allowed music lovers to ditch the fluff and not have to carry around 10 CD's to listen to 20 songs that they like. It also allowed for them to buy only the songs they want and ditch the filler songs that they'd never listen to anyway.

Movies are generally watched from start to finish, so owning the physical media makes more sense. You have to store the data somewhere and optical discs are ideal for long term storage and archiving. Most of us with MP3 collections probably store them on optical discs of our own at some point. So physical media does make sense, although for music, downloads are a better delivery system.

HD Movie downloads right now aren't very feesible. A 30GB download off of a 10 Mbps cable connection would take almost 7 hours at full bandwidth, and it would be extremely costly to the server, each download might cost about $4.50 for the host each time it's downloaded. Think of how many times you've had to download a file more than once, now multiply that by $4.50 and figure out how much you would have cost the host. You could force consumers to only be able to download each movie once, but then they'd have to throw it on their own physical media to ensure they don't lose their copy and it totally defeats the argument that physical media is going bye bye.

[Thunderchildga]

We've been dealing with MP3s for over ten years now and even with the huge market single-handedly driven by the iPod, downloads of music are still less than a quarter of the way people get music. It's still the purchase of an actual disc that has nearly 80% of the market!

As it's been said, there's just intangible that's important to us for owning something that we can lay our hands on and says its ours.

Furthermore, a lot of us are jaded by the fact we live in or near a major metropolitan city that has the conveniences that affords us and that includes high-speed Internet access. Just as it is with CD sales, the vast majority of the citizens of the US get their TV images from over the air broadcasts, have no cable or sat service, and if (and that's a big if) they have an internet connection, chances are it's either dial-up or a very low-speed DSL connection. Because of that, they could never download large files such as those that would be needed for an HD product.

Downloads can be an important part of how we get products, but it can't totally replace the outright purchase of media on a disc, drive, or non-volitile memory chip, and its going to remain that way for many decades to come.

[atomik kinder]

Originally Posted by Elandyll

Thing is, Mp3's have been around for what ... 12 years+ now?
The first commonly available mp3 portable player (right after the Mpman), the Diamond Rio (I had one) is close to 10 year old !
The I-pod ... 6+ years old !

What do you see when you go to a store with an audio section? audio CDs.

How come?

It's because we are physical animals. Of course digital downloads are very practical, be it on your cell phone ofr portable player, computer etc.
But when it comes down to owning stuff, we like to go check it, for it to have a nice cover, possibly a booklet, and if it's a gift we want a nice presetnation and possibly something collector.

In an all digital world, when you go to a store (if ever), all you will see is rows after rows of .. gift cards.

No thanks.

I have to agree with this. I don't think digital downloads for movies will really happen on a wide scale. I think the only reason it has happened to become so popular with audio is that people liked to get their music for FREE over the internet and many still do even though it is illegal. It wasn't much of a jump from getting it free to paying 99 cents a song. And that is reason number two. You don't have to buy an entire album if you don't like all of the particular songs on it. You can get just the one you like, gone are the days of 45rpm records and even cd singles. Sure you can still find CD singles, but does Wal-Mart or Target or Best Buy carry them. Best Buy might, but they don't have everything. Video is not the same, Yeah, you can download video for your ipod or your Zune or even your PSP, but those are extremely small files and only take a minute or so to download and are not watchable at the same size as most people's TV screens. If you have ever tried to download a DVD over the internet, it can take HOURS even on a high speed connection. Sure connection speeds may get faster, but you also have to remember that most people don't have highspeed internet connections and you can pretty much guess that many of them don't have an internet connection at all.

[Paden]

The big picture is that M$ expects to be able to offer you the ability to have a library of 1,000's of films on demand anytime you want them. You won't ever own them but rather lease them whenever you'd like. Therefore you don't have to dedicate a lot of shelf space to disks or a lot of server space to movies you "own". They'd always be there, available to you whenever you want, assuming your connection to their servers is up. There's nothing wrong with this big picture other than infrastructure needs to develop to support it. If M$ put a satellite up (or worked with DirecTV to partner in it) they'd be able to send a stream to the satellite so every movie ever made was available at all times. And your internet connection would simply allow you to click on a film and it would start on your box immediately.

I don't know where this is all going. I do know that right now without any changes to technology I already own the best device to produce movies on my HD television. It's Blu. Where the future takes us is anyone's guess.

[SamInNorthCakalakey]

Another factor that made MP3's mainstream was the free factor. A lot of the music being downloaded by people back then (and to some extent now) was that it was pirated. Free. How is a free product that is very close to the same quality as the original not going to catch on.

We see it with HD DUD. The only reason their still alive is because it's almost free.

[Matt X]

Originally Posted by Thunderchildga

We've been dealing with MP3s for over ten years now and even with the huge market single-handedly driven by the iPod, downloads of music are still less than a quarter of the way people get music. It's still the purchase of an actual disc that has nearly 80% of the market!

As it's been said, there's just intangible that's important to us for owning something that we can lay our hands on and says its ours.

Furthermore, a lot of us are jaded by the fact we live in or near a major metropolitan city that has the conveniences that affords us and that includes high-speed Internet access. Just as it is with CD sales, the vast majority of the citizens of the US get their TV images from over the air broadcasts, have no cable or sat service, and if (and that's a big if) they have an internet connection, chances are it's either dial-up or a very low-speed DSL connection. Because of that, they could never download large files such as those that would be needed for an HD product.

Downloads can be an important part of how we get products, but it can't totally replace the outright purchase of media on a disc, drive, or non-volitile memory chip, and its going to remain that way for many decades to come.

Part of my point is that I think this difference is generational, and the generation that has the most $$$ to spend on media of any type prefers physical by a very wide margin.

[m6bigdog]

No movie downloads is a no brainer.

So lets see, we are all voting for Blu-ray with 50GB of space avaliable. We are all voting for less video compression and more lossless audio, so using compression schemes to reduce the download size is off the table.

So, I like to keeping a movies for spontainous viewing.
I would object to a pay-per-view scheme mainly because the service provider may just stop making titles avaliable once the download/viewing rate decreases. Besides that I prefer not to invest additional $s in the cable companies.

So, I would need to archive every movie that is downloaded. Where am I going to store 25-50GB's per movie? I can burn a Blu-ray disc? However, the time and effort to do the download, burn the BD and review the BD for quality (before I delete it) would be work, time consuming and all I want to do is be entertained. Also, R media does not last as long and may not be compatable between drives so the risk of loosing a movie in your library is much higher than purchasing the massed produced movie.

Just store the movie on the HD? Even a Terabite HD is a small HD @ 25-50GB/movie. One HD crach and your archived library is gone. Backups would be huge.
Is the internet bandwidth large enough to either pay-per-view or direct downloads of HD movie? 25Gb download is huge.

[Matt X]

One more thing, if one were to store all those movies on one drive and the drive fails, it seems to me that would be a huge hassle to try to either recover or replace the data. If I damage a BR/CD/DVD, guess what? the rest of my collection is still fine.

EDIT: OOPS! big dog beat me to it, and said it better, too...................

[Shadowself]

1. Microsoft plays for the long term. They don't worry about version 1.0 of anything (hardware, software, 'net, etc.) failing badly. Their goal is to get a passable version out by 2.0 and a winner by 3.0. There could be 5+ years between versions.

2. Microsoft is in it to stay for digital media downloads. They know they have a lot of making up to do on the audio side and don't want to get as far behind with the video side (note their management shake ups over the past six months on their video side).

3. Microsoft is not throwing money away on HD DVD. Virtually all software is re-usable in the download arena. Implement a significant fraction of HDi in a browser (IE?) and you have a new interface for downloads over the 'net. VC-1 can be used directly.

4. The average home's bandwidth won't even realistically support 720p for the next 3+ years. I'm talking *average* home bandwidths -- this excludes those of us who have 10+ Mbps links today! Home bandwidths are getting faster, but they are not there yet. And remember, you can rarely get long downloads at even half your theoretical peak rate.

5. The only way to push video downloads in less than 5 years is to get people to accept 720p or worse as "good enough" to buy.

6. If either HD DVD or BD truly takes hold, for the next 10 years the average consumer will focus their purchases on physical media rather than downloads.

7. If either HD DVD or BD (and especially if BD) takes hold then consumers will get used to 1080p imagery and lossless sound. Consumers won't want to deal with 720p as it just won't be thought of as "good enough" anymore.

8. If 1080p and lossless audio become the recognized standard for quality then average home bandwidths won't be able to support this for possibly 10+ years from now -- delaying any direct download market.

Thus if Microsoft wants to push the edge and do an early take over of video downloads they need to
A. keep either HD DVD or BD from being adopted
B. push 720p as the best available download in the near term ( < 5 years from now) and that this is "good enough" and *eventually* 1080p with lossless audio will get there
C. convince people that having Microsoft based codecs for everything from 320x240 imagery up through 1080p and beyond is the best way to go

Apple was "lucky" with their iTunes store. The largest fraction of the initial customer base got used to poorer quality MP3 rips. When Apple did a slightly higher quality version people were OK buying it (even though it was poorer than what is on a standard CD and much poorer than on other media available). Microsoft has no choice but to try to keep people from getting used to 1080p and lossless audio as the minimum standard.

Note that the trend to consider 720p as unacceptable has already begun. Apple limited the iTV product to 720p. It is not selling anywhere near as well as Apple (or Steve) had hoped. Microsoft cannot afford to let 1080p and lossless become the minimum acceptable standard.

[Aclar00]

I think physical media is going to be out the window soon enough, just not now. Current adult population may be use to owning physical media, but the ipod generations of today are not.

Ipod, however, is targeted mainly towareds music. 80 gig ipods dont have the room available for movies and such, but niether do home theatre systems in the terabyte level, but they will get there and the download speeds have to get there as well. Downloading a hidef movie will need to be able to be downloaded in no more than an 30min to an hour on the 50GB level in my opnion to be viable

[MotionBlurr]

Some cable providers like Cablevision have Video On Demand that has been available for a while (since 2003). For $5 you can watch any movie you want at any time. It only takes a few seconds to load and you don't need a hard drive. Why hasn't this taken off? I rather have this than wait an hour to download a movie file.

[tron3]

I haven't read any of this thread besides the title, but I think this is still insightful.

It doesn't matter if Microsoft barks up the wrong tree. They just as soon buy out the whole dang forrest.