Samsung Exec: Blu-ray Will Be Gone in 5 Years

[uptheirons]

http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/ne...ars-left.phtml

Samsung has said that it sees the Blu-ray format only lasting a further 5 years before it is replaced by another format or technology.

"I think it [Blu-ray] has 5 years left, I certainly wouldn't give it 10", Andy Griffiths, director of consumer electronics at Samsung UK told Pocket-lint in an interview.

Hoping to capitalise before it's too late, Griffiths believes that 2008 is the format's year.

"It's going to be huge", he told Pocket-lint. "We are heavily back-ordered at the moment."

Citing online rental sites like LoveFilm's adoption of Blu-ray titles, the move to offer cheaper players and a now clear path to adoption following the Blu-ray HD DVD battle, Griffith says the format will be a winner, although not for long.

Instead Samsung is putting its faith in its OLED technology. The new technology, which is "ready to rock", is being held back at the moment due to high manufacturing costs.

"We will launch the OLED technology when it's at a price that will be appealing to the consumer, unfortunately that's not yet."

Griffiths, citing 2010 as a possible date for your calendar, told us he believes that when the technology becomes mainstream it will replace LCD.

"It's gonna be big, but at the moment it's a great story, not commercial, product."

Samsung previewed two OLED screen televisions at IFA in Berlin earlier in the month, out-manoeuvring Sony to be the largest models on show at the show.

Coming in 14- and 31-inch models, the screens that are incredibly thin, produce vivid contrasts and colours.

Sony settled for second place with a 9- and 27-inch models, but it wasn't the only area that Samsung claimed a "world's first" over their Far East rivals.

The company has recently announced it's partnered with Yahoo to offer widgets on its internet connected televisions as it tries to turn the television into an information hub of the home rather than the PC.

"The content has to be relevant, but once it is it will make the TV more than a TV", said Griffiths.

So where next? Griffiths is clearly thinking about the future citing more focus on rolling out LED backlighting in the range as well as improving the quality of the offering.

But it seems the Olympics is on the man and the company's minds.

"In 2012 we will be in a true HD world. Everything from your television to your camcorder will be offering you pictures in high-definition, and we plan to offer you that HD world from all angles."

With 4 years to go, the prospect sounds exciting, but by then Blu-ray will be, if Samsung are to be believed, on its last legs.

[RUR]

I'm missing the connection between "faith" in Blu-ray and in OLED. Does he mean company resources or ???

I'm also wondering what magical technology is going to appear in 5 years to supplant Blu-ray..... Not downloads, surely?

[quexos]

It's gonna be at least 3 years before Bluray becomes fully mainstream and beats DVD sales so either it crashes now or it will still be around in 10 years but a 5 years lifespan is a miscalculation in my opinion.

[tilallr1]

Yeh, missing his point. He says blu-ray has 5 years to live but doesn't really give us a reason why. Just that some technology will replace it. What technology? The guy is talking out of his ass.

There is no technology at present or in the next decade that will replace blu-ray. But based on blu-ray technology being expanded to 500GB disc's does make it future proof. I don't see the demise of blu-ray anytime in the next 20 years.

[PS3FAN]

Is Samsung going the way of Toshiba?

[tron3]

The man is a blow hard who clearly doesn't know what he is saying. That article was all over the place. Bashing blu-ray and then exclaiming how they expect a banner year. He assumes this on the basis that many products have a 5 year shelf life. He doesn't understand blu-ray enough to know we intend on keeping it alive for a LONG time.

Either he is just an idiot, or he knows something the rest of the industry doesn't want us to know. Idiot is my guess. The format war proves without a doubt the public wants blu-ray. In 5 years time any new technology will immediately bring out the horror of the format war which ended in February of 2008. Many consumers were too young to recall the BetaMax / VHS war. But the Blu-ray Disc / HD DVD holocost will make consumers very gun shy about adopting any new "hard media" format. Not to mention anger us to the point where we stop buying stuff until they get their act together.

We do not want, nor do we need the Ross Perot of high definition to try and save us.

If SD TV had lived on we would never need anything better than DVD, and it would have reigned as king longer than VHS. As long as 1080p remains the defacto standard for home theater blu-ray will remain. Anything else is simply repackaged blu-ray.

Read the article in my signature line.

Even flashcard movies will not be the giant leap in technology as DVD was to video tape. The benefits of disc are unchanged. Random access, clean freeze frame, super high speed search, and extras. It is most compelling for having virtually no moving parts. But again, people buy it because they want to OWN it, not "own to rent" like Div-X. Even the future of movie flashcard is uncertain because of the HD DVD fallout. Studios will not line up to support this thing. Now that we have HDM, anything that follows is just "repackaged blu-ray".

[Woody]

BR won't last but LED backlighting is the future??

Did we go into a bizarro world when I wasnt looking?

[stockstar1138]

i would lend more crediblity to the article if it actually was coherent and made sense.

[Maximus]

Hmmm, looks like Samsung are tired of Sony grabbing all of the headlines lately. Sounds like a pretty standard publicity grab for headlines.

Think about it this way, if he had said "LED backlighting to rival CCFL backlighting" or "OLED to defeat LCD" (which is what the article seems to be pushing) would we have a thread dedicated to the article. No, of course not. We know these things, Samsung have already been crowing about LED backlighting for the longest time, and Sony have been talking OLED for a while now as well.

[jmartinez]

Originally Posted by stockstar1138

i would lend more crediblity to the article if it actually was coherent and made sense.

ditto, i couldn't really understand what he was trying to point across but at some moment while reading this I felt like their is something out their we've yet to see and once their is more light shed on this will find out whats been underwraps...

either that or he's just talking out of his butt

[prerich]

Hmmmm???? .....We thought that DVD would last forever too. I can remember DVD's old nickname (Doubtful Very Doubtful) and then wham! It surplants Laserdisc as the format of choice for High-end systems. The short lived Divx war was laughable. DVD was to reign supreme...for aproximately 10 to 11 years.
Then 2 more formats immerge one finally defeating the other. Blu-ray while not firmly entrenched in the public mainstream is poised to be the next DVD. The problem is that technology is growing at exponential rates. When I build a top of the line PC and it only remains top of the line for 4 months?!!! Technology is moving! We don't see the technology or haven't heard of it yet, but be very wary...it's out there - you just don't know it yet. We have gone though several HDMI standards already - and the PC world is thinking about releasing Display Port technology (looks like HDMI but suposedly better )
This isn't a slap on BD - its the fact of a changing world market and the way we receive info. I could always live without a Cell phone - my daughter..she can't and won't. Kids do everything with it - even watch tv and movies on a little itty bitty screen ()! If DVD dies within the next 2 years - I can expect a replacement for BD to be on the horizon within 3 years after the death of DVD (or its reduced production). Then we would go through all of the early adoption phases (1.5 years to 2 years) and mass market (one more year after that). Add it up and BD has roughly 9.5 years left - it's more than 5 years, but hey - remember...account for the speed of technology development so.... I guess 6 to 8 years.
People want to make money...and to make money - you have got to give the people something new, thats the way its been for a while now.

[Bobby Henderson]

Andy Griffiths at Samsung UK is obviously trying to rationalize Samsung throwing a lot more resources behind OLED technology than Blu-ray. But trashing Blu-ray is a pretty silly move, even in terms of promoting new display technologies like OLED.

The fact is Blu-ray delivers the highest level of video quality of any high definition format people can view in their homes. Nothing from the Internet, cable, satellite, OTA broadcast or other prerecorded video formats matches BD quality.

A higher quality OLED display (with very thin monitor designs and contrast ratio claims of 1,000,000:1) is going to be even better at revealing flaws in severely data compressed HD video streams. That kind of monitor will need Blu-ray even more in order to show off all of its potential.

The 5 years left prediction on Blu-ray is pretty silly. What will come along to replace Blu-ray in that time frame? Nothing.

Lots of electronics industry pundits keep beating the Internet downloads dead horse as if that's going up upend Blu-ray. The technology just isn't there at this point and won't be for nearly another decade. Right now the data pipes are way too slow and American telcos are in no hurry to bump up speeds either. It may be 2015 before the average home Internet connection is sustaining anywhere near 20-30 million bit per second speeds. And that's only enough to get it into the HD-DVD quality category; not quite enough for Blu-ray quality.

Even when Internet speeds finally make things like real time HD movie downloading and HD-quality video telephony a common reality it still doesn't address one issue of customer behavior: lots of people prefer buying a tangible product rather than downloading something "virtual."

[Tok]

One has to wonder if Samsung was supporting HD DVD to cause confusion like Microsoft. Do they have some product/format waiting in the wings?

I agree with the poster who said this guy is just full of it. In five years how many households will have a BD player (PS3 or standalone). The format is large enough now that none of the majors are ignoring it.

Five years? Let's see how big BD is after this holiday. BD is the future of high quality HD video and audio for at least the next ten years.

[stockstar1138]

Originally Posted by CraigW

One has to wonder if Samsung was supporting HD DVD to cause confusion like Microsoft. Do they have some product/format waiting in the wings?

I agree with the poster who said this guy is just full of it. In five years how many households will have a BD player (PS3 or standalone). The format is large enough now that none of the majors are ignoring it.

Five years? Let's see how big BD is after this holiday. BD is the future of high quality HD video and audio for at least the next ten years.

Samsung never supported HD DVD. They had 1 combo player that had there name on it, however that combo player came out of TSST a joint venture between Samsung and Toshiba in which Toshbia had a 51% stake in. For obvious reasons, Samsungs name got slung onto the combo player, not Toshibas.

[Dirk504]

Originally Posted by prerich

Hmmmm???? .....We thought that DVD would last forever too. I can remember DVD's old nickname (Doubtful Very Doubtful) and then wham! It surplants Laserdisc as the format of choice for High-end systems. The short lived Divx war was laughable. DVD was to reign supreme...for aproximately 10 to 11 years.
Then 2 more formats immerge one finally defeating the other. Blu-ray while not firmly entrenched in the public mainstream is poised to be the next DVD. The problem is that technology is growing at exponential rates. When I build a top of the line PC and it only remains top of the line for 4 months?!!! Technology is moving! We don't see the technology or haven't heard of it yet, but be very wary...it's out there - you just don't know it yet. We have gone though several HDMI standards already - and the PC world is thinking about releasing Display Port technology (looks like HDMI but suposedly better )
This isn't a slap on BD - its the fact of a changing world market and the way we receive info. I could always live without a Cell phone - my daughter..she can't and won't. Kids do everything with it - even watch tv and movies on a little itty bitty screen ()! If DVD dies within the next 2 years - I can expect a replacement for BD to be on the horizon within 3 years after the death of DVD (or its reduced production). Then we would go through all of the early adoption phases (1.5 years to 2 years) and mass market (one more year after that). Add it up and BD has roughly 9.5 years left - it's more than 5 years, but hey - remember...account for the speed of technology development so.... I guess 6 to 8 years.
People want to make money...and to make money - you have got to give the people something new, thats the way its been for a while now.

I understand your logic, but most peoples pockets can't keep up with technology. I'm a consumer of mainly electronics, as most people on this site are. Going blu for me is not only a luxury, but an expensive one. Most people can't even afford to go blu yet, so trying to release a new technology every 6-8 yrs. is really disregarding the state of the economy. Cell phones are totally different, because most people need cell phones and they're replacing regular house phones. Most people don't NEED new HD technology and are content watching TV in SD.

[Oddiophile]

4,000 resolution TV's will be hitting the market soon.

If the Blu-Ray association can get 200GB disk's working in production and update the players processing to handle 4K, maybe Blu-Ray can go longer then five years.

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm not holding my breath for 4,000 line televisions or movies in 4K format to arrive in home anytime soon.

For one thing, the 4K format is still very rarely used for CGI and digital intermediates of major movie projects. The vast majority are still produced at only 2K. You need a very healthy supply of 4K-based content before you can launch a video format designed to play back such content.

As far as monitors go, I can see high end computer monitors increasing their resolution more and more. Graphics and engineering programs can make great use such monitors. D-SLR cameras are upping their pixel counts and demanding higher resolution displays for editing purposes. On the HDTV front, that "platform" will be set at 1920 X 1080 for quite a long time.

[Maximus]

Originally Posted by Oddiophile

4,000 resolution TV's will be hitting the market soon.

If the Blu-Ray association can get 200GB disk's working in production and update the players processing to handle 4K, maybe Blu-Ray can go longer then five years.

Do you have $30,000 and enough room for a 90"+ TV in your house. That is what you would need for 4k. No point in it until you get to that kind of size, just like 1080p being useless at sizes smaller than 46"...

[Maximus]

Originally Posted by Bobby Henderson

I'm not holding my breath for 4,000 line televisions or movies in 4K format to arrive in home anytime soon.

For one thing, the 4K format is still very rarely used for CGI and digital intermediates of major movie projects. The vast majority are still produced at only 2K. You need a very healthy supply of 4K-based content before you can launch a video format designed to play back such content.

As far as monitors go, I can see high end computer monitors increasing their resolution more and more. Graphics and engineering programs can make great use such monitors. D-SLR cameras are upping their pixel counts and demanding higher resolution displays for editing purposes. On the HDTV front, that "platform" will be set at 1920 X 1080 for quite a long time.

Pro monitors have 3840x2400 resolution already along with 12bit colour reproduction. They cost a lot of money though...

[Oddiophile]

Originally Posted by Maxpower1987

Do you have $30,000 and enough room for a 90"+ TV in your house. That is what you would need for 4k. No point in it until you get to that kind of size, just like 1080p being useless at sizes smaller than 46"...

I'm using front projection with a 110" screen so 90" is kind of small.


JVC will be showing off 4K and 8K front projectors at CEDIA.