Oh noes teh sky is falling!

[Jacob6875]

Originally Posted by richieb1971

Physical media bloomed at a time when the internet was not powerful enough for any kind of distribution. Now it does exist its going to eventually over take physical media.

In the ideal world for most people out there, a youtube type service at 1080p for movies is good enough. I guarantee in 10 years time if you tried to lend out a DVD or blu ray to someone they would more than likely say "I haven't had a player for years".

Before any kind of movie business can be successful the torrenting needs to stop. I guarantee if good quality torrents of cinema releases was available cinemas would close down all over the world in less than 2 years.

Right now we live in a world where everyone wants control where there is no control. There is only those that are willing to pay rather than get it for free. Or those who want that 20% extra quality or extras rather than watch the movie by itself.

So 10 years in the future we are going to have worse quality movies and 0 extras. (1080p on youtube looks pretty terrible)

Sounds like progress.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by Elandyll

The "cloud" will eventually become the norm I believe (one day), but it will mean the risk of trading major freedom rights against convenience of access. Too many people already have been willing to make that choice (cf Itunes and being married to one portal and one company for the player side forever).

for me it is simple, there is no need of predictions or anything. The cloud idea has a few major flaws.

My BIL got a cell booster and built a tower for the cottage and so he has phone and with a USB stick internet on the PC. One of my friends has a cottage as well (there are a lot of lakes and everyone here either has a cottage or knows someone with one) and he needs to go to the middle of the lake or climb the mountain to get reception, so when he is there he does that trip twice a day to get voice mail. How about people with luxury yachts that take cruises? look at portable DVD/BD players now imagine that with streaming from the "cloud".... you don’t need to go with extreme cases such as the old (like my GP that like watching movies but have no need for PCs or the internet) or the destitute. The question is can super high speed internet be had everywhere and for everyone .


And then Netflix was down for a while the other day, and I know my ISP has been down for a bit before, sure makes it fun if you can't just sit down and watch a movie because the connection is not there.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by Clark Kent

What you will see is an increasingly smaller market for physical media in the future. The majority of people under the age of 25 simply do not have the same conceptions about ownership that the older generations possess. As that generation matures and becomes the coveted 25-54 demographic, physical media will surely shrink in sales. The music industry is already fighting this disturbing trend, as music was the first intellectual property to be digitized and widely disseminated. But it will also happen to the movie industry in due time.

I disagree.

1) look at Robs list of music sales. Do you think that Lady gaga, Beyonce and Bieber and stuff are comprised primarily by over 25 year olds?

2) don't mix choice of youth with a life long choice. There was a time when all I bought where tapes, they were easier and they played on my walkman and boombox. But then I matured a bit and realized I did not need to buy tapes and so I started collecting records. Most young people tend to believe they are immortal while at the same time tend to act as if the next second is the last. But when one matures, it tends to change, you start to think of yourself as extremely mortal re is more to life then the immediate. That is why when I was younger I wanted the convenience of tape (get it and play it immediately in all my and my friends devices ) but when I got older I valued the quality and longevity of records over tapes and I did not mind the minutes it took to dub the records to tapes to use with the other devices.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by Mr.Poindexter

Well, you are assuming the discs are inaccessible, so it would not be possible. We could just as easily assume that your discs are inaccessible too, right?

no,
1) just that talking about the benefits of an HDD is useless if everytime the issues are brought up the answer is use the disks the movies came on.
2) if someone uses the original disks then it makes no sense for them to be inaccessible, but there can be many reasons why the disks are inaccessible unless Kaleidascape re-implemented the need fro the disk to be in the server when watching it. For example , back around 2002-2003 I had a co-worker that used to duplicate his DVDs and then put the originals in a storage room as a back-up for the copy (he had the storage room for other reasons and like he said "if anything happens to my apartment my movies and music will be safe 20km away"

3) the OP that started this conversation was really about DL over the internet to an HDD, so in that case the original disk would not exist.

If that happened here and the title was on Blu-ray, I could go to my computer, select the title and eject it from the vault and hand it to her. However, I would simply say I am not in the loaning movies business and she can pick up the film at Blockbuster. I do not ever let my kids or anybody else's kids touch my discs. I might as well just throw them in the trash because they either forget to bring them back or they lose them or they give them back and they are scratched to hell. While you are able to give the disc to your neice to watch when she gets home, you are now no longer able to watch that disc until she returns it intact, if in fact she does. Not all kids are responsible.

well I let my friends and family borrow movies all the time. I do teach the kids how to be responsible ( how to handle the disks, that they need to put tem back in their case when not watching, ….), and have yet to have an issue with any of the loaners. My one simple rule (and sometimes I have said OK in exceptional circumstances) is that they can’t borrow films that are on my unseen shelf. Anything else is more or less always OK (but I need to know what they are borrowing)

But this was just one example and I posted it because it happened the night before. If I was posting today it would have been my nephew and “the wild” and “up” that left my home yesterday. But like I said before, I gave other examples to the other guy so they don’t only need to be about loaners. It can be about bringing some films to watch on a business trip, it can be because you want to bring films somewhere else (like a friends home), it can be about the family being in different places (like my friends wife that works three days a week out of Toronto or my sister who spends most of the summer with the kids at the cottage and an extra 1.5h commute each way is not always possible for her husband so then he stays at home.

No system is perfect - they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

agree, hope you don’t take this personaly. For me it is just that I see large cost and the closest thing to a benefit for an HDD system is that you don’t need to manipulate each disk, but I do see a lot of issues with the way I live my life now.

[Ray O. Blu]

I haven't read through all the posts, but when I saw this

"I have to say that it's really concerning to go into a Best Buy and see only 2 small rows for CDs, 3 for Blu-ray and maybe another 2 or 3 for DVD."

I thought I'd give my two cents.

I live in the Long Beach/Los Angeles area and I frequent about 6 different Best Buys very often in my area. Each store is nearly identical in layout with roughly 8 rows for CDs, 6 rows of DVDs, and 4 rows of Blu-rays. The Blu-ray section at each store is constantly expanding into the DVD territory and I notice more and more human traffic when I'm browsing for Blu-rays.
I, for one, believe that ease of portability and physical ownership will stand the test of time against digital download mediocrity until the End of Days.

[seigneur_rayden]

Physical media will not die. Moreover, studios just can't leave a income source like that. I will take physical media any day, any time. F*%$ digital download!!!

[frogmort]

Originally Posted by seigneur_rayden

Physical media will not die. Moreover, studios just can't leave a income source like that. I will take physical media any day, any time. F*%$ digital download!!!

Right on! Digital downloads are just not as good as blu-rays, plain and simple. With lower resolution, artifacts, buffering, lossy 5.1(if not 2.0) it just can't compete. I know that a lot of people don't care about quality, but a lot of people do care. With some blu-ray titles coming close to, or surpassing DVD sales, I don't think there's anything to worry about. Blu-ray is still in its infancy, relatively speaking. It is still on the rise.
LONG LIVE BLU-RAY!

[victorvondoom88]

What is with all the doom and gloom posts about streaming and physical media lately? "Will blu-ray survive?", "The end of media", "blu-ray 2 or it's successor"

And to the OP I'm not sure where you live but my BB has about 15 aisles of CD's Blu-ray section keeps expanding as does the Vinyl section. The end is not nigh my friend.

[seigneur_rayden]

Originally Posted by frogmort

Right on! Digital downloads are just not as good as blu-rays, plain and simple. With lower resolution, artifacts, buffering, lossy 5.1(if not 2.0) it just can't compete. I know that a lot of people don't care about quality, but a lot of people do care. With some blu-ray titles coming close to, or surpassing DVD sales, I don't think there's anything to worry about. Blu-ray is still in its infancy, relatively speaking. It is still on the rise.
LONG LIVE BLU-RAY!

Amen!!!

[Musashi]

Originally Posted by richieb1971

I guarantee in 10 years time if you tried to lend out a DVD or blu ray to someone they would more than likely say "I haven't had a player for years".

For this to come true, ppl would have to start dropping their DVD/BD players before 2015, with most having gotten rid of their by 2017. All in all, the notion that "most people" would "not have had a player in years" come 2021 strikes me first as way too soon, but really as physcially impossible.

I'm sure downloadable movies will see some growth, but physical media will always be the majority. If DL hasn't taken a majority shore in the music biz after 10 years, how could it possibly overtake physical media with movies?

[mywhitenoise]

Originally Posted by frogmort

Right on! Digital downloads are just not as good as blu-rays, plain and simple. With lower resolution, artifacts, buffering, lossy 5.1(if not 2.0) it just can't compete. I know that a lot of people don't care about quality, but a lot of people do care. With some blu-ray titles coming close to, or surpassing DVD sales, I don't think there's anything to worry about. Blu-ray is still in its infancy, relatively speaking. It is still on the rise.
LONG LIVE BLU-RAY!

Yeah...if you're streaming. You can get 1080p blu-ray rips without any quality loss (minus useless menus, ads, bonus content, and extra audio tracks) at about 12GBs a movie.

[Petra_Kalbrain]

With internet providers all across North America threatening to cap bandwidth (both bottlenecking transfer rates AND monthly data usage limits), There is absolutely no reason anyone should fear the "end of physical media."

It won't take long for those who adopt the "streaming/download" approach will quickly return to physical media when they get their first internet bill after switching.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by victorvondoom88

What is with all the doom and gloom posts about streaming and physical media lately? "Will blu-ray survive?", "The end of media", "blu-ray 2 or it's successor"

It happens every few months usually just before or after big news.

[Nemo3404]

Physical media will stay strong. If you look at Sony's PSP GO, epic fail! Not everyone has internet service. Not every town has wi-fi spots. People will always want to trade... You can't resell a used DLC.

[denodan]

Originally Posted by mywhitenoise

A hard drive is no different than owning a blu-ray. The difference is that (like you said) you can easily clone your drive. A 2TB drive costs $80 right now, storage is only going to get bigger, and prices are only going to go lower. I'd rather pay $80 to back up 200 movies, than spend $20 on one blu-ray.

HDD's do break down, are being made cheaper, and cheaper often means poor parts, which ends up an HDD is not a reliable medium anymore, whereas a DVD, or bluray disk is a far better means of backup.

[Mr.Poindexter]

Originally Posted by denodan

HDD's do break down, are being made cheaper, and cheaper often means poor parts, which ends up an HDD is not a reliable medium anymore, whereas a DVD, or bluray disk is a far better means of backup.

If you use a RAID system, then the HDD being cheaper isn't a real issue. When you lose a drive, you lose ZERO data. If you use RAID 6, you can lose 2drives and lose ZERO data. That means it is a pretty reliable way to store data.

[Mr.Poindexter]

Originally Posted by mywhitenoise

Yeah...if you're streaming. You can get 1080p blu-ray rips without any quality loss (minus useless menus, ads, bonus content, and extra audio tracks) at about 12GBs a movie.

Sorry, not believing this one. There is no way that my average of 40GB per disc of Blu-ray is 12GB for the actual movie and 28GB for the bonus content and extra audio tracks.

[krazeyeyez]

Originally Posted by Mr.Poindexter

Sorry, not believing this one. There is no way that my average of 40GB per disc of Blu-ray is 12GB for the actual movie and 28GB for the bonus content and extra audio tracks.

What about all the blu-rays that have come out on the 25gb discs? not to mention all the HDDVD's.... as i remember storage on the hddvd side of things was directly related to the audio, with the picture in 99% of cases being the same as the blu counterpart. While i don't know the exact numbers a movie takes up i would imagine removing all the excess, especially other audio tracks would save you a great deal of space.

[mywhitenoise]

Originally Posted by Mr.Poindexter

Sorry, not believing this one. There is no way that my average of 40GB per disc of Blu-ray is 12GB for the actual movie and 28GB for the bonus content and extra audio tracks.

You'd be surprised at how a good rip can look, though...maybe you do know, you seem to have a better understanding on both physical and digital forms than most of us. The ones I've downloaded look exactly like the blu-ray versions I own. If there's a difference, my eye can't tell.

[img eL]

@mywhitenoise, Blu ray movies are not 12GB's. You must be compressing those BD files. Those compressed BD files could look good but not great. Come on compressing Blu ray films is blasphemous!