Oh noes teh sky is falling!

[I KEEL YOU]

Originally Posted by PrestigeWorldwide

HD streaming from Netflix or Amazon is significantly better than "HD" cable. I thought it was ridiculous how I was being charged an extra $10 on my cable bill for their heavily compressed "HD" crap. No thanks. Had no problems dropping cable TV like a bad habit a few years ago.

Cable is less prone to interruptions during a film's running time though.

[hamchuck1]

My guess:

As for the future of physical media (maybe 5-10 years from now) I can see the discs of popular movies still being in stores and a year or two after their release the discs will be available online only for purchase.

Smaller movies and catalog titles will probably be burn-on-demand only.

[I KEEL YOU]

Originally Posted by hamchuck1

Smaller movies and catalog titles will probably be burn-on-demand only.

Burn on demand makes sense as the future of physical media, except that burned blu rays have been highly unreliable. That is why no company uses them.

[mredman]

Originally Posted by hamchuck1

My guess:

As for the future of physical media (maybe 5-10 years from now) I can see the discs of popular movies still being in stores and a year or two after their release the discs will be available online only for purchase.

Smaller movies and catalog titles will probably be burn-on-demand only.

Ignorant people said that about CD's too years ago

[eiknarf]

Originally Posted by mredman

Ignorant people said that about CD's too years ago

But CDs of new releases are still on store shelves. New releases can be found in Target, Best Buy, Costco...

[hamchuck1]

Originally Posted by mredman

Ignorant people said that about CD's too years ago

My guess was for movies...in 10 years. Not Cd's in 2015.

[Groot]

Originally Posted by mredman

Ignorant people said that about CD's too years ago

And yet what he said is commonplace for CD's.

Can you have a conversation without calling people names or is that an impossibility?

[darkknightman]

Originally Posted by Nostromo

The reason blu rays come with a digital copy is not to get consumers to switch to digital. It's to get them to buy the blu ray. If a consumer has a choice of buying a digital only version of a film with no special features, or a blu ray which comes with special features AND a digital copy, most people would probably choose the latter version. It's the best of both worlds.

I think releasing a digital copy with a physical copy is to get consumers to warm to the idea of streaming over physical. Can you explain the rationale behind the current trend of releasing movies in digital weeks before the physical copy?

[SkyAntoine]

My half-speed DSL laughs at this thread. Long live physical media!

[42041]

Originally Posted by mredman

Ignorant people said that about CD's too years ago

And CD revenues have been dropping by almost double digit percentages annually too.

[octagon]

Originally Posted by Doctor Jack

Whoever came up with pan and scan will go to the special hell. The one reserved for child molesters and those who talk at the theater.

Pan and scan was a perfectly reasonable compromise for broadcasting an entire generation of films back in ye olden times. Was it always ideal? No, but compromises rarely are.

When I was in seventh or eighth grade (so 73, 74...somewhere around there) I saw 2001 for the first time. It was on a 19" CRT, it was cropped, it was edited for content and it was interrupted by commercials every ten or so minutes. And it was awesome.

So were Jaws and Dirty Harry and Bond and all sorts of cool stuff that so called evil-doer wrought upon us.

[mredman]

Originally Posted by SkyAntoine

My half-speed DSL laughs at this thread. Long live physical media!

Exactly this. People with fast internet forget there are MILLIONS of people around the world that can not get fast internet. That is also one of the reasons physical media like Blu-Ray will remain. And that there are people who just don't buy into the digital "smoke screen" and actually wanna OWN what they buy for their hard earned money

[PrestigeWorldwide]

Originally Posted by I KEEL YOU

Cable is less prone to interruptions during a film's running time though.

Depends on the service. I had U-verse TV for a while and it was by far the worst. I rarely encounter streaming issues, even during peak hours.

[The Great Owl]

Originally Posted by octagon

Pan and scan was a perfectly reasonable compromise for broadcasting an entire generation of films back in ye olden times. Was it always ideal? No, but compromises rarely are.

Pan-and-scan was the only way to see movies up until the mid-1990s or so, when VHS tapes of widescreen movies started to become available. It's funny to think about it now, but there were a couple of instances where I double-dipped on VHS tapes to replace my pan-and-scan editions with subsequently-released widescreen editions.

I'll never forget how awesome it was to see Ridley Scott's Alien in proper widescreen for the first time.

It's really pretty amazing how fortunate we are right now in 2015 as movie fans. I was around before VHS tapes, before pay cable channels, and all of that, and it's tough to believe that there was a time when, if you missed a movie at the theater, then you missed it forever. VHS tapes came into fruition after that, but they were only available for rental in any practical sense, because the tapes were generally on sale for $99 or so during the 1980s. Even then, VHS tapes showed movies in pan-and-scan. This went on for a good 15 years before DVD surfaced.

Whenever I think back on all of this, part of me wants to slap all of the people on this site who harp on edge enhancement, aliasing, compression, and such. On the other hand, though, I'm quite glad that such people are around to keep the studios grounded so that they will be pressured to released good-quality content.

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by PrestigeWorldwide

HD streaming from Netflix or Amazon is significantly better than "HD" cable. I thought it was ridiculous how I was being charged an extra $10 on my cable bill for their heavily compressed "HD" crap. No thanks. Had no problems dropping cable TV like a bad habit a few years ago.

I guess it depends which cable company you have and what technology they're using. I've compared OTA TV broadcasts to the cable feed and IMO there is no perceptible difference on my 55" TV. I can even have them both up at the same time (although with each in reduced size). I'll admit to being surprised that the OTA signal wasn't better than the cable signal, but it's clearly not.

I find HD streaming from sites like Netflix or Hulu to be acceptable for shows that I don't care all that much about, like a comedy that doesn't have great visuals, but my experience has been that the quality is very poor, especially in dark areas of an image. I see noise, blocking and all sorts of problems. I personally find the cable company's VOD to be superior to most streaming, although for many shows, they knock the 5.1 to 2.0 stereo on the VOD versions. On some shows on VOD, I can even fast forward past the commercials (others you can't). Even going directly to the HBO site for "Game of Thrones", I found the quality to be far worse than VOD from the cable company.

Most cable companies don't charge extra for HD service. If they charge at all, it's most likely that they're charging $10 extra for the HD box. Congress has been looking into a rule that would enable consumers to supply their own set-top box the same way that consumers can supply their own cable modem. I really hope that happens.

As for streaming in general, if it's a TV show or movie that I only intend to watch once or one that I didn't care enough about to see theatrically, I stream it. If it's a movie with lasting value that I think I'll watch more than once or is one that I think is destined to become a classic, I'll buy the Blu-ray. I think both can co-exist even if there are consumers who won't use both.

The mass of consumers have always gone for convenience and price over quality. That's true for food and clothes as much as it is for media consumption. To expect anything else is to be completely naive. If consumers behaved differently, Walmart, McDonald's and the like wouldn't be as successful as they are.

[Lyle_JP]

Originally Posted by The Great Owl

Pan-and-scan was the only way to see movies up until the mid-1990s or so, when VHS tapes of widescreen movies started to become available.

Actually, widescreen started being widely available in the late 80's thanks to laserdisc. VHS was rather late to that party.

[The Great Owl]

Originally Posted by Lyle_JP

Actually, widescreen started being widely available in the late 80's thanks to laserdisc. VHS was rather late to that party.

Ahhh. The whole laserdisc thing completely passed me by, as I was only a teenager during the mid-to-late 1980s.

[blonde_devil]

Originally Posted by Lyle_JP

Actually, widescreen started being widely available in the late 80's thanks to laserdisc. VHS was rather late to that party.

True. I don't remember seeing widescreen vhs until around the mid-90's because most places didn't carry them. They were probably out sooner than that but I don't really remember seeing any but I know that was a selling point for laserdisc. Pan and scan was a compromise but there wasn't much that could be done. Movies went to widescreen to offer something different since tv was taking such a bite out of their wallet. When home video came around, they didn't have a lot of options since most tvs were not very big and the resolution was poor so widescreen really wasn't a great option. It wasn't until HD came around that dropping pan and scan was a real option since you now had the bigger screens with good resolution that could handle widescreen.

[eiknarf]

Forums are crazy today (not)

[I KEEL YOU]

Wide-screen, while obviously more faithful to the film's presentation, really sucked extra hard when being watched on the old box 4:3 TVs where the average size of a TV screen was like 25 inches and anything above 30 was considered as a big screen today whereas today 30' is not even medium but small. I remember watching wide screen with black bars on my 21 inch box TV all too well. It's not an experience you forget easily and it will follow me to my grave. Not defending pan and scan in any way, but I can certainly see why there was a major headache on deciding how to present films on TVs between the 3 options: Black bars with extra tiny picture area, cropping or pan and scan. Every option had major drawbacks.

Sometimes I can't believe how spoiled us film fans are today.