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Originally Posted by master gandhi
I enjoy the convenience of digital and find the quality is acceptable most of the time. I definitely don't want to see it fail now, since I've invested my time and money into Vudu and iTunes these past several months. But I also don't want to see physical media fail. I appreciate its quality much more than digital, especially on my 65" TV. Whenever I pop in a Blu-ray Disc, I'm reminded just how incredible they can look. 3D even moreso.
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You say that you don't want physical media to die. But with all due respect, the problem is that whenever you choose to directly purchase a movie digitally instead of on physical media, you are helping send a message to the studios that physical media is less desired. That may not be your intention, but that is how they are interpreting it.
You can do what you want, but just know that each time you decide to buy a movie and you go with digital instead of physical, you are doing more to hurt physical media in the long run than you are to help digital.
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Originally Posted by Rocket Richard
We all know it will surpass it "someday" as the disc size will eventually be compromised.
Blu-ray will be obsolete, as collectors will move on to the better UHD disc as they did with DVD & VHS. Blu-ray never surpassed DVD, which tells us all, it is just a niche, whether some of you like to hear that or not, it's just fact.
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Understand first of all that the points that I am making here are primarily in regards to BUYING individual movies, as streaming services ala Netflix are a different matter entirely (which I'll get to in a bit)...
There are several logical fallacies here with your argument, many of which have been called out in this thread, and you continue to conveniently ignore.
You look at each disc format as being completely separate from the others, but seem to treat all forms of digital distribution (whether it's individual purchases or a streaming service... and regardless of the quality or through which service an individual title is bought through) as one and the same.
There are several separate services/vendors through which content can be purchased. ITunes, UV, Amazon, etc. Even game systems like Playstation 4 and Xbox One offer the option to buy movies. Those purchases are tied to those vendors. In order to technically not do anything illegal, you have to use their apps to stream or download the content, and it is locked down by their respective DRM.
In essence having a digital collection split up between a couple/few of these services isn't much different than having a physical media collection that is comprised of a couple/few different formats (DVD, BD, 4k BD, etc).
Plus many of these services offer different quality options for purchases... i.e. SD, HD, and in some cases 4K. If someone buys the content in a lower quality, then they have to pay again to upgrade to the better quality option. So again, that's no different than buying a Blu-Ray of a movie that someone already has on DVD.
Any Digital HD files are going to be just as obsolete as Blu-Ray discs once 4K and possibly later on 8K become to the norm. So whether someone opts to buy a 4K download or a 4K disc, either way those two things will become just as obsolete as one another when and if something of better quality comes along.
So for anyone who wants to buy a given title to have access to whenever they want to watch it, there's always a risk of something better coming along down the road. Whether it's a disc or a digital file makes no difference in this respect.
But again, with digital, there's both the difference in quality between different files purchased AND different distributors. It's the issues of upgrading (i.e. DVD to Blu-Ray) and a format war (i.e. VHS vs. Beta, Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD) combined. Some titles are only available through some services and not others. Some services are more limited as to which devices they can be accessed through. It's far more split up and confusing than disc based physical media.
In some ways obsolescence is a matter of perspective. Even if Blu-Ray is at some point discontinued, I will still be able to watch the discs that I already have. Likewise, even if one day digital distributors stop selling movies in SD/HD and only offer them in newer 4K quality or whatever, presumably (if access hasn't been taken away to the older files for those who previously bought them) people who bought the Digital HD files will still be able to view them. So there isn't much of a difference really in that sense. Both would be obsolete in the sense that they are discontinued and something better has come along. But both will still be presumably usable.... with there being more certainty and control with discs.
For whatever reason you are selectively applying obsolescence to physical media and acting like somehow digital distribution is completely free of it... but it's not.
Plus with digital, there's still the issue of internet speed, data caps, and the like. Combine that with the split between different digital services, and there are far more variables and potential problems and confusion with digital than with discs.
And the law of diminishing returns is a real thing. Frankly I wonder how much better 8K would really be than 4K on average sized screens, or even bigger one like 60 or 70 inches. Even now a big part of what is making the 4K BD format noticeably better than regular BD is the HDR more so than the upgrade in resolution. So even if there is no physical format after 4K BD, it's doubtful that digital will ever surpass that quality anyway in the foreseeable future. And if it ever does, it will probably be marginally.
As for Blu-Ray itself, it's true that sales-wise it never surpassed DVD. I don't think it's accurate to necessarily call it "niche." Laserdisc was niche. 4K discs will probably be niche. Blu-Ray is still relatively main stream. This isn't a black and white case of being totally mainstream or extremely niche. There is a middle ground in between. But to go back to my earlier point about different digital services basically being a separate format due to the DRM locking the titles down with the service, each service like iTunes, Amazon, Disney Movies Anywhere, UV, Vudu, PSN, Xbox Live, etc. likely have different volumes of sales compared to each other. So they aren't really all one and the same despite being treated as such on sales charts.
And regarding your comment about disc size one day becoming "compromised," that will really only be an issue if and when the size of the digital files through digital services (both streaming and downloads) catches up to Blu-Ray now, let alone 4k Blu-Ray. A digital HD file is 3-5 GB on average. Movies released on Blu-Ray are somewhere between 5 and 10 times that file size. In order to catch up, internet speeds need to increase to allow a much larger amount of data per unit of time to be streamed and data caps on the part of ISPs need to be eliminated to SERVERLY increased. And if somehow there is another physical media format after 4K BD, who says that the distribution method will be discs of the same physical size as CDs, DVDs, BDs, etc.? If they can't format a disc of the same physical size to hold more data per unit of space on the disc, then they could always make a disc of a slightly larger physical size, or even go with something other than discs entirely. I'm not saying that this is definitely going to happen, but there's no reason why any potential future physical media formats, should there be any, HAVE to be on the same physical sized discs.
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For me, Streaming is the future, as I'll only watch so many movies more than a 2 times and then it's a long time before I'll play it again, and usually by then, it's on TV in HD. So why buy the disc, that will soon be obsolete?
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Well that's fine. But that's a different thing entirely. If you are only going to watch a movie once or twice and have no desire to own it, then watching it through a service like Netflix is fundamentally no different than renting a movie from a video store before streaming was an option.
No one is arguing that you or anyone else HAS to go out and buy every single movie that you have any remote interest in watching. It's just that for the movies that one DOES decide to buy, physical media makes more sense since we, as consumers, have more control.
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