TimesOnline(UK): Sony faces a paradox

[Ispoke]

The Times article makes interesting reading, usual erroneous statements are there, but the conclusion is

In other words, Sony faces a paradox: the impending success of Blu-ray could be bad news for the company because it will distract it from the real task of developing digital download systems. Blu-ray might well turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to the Japanese electronics company. Mark my words.

Seems that more and more articles are pointing to downloads being the next war. Microsoft pushing this agenda no doubt

[Grisle]

They're just trying to discredit Blu-ray. Downloads will be a great thing for rentals once it's up and running, but they're just now getting the SD stuff going and it's not near as big as they want it to be so once they've got things more polished then they should start talking about HD. I really don't see why they would compete with one another. There are people who just want to own physical media...I'm one of them.

[Seretur]

I'm always amazed at the kind of idiocies people can write and still get paid for it.

[Ispoke]

It might be worth pointing out to those that may not know the Times newspaper, it is highly regarded in the UK as a reliable and accurate news source.........for what thats worth

[docjan_uk]

I can't see how it will "distract" them.
I can see them slowly working downloads into the Playstation network which will be an ideal incubator for the Sony version of such a system. As ultrahigh speed broadband penetration increases, they can expand the service as needed from there.

[Grisle]

The whole Downloads are the future is just a bunch of crap to me. I can't wait until they realize that it's not going to be the end of physical media.

[docjan_uk]

I can't see how it will "distract" them.
I can see them slowly working downloads into the Playstation network which will be an ideal incubator for the Sony version of such a system. As ultrahigh speed broadband penetration increases, they can expand the service as needed from there.

Oh, and as intelligence gets integrated into more consumer electronics (Cell in TV's etc), I can just see those devices logging into such a network to get content.
Oh, and as an aside, the XMB seems like it would make a great cross platform OS moving into the future for their products.

[NutsAboutPS3]

Originally Posted by Ispoke

It might be worth pointing out to those that may not know the Times newspaper, it is highly regarded in the UK as a reliable and accurate news source.........for what thats worth

It is highly regarded, but to some extent individual columnists can write what they want. I can readily think of a specific example of a person who regularly writes for the Times who has on many occasions used his articles in there to further his own personal agenda.

[Knight-Errant]

Originally Posted by Ispoke

It might be worth pointing out to those that may not know the Times newspaper, it is highly regarded in the UK as a reliable and accurate news source.........for what thats worth

Yeah but I get the feeling when it comes to technology articles a lot of "weighty" news sources don't really care that much.

I could be wrong but that's my impression. See also, BBC technology features.

[Ispoke]

Agree with both your comments and probably the reason they don't get into the technicalities of downloading. It is amazing how many article suggest downloads as the future, but very......very......few actualy discuss the technical limitations of this method of media access.

[Fozziwig]

DVD, CD, Blu-ray are all about physical ownership of a packaged product.

A download is not that.

Music downloading is quick, easy and widespread. Are these same journalists forecasting that packaged CD media will vanish? If they are then they are wrong. Yes, CD sales have been cut by the impact of dowloads but CD sales numbers are still massive.

Downloading will have an impact on packaged media eventually. But, it will not 'kill' the packaged market simply because people will always want to buy packaged media - or at least for very many more years to come.

Movie downloads today are in competition with the home video rental market, broadcast TV, video-on-demand services and illegal file sharing. But downloading even a 10GB file is such a complete pain in the neck that it's going to be a very long time before it takes a meaningful slice of the home video market.

[eat_me_cool]

Originally Posted by Ispoke

It might be worth pointing out to those that may not know the Times newspaper, it is highly regarded in the UK as a reliable and accurate news source.........for what thats worth

And it still manges to produce utter rubbish. It us an OPINION piece, in other words it the musings of a journalist who, if he really knew what the future held, would be making money from that, not as a journalist.

Sony are in the process of adding DiVX downloads for the PSN, they do have more than one brain between them and are capable of doing more than one thing at once.

BTW, this is the qualifications of the author

Before becoming a journalist Sathnam (among other things) worked at a burger chain, a hospital laundry, a market research firm, a sewing factory and a literacy project in New York. Between 1998 and 2006 he was at the The Financial Times, where he (variously) worked as a news reporter in the UK and the US, specialised in writing about the media industries, worked across the paper as Chief Feature Writer, and wrote a weekly column.

[Ispoke]

Originally Posted by eat_me_cool

.....BTW, this is the qualifications of the author

Gives hope to all McDonalds employees everywhere then.....

But we should not be so complacent about such articles. The typical reader of such articles, and remember they number in the millions, will not be an ‘early adopter’ with an interest in the format war. One can assume that these type of articles will do harm even if we do not agree with the message being put out.

[Fozziwig]

Originally Posted by Ispoke

Gives hope to all McDonalds employees everywhere then.....

But we should not be so complacent about such articles. The typical reader of such articles, and remember they number in the millions, will not be an ‘early adopter’ with an interest in the format war. One can assume that these type of articles will do harm even if we do not agree with the message being put out.

Touting downloads as the next big thing is more of an attack on the DVD market than the Blu-ray market. After all downloads are 'near' DVD quality. They are nowhere near Blu-ray quality.

[docjan_uk]

I wouldn't sneeze at his "qualifications", given his name he sounds like an immigrant from South India.
No doubt he worked those jobs because he likely had to.

[nails]

Well if you think about it. the PS3 can already do Digital Downloads. I mean what is the Playstation store? They just add a movie section, and there ya go. Not only to they have their media box (with unlimited hard drive expansion) already on the market and going, but they have a store setup and ready to go to compete in the digital downloads world. I doubt people are ready yet, because the average person can barely figure out how to setup rock band.

[Deacon220]

I think one day downloads may find a niche in the market but that's about it. Too time consuming, too many storage issues, too big of a load on bandwidth for your ISP to deal with. There's a major difference between downloading songs and downloading entire movies in any sort of quality. I have on demand HD (1080i) movies from my Verizon FIOS now and don't really use it. On top of that watching movies on a tiny little portable screen just doesn't excite me at all. Once again a cool gimic and trendy but not all that special.

[dialog_gvf]

Where were the articles prior to January 4, 2008 complaining that Toshiba wasn't doing enough about downloads?

And they were LOSING the disc battle.

Gary

[Brain Sturgeon]

It's amazing to me that there are people in the industry that think on demand downloads are ready for prime time now or in the very near future, yet people currently get impatient and ticked off when a BD takes 3 or 4 minutes to load. The vast majority of people out there do not have anything close to enough bandwidth to download any flick in reasonable quality in any reasonable timeframe, much less have the drive space to store it for an extended period of time, assuming that the DRM doesn't run out and "expire" the download in 24-48 hours.

Physical media will be here for a long while yet.

[Spider1981]

Already posted.
(Actually was right above this thread when I loaded the forums)

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=31508