I attended the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest seminar entitled “Multichannel Music: The Promise” yesterday. It was moderated by Andrew Quint, who addressed questions to Brian Moura & Kal Rubinson. It was a very interesting discussion, and video of the talk will be posted at a later date. Thanks to Andrew, Brian & Kal for putting it together!
In the course of the discussion someone brought up the idea of streaming multichannel audio content, and another participant made the point that Netflix had needed to spend considerable money on infrastructure in order to get where they are today, so it would be hard for another provider to come along and do the same. It occurred to me that Netflix already streams 5.1 content in the form of soundtracks to movies and TV shows in 5.1, so why not ping them to see if they might offer surround content of audio only entertainment?
This would be a new market for them, but even if it is small it is unlikely they would need to invest in new hardware to deliver the content. I threw out the idea, and it seemed to draw some interest.
So four questions:
1. Would there be any reason to not encourage corporate streaming? I presume they compress their content to save on bandwidth. Any comments on that?
2. Would the option of streaming tend to boost the hobby, or diminish it. I am mostly referring to gaining more supporters, but feel free to expand on the idea.
3. Would anyone here want to get streaming content from such a provider? It would not necessarily have to be Netflix.
4. If Netflix, does anyone here have contacts in that organization where the topic could be broached? If not Netflix, who? Amazon?
I wonder if what sounds like a good idea would end up being the final nail in sales of physical media, which I still like. On the other hand, if rare titles were easily available via streaming, maybe the costs of out of print physical media would come down.
It also seems possible that content delivered via HDMI might not come out as truly discrete, or at least might require internal amp adjustment to do so. If this is so, it might misrepresent surround content to the average consumer, which would not help our cause.
I would love to hear your ideas on this topic.
In the course of the discussion someone brought up the idea of streaming multichannel audio content, and another participant made the point that Netflix had needed to spend considerable money on infrastructure in order to get where they are today, so it would be hard for another provider to come along and do the same. It occurred to me that Netflix already streams 5.1 content in the form of soundtracks to movies and TV shows in 5.1, so why not ping them to see if they might offer surround content of audio only entertainment?
This would be a new market for them, but even if it is small it is unlikely they would need to invest in new hardware to deliver the content. I threw out the idea, and it seemed to draw some interest.
So four questions:
1. Would there be any reason to not encourage corporate streaming? I presume they compress their content to save on bandwidth. Any comments on that?
2. Would the option of streaming tend to boost the hobby, or diminish it. I am mostly referring to gaining more supporters, but feel free to expand on the idea.
3. Would anyone here want to get streaming content from such a provider? It would not necessarily have to be Netflix.
4. If Netflix, does anyone here have contacts in that organization where the topic could be broached? If not Netflix, who? Amazon?
I wonder if what sounds like a good idea would end up being the final nail in sales of physical media, which I still like. On the other hand, if rare titles were easily available via streaming, maybe the costs of out of print physical media would come down.
It also seems possible that content delivered via HDMI might not come out as truly discrete, or at least might require internal amp adjustment to do so. If this is so, it might misrepresent surround content to the average consumer, which would not help our cause.
I would love to hear your ideas on this topic.
But I'd be very happy if it did. Someone needs to get a demo playlist to Jeff Bezos. Imagine if you had access to every quad/surround release at the click of a button?! 
