I hate to say "I told you so" but.....

[neil wilkes]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365&tag=nl.e539

Seems like the backlash is now well underway.
I particularly like the part about the CEO needing to "Put down the crack pipe & look at the market dynamics". The sole point of thre article that is still "blowin' in the wind" as Dylan once said is the equally stupid claim that HD downloads are the future. They are not, and for many of the same reasons as BD is a dead duck:
1 - Too expensive. Most ISP are severely limiting bandwidth & download allocations for all the entry level packages (most households with "broadband" are lucky if they are allowed much more than 5Gb/month)
2 - Limited penetration (as the actress probably didn;'t say to the bishop).
I don;t know the figures for the USA, but in Europe there is less than 40% of households with Broadband of any description, Cable modems are seriously limited to the main towns/cities only & ADSL is useless for more than 6 miles away from the exchange - you may as well be on a dialup.
SDSL is over £200/month, and Adaptive DSL is £160 and upwards. 8Mb/sec is about the maximum you can get on DSL, despite many claims of "up to" 12 or even 20Mb/sec, it is not technically feasible without cable modems, and who - given the current economy - is going to cable up whole countries and make it affordable for the vast majority? No, downloading on demand is a pipe dream (pun intentional) and will not happen inside the next 10 years - if ever.
3 - Server bandwidth. Id high-speed to the masses ever actually happens, server farms the size of a small state will be needed to handlethe bandwidth. As things currently stand, most of the major companies cannot even run large forums without bringing servers to their knees. Ask Adobe - they scrapped their new forums altogether after finally waking up to the fact that as soon as a heavy load goes onto them, it stumbles to it's knees & falls down. Hard. Imagine 1,000 people attempting to stream HD at the same time? Do the maths. Now multiply by factors of 10. That's still only 10,000 customers. by the time you hit 10,000,000 in the UK all wanting to get just one movie, the bandwidth needed probably doesn't even exist right now - and where is the cash coming from to fund this, when there are sites like "LoveFilm.com" who will post out all you want for what can best be described as a pittance?.
4 - Quality. Is it really worth the effort & expense? I don't think so, and I will tell you why. I just spent a very pleasant 5 days in Wales (with a band I work with, mainly on holiday but also finalizing the new 5.1 mixes for their second album (more in a different post on that one). Their ISP is high-end for the area (a small market town in Wales) and it takes over 10 hours to download 8Gb - assuming nobody ,much is trying to go online at the same time, at which point our old friend "contention ratios" kick in. But I digress.
One of the things we set up for them was an upscaling Cambridge Audio 540 MkII SD DVD player into a 1080p capable projector onto the wall (the projector is incredibly quiet - silent compared to a BD player).
The quality was outstanding - simply superb. Even on SD films, via the HDMI upscaling you can count the hairs on the actors heads. This is on a screen over 7 feet wide. Why would they even consider BluRay? to what advantage?

As I said, the cost is simply prohibitive with the insane mandatory AACS, and once that gets taken away (if it ever does) then HD DVD could well get dusted down as technically & economically it was the superior format.

However, for our purposes - multichannel music - DVD-A/V still makes more sense than anything else. Add in a CD for the sacred cow of backwards compatibility (which is plain stupid anyway) and that is the end of the argument.

BluRay is dying, if not already dead & not realising it - rather like a chicken with it's head lopped off, which takes a few minutes to realise it is actually dead, BD will doubtless stumble on for a while yet. But given it was 8 months ago that Toshiba (somewhat stupidly IMHO) threw in the towel, BD is still under 4% market share compared to DVD. This is with no competition at all. What a complete waste of time.

 

[BananaSlug]

I've stated before that I think Blu-ray is going to die, so no argument there. I just don't quite understand how broadband and downloading has anything to do with it. I can see where upscaling DVD players might have an impact (on my 32" 720p screen I doubt there would be much difference and I would guess many of the HD TVs sold are similarly low end). But, the old refrain 'It's the economy stupid' seems to be making a huge comeback lately, and I think is what will kill Blu-ray. As I've said before, if Blu-ray doesn't become the standard soon there will be new technologies and corporations willing to take on Blu-ray. But in the end, who cares? People who can afford Blu-ray are enjoying it and probably will continue to do so for at least a few more years. The rest of us will wait and see. The market works (or it doesn't, just ask Alan Greenspan), and it will decide.

 

[atrocity]

The sole point of thre article that is still "blowin' in the wind" as Dylan once said is the equally stupid claim that HD downloads are the future. They are not, and for many of the same reasons as BD is a dead duck

I'd also add that allegedly "HD" downloads are usually of far lesser quality than what can be obtained on Blu-ray. Not sure how the downloads stack up against broadcast.

On top of that, I'm really nervous about the on-demand future where the version you knew and loved forever suddenly no longer exists because Lucas or Disney or Spielberg or whoever decided that, no, you can't have that one any more.

Even on SD films, via the HDMI upscaling you can count the hairs on the actors heads. This is on a screen over 7 feet wide. Why would they even consider BluRay? to what advantage?

I agree that proper upscaling is extremely impressive. My primary player is a Panasonic Blu-ray that I use for all NTSC discs because it gives the best picture in the house, whether the source is DVD or Blu-ray.

But, having said that, Blu-ray sourced material *is* better. Whether it's *significantly* better--better enough to make it worth the money--is something one can only decide for oneself. I have no regrets, but I think the people convinced that the difference is night and day are fooling themselves. Then again, I'm watching on a cheap 47" multistandard Vizio LCD. It's good enough for me to clearly see and appreciate the difference, but I would assume that those with any of the hundreds of better monitors out there would notice a more obvious difference.

BluRay is dying

I don't think the current climate is a good one in which to assume that market success or failure of any new product is based on anything other than how much money people have and how readily they'll part with it.

Believe me, I'm not trying to apologize for Sony, a company that I see as having a long serial history of inventing a good product and then immediately putting even more effort into sabotaging the product's chances. I'm just pointing out that Blu-ray's problems are entirely political--as a delivery and storage method, it's great.

And I'll say it again: I bought into HD-DVD and found that the discs were incredibly delicate and given to skipping and locking up (including new ones). I haven't had a single problem with any Blu-ray *ever*, including popular rental titles. When you add that to the greater storage and real-time bandwidth, it seems to me that Blu-ray is the clear winner on purely technical grounds (speaking strictly as a consumer, of course)...the fact that Sony has managed once again to shoot themselves in the foot is a completely separate issue.

I understand and agree with your views on Sony's flat-out bizarre antics. And I'm interested in the behind-the-scenes reasons why HD-DVD might have been better in one or more ways. But the simple reality for me is that when I go home at night and want to watch a movie, I know that the Blu-ray version will look better than the DVD (even if just a bit) and that, unlike the HD-DVD version, it will play beginning to end without screwing up at the most dramatic moment in the film. As a consumer and a film fan, *that's* what I care about.

 

[JonUrban]

I'm no fan of Sony's politics. I think they have led the way in the industry with some great products like the Walkman and the floppy disc camera (Mavica) which were great in their time. I even think the SACD was a great product that gave us 5.1 as well as stereo CD on the same disc.

I hate the way they ganged up on DVD-A, the way they help begat then torpedo the DualDisc. I especially hate the way they dropped SACD once they had helped to tank DVD-A.

I also dislike (though can't argue with their thinking) the fact that they own movie studios and could withold many titles from being released on HD-DVD, thus limiting the market penetration of the format that at the time was far superior to theirs.

Even with all of that (and many more), I still like Blu-Ray. Sure, I'm a latest and greatest type of guy, but once I got used to watching HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs, it was hard to go back to DVD, even though I have great players that upscale existing DVDs. They may be close, but on a large projection screen, there is no comparison.

I also don't think that Blu-Ray is "dead". What Blu-Ray needs is cheaper software. The average Joe is not going to pay $25 - $35 for a movie he can get on DVD for $14.99. If the price of the discs goes down, the format will last. It's as simple as that.

This Christmas season will see a large push with players going from $99-$199 (cheapo players, but players non the less). Everyone seems to be buying these flat screen 16x9 TVs, and there is no question that the BD discs make these look great.

DVD is not going away by a long shot, but I don't think BD is either. If it does, than that will end the HD deal, as the world economy will not be able to handle ANOTHER format coming along - at least for 10 or so years.

 

[atrocity]

The average Joe is not going to pay $25 - $35 for a movie he can get on DVD for $14.99.

And at Target a week ago Friday, I saw several mainstream titles for that magic $14.99.

If the price of the discs goes down, the format will last. It's as simple as that.

If it's the only HD game in town, I think it can even survive at the current prices...but Sony will have to be content to have it remain something for the freaks.

It took laserdisc years to become a format commonly used for oddball cult movies. I started seeing that stuff turn up on DVD by mid (possibly late) 1997. There's a bit of it out there on Blu-ray now, but nowhere near as much of it as we got almost immediately on DVD. If Sony doesn't rethink their fees, they're going to miss out on a market segment that I think is heavy with people who prefer to buy rather than rent.

 

[jsgamache]

Some upscaled standard DVDs do look spectacular, but others suffer greatly in an A-B comparison. "Casino Royale" is just one example. I originally bought the standard, but I was disappointed. So I bought the Blu-ray. Night and day.

Pixar movies, too. There's just no comparison.

 

[Guy Robinson]

Another dead format that I have bought into huh? Well I guess I am used to it by now. I will just continue to buy BD titles that I want, the same as I bought SACD and DVD-Audio titles that I wanted. I will soon be up to 500 discs no doubt to match the number of SACD's and DVD-Audio discs that I have. And like those other 2 formats, I will continue to enjoy the discs that I have in my collection from the confines of my HT room in the basement long after the general public has proclaimed the format as dead.

If it dies I will have a lot to enjoy anyway. If it doesn't die I will continue to collect BD's. That's my strategy. The format is much better than upscaled DVD's from a video perspective and there is no comparison from an audio perspective. So as usual I don't really care what the general public thinks or whether they decide to support Blu-Ray. As usual I will take what I can get and go home happy knowing that I have something special that others don't have because they chose to ignore it.

 

[daved64]

Sorry to be a PITA, but we're basing all this on the ramblings of a blogger?

 

[BananaSlug]

Sorry to be a PITA, but we're basing all this on the ramblings of a blogger?

That and our happy experiences with Quad, DVD-A, and sacd (among others). Have a nice day

 

[timbre4]

That and our happy experiences with Quad, DVD-A, and sacd (among others). Have a nice day

Sadly none of these ever got a fair shot at mainstream acceptance. Blu-Ray is just coming on reasonably stronger now for this holiday season. Last year they wanted to keep selling DVD because the format war was still going and they weren't ready to start even remotely rocking the std DVD boat.

The bummer of current economic conditions will add some drag (creating a longer trajectory) but it is quietly becoming a mainstream item.

 

[Chris Gerhard]

Every Blockbuster close to me rents Blu-ray and Best Buy and Wal-Mart all have various Blu-ray players for sale and all major consumer electronics companies I can think of except Toshiba have a player or two as a current product. Amazon.com has a Blu-ray player and 4 discs for $180 delivered. None of this looks to me like Blu-ray is dying and in fact all actual reports of sales are indicating Blu-ray is growing, slowly maybe, but growing. Blu-ray is far from being a Sony only product and I believe Panasonic holds a larger piece of the licensing pie. I love the product and believe it is already huge compared to SACD which was much bigger than DVD-A in terms of market. How big it will get isn't clear but I see no way it dies anytime soon and will last for many years. "Dark Knight" is going to sell a million this holiday season through early 2009 and that will get a lot of press when it happens as that is a sign a video format has arrived.

Of course I often see the need at this forum for the weekly whine about Sony thread and bash Blu-ray, mostly by people that don't own the product and have some silly bias against Sony based on what, I don't know and don't care.

Chris

 

[BananaSlug]

Sadly none of these ever got a fair shot at mainstream acceptance. Blu-Ray is just coming on reasonably stronger now for this holiday season. Last year they wanted to keep selling DVD because the format war was still going and they weren't ready to start even remotely rocking the std DVD boat.

The bummer of current economic conditions will add some drag (creating a longer trajectory) but it is quietly becoming a mainstream item.

Yea, actually when people say sub $100 player and $15 discs I probably won't be able to resist. I like gadgets too, I have piles of them all over the place.

 

[Guy Robinson]

Sort of a rebuttal.

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/mytwocentsa161.html#bdrant

 

[bmoura]

Sort of a rebuttal.

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/mytwocentsa161.html#bdrant

Yes, the movie companies keep issuing movies on Blu-Ray. Guess they haven't read the ZD Blogger's column yet!

 

[daved64]

Yes, the movie companies keep issuing movies on Blu-Ray. Guess they haven't read the ZD Blogger's column yet!

I do not own a BR player. I have no real bone to pick on either side, but I'll wait for some real hard numbers by the industry before I call it DOA. Basing it on the opinion of one guy with a keyboard is silly.

As I have learned the hard way with the supposed alleged Beatles remasters, the internet is a cesspool of misinformation.

 

[bmoura]

The internet is a cesspool of misinformation.

Yes, it can be that way sometimes.

Here I'm enjoying some of the High Def movie remasters - both video and audio - on Blu-Ray. Nice stuff !

 

[BananaSlug]

Rumor has it that Wal-Mart will have a Magnavox BR player for $128 on Black Friday. I don't shop Wal-Mart or on Black Friday, but it may be of interest to some.

 

[jimby]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365&tag=nl.e539
BluRay is dying, if not already dead & not realising it - rather like a chicken with it's head lopped off, which takes a few minutes to realise it is actually dead, BD will doubtless stumble on for a while yet. But given it was 8 months ago that Toshiba (somewhat stupidly IMHO) threw in the towel, BD is still under 4% market share compared to DVD. This is with no competition at all. What a complete waste of time.

Neil, you're hilarious

I must say that I make it policy never to get my news from a blogger at ZDNet. The market share of Blu-ray he quotes is the second sentence of his blog is wrong - off by a factor of two. The rest of the blog spirals downward from there.

I agree with you that for a small content producer, Blu-ray production can be a non-economical affair, what with the replication costs and AACS keys. But having supervised both HD-DVD and Blu-ray production workflows, I have to tell you HD-DVD was a major dog. You couldn't burn a disc and had to QC on a emulator? WTF? And the limited disc bandwidth meant that we couldn't do multi-angle video material with Dolby TrueHD 96/24. Blu-ray doesn't have those problems. I can produce an HDMV BD disc and have excellent compatibility with almost every player released.

And don't get me started about Toshiba's verifier software!

Finally, if you think that upscaled standard definition video is comparable to HD, you need to looks at some better HD material Take a look at the Police -Certifiable or the Nine Inch Nails BD releases (I was production supervisor on both of those) if you want to see what BD can do for concerts and audio.

-jim

BTW, P.Angelli says "hi"

 

[neil wilkes]

Fair enough points there jim - I certainly cannot argue against having to QC on an emulator.
Sadly this seems to be quite common. PSP had the same trouble, as did DVDA where the initial producers had to write their scripts manually from what I understand.
My biggest gripes with BD (amongst others) is that it is somehow being touted as a music format when it is a video format and the stupidity of forcing expensive CP systems that are broken wide open onto all - this really will have the effect of shutting out smaller producers who simply cannot even begin to justify the outlay required.

As far as what can BD do for Audio? Nothing that DVDA cannot already do at a fraction of the cost, and additionally also have compatibility with every DVD player sold. 5.1 is a hard enough sell, and 7.1 really stands no chance at all. 23/192 5.1? Again, this shuts out the smaller companies right away. How much DSP is required to mix at that sample rate! Again, from conversations I am having with people regularly working in 5.1, most cannot even justify going to 96KHz and 192 would be regarded as pointless. Sure, I can see the benefit ofreducing the number of quantization steps in the DAC stages, but most cannot justify the extremely small difference this makes in the real world - the law of diminishing returns and all that. 24/48 5.1 lossless is perfectly good - it is not broken, there is nothing wrong with it. Stick in 24/48 LPCM & 5.1 DTS in the Video_TS and everyone is happy. Add a CD for the car, and you have everything covered. So - why BD for Audio? it makes no sense.
Concerts? I for one just do not care enough about being able to watch yet another band onstage in HD any more than I do in SD. In all honesty, once I have started a concert type DVD playing I will usually turn the screen off altogether.

Sorry Jim - maybe I am a digital luddite, but I do not see why it is necessary, and I certainly don;t see why it is good for audio.

PS - Say "Hi" to Paul for me when you see him. He is a true gentleman.

 

[dobyblue]

BluRay is dying, if not already dead & not realising it - rather like a chicken with it's head lopped off, which takes a few minutes to realise it is actually dead, BD will doubtless stumble on for a while yet. But given it was 8 months ago that Toshiba (somewhat stupidly IMHO) threw in the towel, BD is still under 4% market share compared to DVD. This is with no competition at all. What a complete waste of time.

Someone ought to tell the studios who are selling over 500,000 copies of their discs in the first week that.

Given that 8 months ago the absolute top new titles were lucky to see 5% of the market share of DVD and now they're seeing upwards of 20%, I just don't see how any stretch of logic complies with this utterly bizarre conclusion. Transformers on Black Friday on Blu-ray took almost 40% of the market.

My biggest gripes with BD (amongst others) is that it is somehow being touted as a music format when it is a video format

It’s a disc, not a video format. It can be used for data storage, audio, video, whatever you want. The non-concert music format releases represent, what, about 2% of the 1,000 titles on the market? How do you come to the conclusion it’s being touted yet as a music format?

and the stupidity of forcing expensive CP systems that are broken wide open onto all - this really will have the effect of shutting out smaller producers who simply cannot even begin to justify the outlay required.

Yet there are a stunning number of independent content producers currently releasing Blu-ray Discs! According to Richard Casey from R&B Films he only needs to move 20,000 units to break even and that was over a year ago – costs have dropped considerably since then. In addition AACS may not stick around much longer. BD+ would be left and it’s not compulsory.

As far as what can BD do for Audio? Nothing that DVDA cannot already do at a fraction of the cost, and additionally also have compatibility with every DVD player sold. 5.1 is a hard enough sell, and 7.1 really stands no chance at all. 23/192 5.1? Again, this shuts out the smaller companies right away. How much DSP is required to mix at that sample rate!

I’m sorry but what has DVD-Audio done for audio exactly? How many new releases are there every week I can pick up? DVD-A has done bugger-all for audio, that’s the harsh reality.

Given that several audiophile studios are releasing 24/96 hi-rez flacs and 2L is doing (and they’re by no means a MAJOR LABEL) 24/192 multi-channel mixes as well as DSD mutli-channel from DXD sources, I’d say the things you say have no chance at all are already in place …and we haven’t even seen popular music yet! 2L are already doing Blu-ray/SACD combo discs! I think Neil Young’s release will be the first and given that it’s a huge box set the sales will not be a good measure to gauge how well a release like Pearl Jam “Ten” remastered would do, including the extras that I will outline in the next paragraph.

Again, from conversations I am having with people regularly working in 5.1, most cannot even justify going to 96KHz and 192 would be regarded as pointless. Sure, I can see the benefit ofreducing the number of quantization steps in the DAC stages, but most cannot justify the extremely small difference this makes in the real world - the law of diminishing returns and all that. 24/48 5.1 lossless is perfectly good - it is not broken, there is nothing wrong with it. Stick in 24/48 LPCM & 5.1 DTS in the Video_TS and everyone is happy. Add a CD for the car, and you have everything covered. So - why BD for Audio? it makes no sense. Concerts?

Sure, concerts, but here’s more reasons why it makes sense.
If you’re using a DVD-A for high resolution material, there just isn’t enough room left over to provide enough supplements to make the disc a worthwhile upgrade over the CD and in addition everyone knows that SACD and DVD-Audio aren’t mass market adopted formats, so the average consumer won’t touch them. Even some of the nicest discs contain things like a short 15 minute documentary in Dolby stereo from the time the album was made. Now picture a disc like “Ten” - give me the album in high resolution stereo and surround sound, give me the videos from that album in high resolution stereo and surround sound and the video in HD where the source permits, give me some of the unplugged performance, or a performance around the time of the album, interviews, access to downloadable content if something else comes available (high rez mixes of the B-sides like Yellow Ledbetter) so I don’t have to double dip (BD-Live), etc. Give me the CD in there too for $19.99 and what Blu-ray can do for Audio is this – bring high resolution music to the masses. Whether they choose to listen to it properly or not, it will have much better results than either DVD-A or SACD did. You seem to forget that companies still aren’t willing to release in a format they didn’t support. Blu-ray gives them a clean slate.

I for one

…and that may well be the way it remains. Get ready to get left behind.