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8 responses to “It’s not HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray”

1. 2008/01/09

   Neil

   I like to possess the material DVD or CD. in fact probably more for films more than with music. I think it is the permanence. Anything on HDD is temporary and I would always want to record it onto CD/DVD to keep it.

   Also I find HDD space is always limited. Even if I could (as a reasonably techy, but not that sysadminy person) be bothered to setup a custom or hacked HDD recorder, I am sure I have almost 1TB of video already. I would not consider it a long term solution – though it might force me into sorting out some sort of backup regime finally.

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2. 2008/01/09

   Stephen Usher

   I somewhat disagree with you there for the following reasons:

   Firstly, the war is not even high-definition DVD v. download it’s DVD v. high-def DVD. Normal DVD is generally concidered by most people even with “HD Ready” LCD TVs to be “good enough” and won’t want to re-purchase all their back catalogue.

   Secondly, high speed broadband (I’m talking 100Mb/s without contention) is still a pipedream in the UK even in densely populated areas and will never happen in rural areas. Any relatively low-compression ratio 1080p downloads will need this for consumer acceptable download times (which don’t impinge on their prawn downloads and high(ish)-definition You-Tube watching).

   Remember that even where broadband is currently available in the UK most people struggle to get 2Mb/s with a contention ratio of 50:1. Even with that ISPs are stuggling with the load and the cost.

   (Remember, also, that ISPs renting BT IP Stream only just break even if the user downloads no more than about 2GB per month with the current pricing structure. If you crank that up the ISPs will need to charge the users far more.)

   Thirdly, downloaded media isn’t portable, as in physically. You can’t pick up the internal hard disk version of a film and lend it to your friend down the road or take it over to a friend’s place to watch. A physical DVD-like medium is convenient.

   Fourthly, downloads aren’t technophobe friendly. A disc player is simple for a reason, and even they baffle quite a few. Even making the box as simple as a Sky+ box will limit it to the semi-technical as they will still have to access menus to select the content rather than hit the eject button, put the disc in the machine and hit the eject button to close the draw and then watch.

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3. 2008/01/10

   Chris Samuel

   Many places down here in Australia struggle to get any ADSL, and dial up can be a bit dicey too, so I wouldn’t go betting the farm on “online” content just yet.

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4. 2008/01/10

   Nick Palmer

   I’d agree with all of the above; upscaled DVD on my new LCD is fantastic, and DVDs are now way cheaper than they were. I like having a physical disk if I’ve bought a movie/series-season, and bluntly the “online” option just seems to me to be a way of transferring more of the cost of distribution to the consumer while giving them less. Steve’s comments above on infrastructure limitations are spot on, and I’d add that as more ISPs are imposing draconian “fair use” limits on broadband customers, any attempt to download the sort of data required for a 1080p movie will pretty swiftly result in gimped connections and nasty letters from ISP to poor naive fool who thought that “unlimited” meant, well, “unlimited”.

   If there is an absolute winner it’ll probably be Blu-ray, which (IMO) will suck, as that’s the format that’ll continue the region encoding nonsense. It DOES store more, and it’s getting more market share, but I think it’d be sad for the consumer if it did “win”. I’d rather see both formats continue to pound seven shades out of each other and have the ultimate winner be the Unpronounceablenamecorporation of Guanjo (for example) with their very tacky looking (but EXTREMELY cheap) dual format player. THAT’D be good.

   As an aside, one of the things that bugs me about the whole format war is the extent to which companies blame “the market” or say “the market will decide the winner”. O RLY? In that case, I (as a member of the alleged market) would like to buy a shiny new copy of Casino Royale on HD-DVD please. What do you mean, “Blu Ray only”…? In reality, the “market” is being dictated to buy a handful of companies and there’s no real “decision” at all.

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5. 2008/01/11

   Stephen Usher

   Nick, you forget that “the market” is the distribution channels and not the little oik with the player in his or her living room.

   The consumer can only buy/rent what the retailers stock. It is they who have the real power.

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6. 2008/01/11

   Peter Jenkins

   I’ve been wondering recently if the content owners are pushing HD-DVD and Blueray _becuase_ it wouldn’t be feasible to download that amount of data over most home broadband connections. By giving people a format with such high definition that their TV, eyes, ears and brain cannot hope to reproduce/comprehend they might be hoping to deter illegal downloads and perhaps counterfeit DVD’s.

   I think Alec has a point about the current format war being irrelevant – does anyone remember the now defunct HD Audio CD format (or what ever it was called). Nobody cared about that because we were all out buying iPods and can now carry our entire music collection in our pockets – convenience won over audio quality.

   I think that unless the likes of Sony stop exposing this dumb format war to consumers both formats will ultimately loose and most people will settle with DVD’s, just like most people have settled for Audio CD’s and mp3’s even though higher definition/”better” formats exist.

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7. 2008/01/12

   Nick Palmer

   I think that was my point, Stephen, although I’d say that in fact the “market” is actually at the Vivendi/Paramount/Sony/Warner level; effectively the rhetoric is about consumer choice when the choices are being made by the movie studios, and the consumer has a kind of Model T level of “choice”. As one of the “oiks”, I resent being fed the standard free-market utopian crap about “choice” and “the market will select the best option” when it plainly isn’t true.

   Peter, I think SACD bought the farm, not because of the advent of digital media players, but because for the vast majority of consumers, ordinary CD really WAS good enough – the investment in new CD players, plus supporting equipment of sufficient quality to make the difference discernible (and even then only to audiophiles in empty rooms with one chair in THAT spot in the middle of the room) simply wasn’t realistic. There is still a market (albeit a limited one) for audio DVDs.

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8. 2008/01/16

   alecm

   I’m with this guy still:

   http://www.hdtvuk.tv/2008/01/seagate_ceo_see.html

   …the UK’s bandwidth issue is parochial and irrelevant compared to the big markets, especially the far east (Korea, Japan) ; and storage management is a bigger problem than storage itself. Terabyte spindles are £170 nowadays, and that’s dropping…

   Nobody will ever satisfy audiophiles (etc) – but most people just want the story at the right price. Steve talks about “relatively low-compression ratio 1080p downloads” but enough people watch 700Mb compressed movies on Bittorrent, scaled for a TV, not to care about the cinematic experience of it all…

   Maybe this is heresy to some, but I just think it’s pragmatism.

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