Blu-ray Celebration Will be Short Lived
I had no vested interested in the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray but watched out of interest to study how the “techonomy” operated. More importantly I was interested in how the “techonomy” is changing. Now Blu-ray has won the battle of the physical media formats, we can look to the period (in a few short years) when the majority of HD movies will be downloaded from the grid and not distributed via a plastic disc. The Blu-ray celebrations will be short lived. The connected world makes an ever increasing amount of physical things irrelevant.
February 24, 2008 at 11:20 pm
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head of why Toshiba backed out of this market. As you, I’ve got no vested interest, but was tracking the technology and waiting to see which one prevailed so I would be left with an obsolete player and a bunch of disks.
From what I’ve researched, HD DVD is a much more capable format - Blu Ray 2.0 spec matches a lot of what HD DVD can do, but there arent very many players or disks out there that support the new spec. I think Toshiba have made a good move if their plan is just to retreat on physical disks and wait for when content is downloaded direct as it will be soon I hope (rumor is that NetFlix are going to be starting up direct download to my Xbox soon, which I’ll very much welcome).
BTW, David Le Blanc wrote a bit out this if you’re interested - http://blogs.msdn.com/david_leblanc/archive/2008/02/15/hd-vs-blu-ray.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/david_leblanc/archive/2008/02/18/hd-vs-blu-ray-2.aspx
May 29, 2008 at 10:12 pm
You have got to be kidding me with this. I honestly cannot believe you are this naive.
You’re saying that in a few years, say 4-5, around 90% of movies are going to be put up onto a database and you pay to download them to a server and keep them there and that’s it? I have to seriously disagree.
While that will eventually become an option, and I digress the word OPTION, it will NEVER become the mainstream way of getting movies, EVER. Blockbuster and Rogers Video would go right out of business, as would many manufacturing companies all over the world, billions of dollars would be lost if that were to happen. Businesses aren’t that stupid, despite how they seem.
Rentals would be a thing of the past, families would not be able to browse in a rental store for movies on a Friday night and then head out and get some take out and go back home for a relaxing night of fun as they have been able to do for…..almost 30 some odd years now, if not longer? I don’t see that happening.
There is great financial gain to be made in offering the CHOICE of downloading movies and TV at a price such as on Xbox, PS3, integrated into blu ray players of the future yes, but it will NEVER become mainstream. That would seriously damage the economy and the natural way of life as we know it. Never going to happen.