Blu-ray State of the Union. Are you switching to streaming media? (1 Viewer)

[Carl Johnson]

I buy fewer blu rays than I did DVDs partially because of streaming media but streaming is not a replacement for owning movies on disc.

Ten years ago I bought about one DVD per week. I kept the titles that I really liked, I traded in the ones that I didn't like, and I bought plenty of used discs. Rather than buying and later trading questionable titles on blu I do my casual viewing on Netflix and only buy discs with the intent of keeping them. Having a catalog of about 100 of my favorite titles on disc has also cut down on any desire to make casual purchases. Why pay $20 for a new blu ray that I may or may not like when I have the option of either watching a disc that I already own or streaming new material with the click of a remote?

 

[Greg_D_R]

Interesting, Sony is going to stop producing optical drives, citing "fierce competition that has forced prices lower":
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nb20120826a2.html
Personally, I have yet to find a reason to stream movies. When I buy, I research a movie, then pull the trigger if I'm interested. I'll continue doing this until I can't do it anymore, then I'll burn digital copies until my equipment breaks. The day my movie collection lives on a corporate owned server, is the day I stop collecting movies.

 

[Brian Kidd]

Think your son or daughter might likethe ebook you just finished? Feel free to buy another copy (actually a download code) because you can't lend yours unless you also lend the reader.

Not to burst your bubble, but Kindle books can be loaned out for two-weeks-at-a-time to any other person with either a Kindle device or the Kindle software on one of their other devices. Sure, it's not indefinite loan, but it's long enough for someone to read most books not written by George R. R. Martin.

 

[Robin9]

I just don't get this whole watch a movie on a 8 inch screen or 3 inch Iphone or 13 inch laptop.

I don't either. I think it's totally, utterly insane. Of all modern fashions, it's the most stupid.

 

[Ejanss]

I don't either. I think it's totally, utterly insane. Of all modern fashions, it's the most stupid.

On the other major Blu-ray boards, we still kid folks about the time iTunes Digital Copies first came out, and core theater nuts kept complaining, "What are these? They look like they were made on MPEG; I put the disk in the player, but these little tiny computer files look like crap on my big-screen set!"
No, seriously: They actually didn't know at first that these were supposed to be for your 3-4" portable iPod, and thought that anything that came out on a disk was to play on your Sony home system.
With movies, studios, and the analysts/critics in general, they seem to have the same problem:
Streaming/cellphone movies were designed to be watched "on-the-go", and yet every analyst predicting streaming as "the future" seems to believe that we'll sit in our homes and download Ultraviolet movies for our living room.
Coupled with the "All-Or-Nothing" factor (see discussions about 3-D whiners) of those either for or against it believing that one must ultimately supplant the other for the sake of evolution--If you can watch Lawrence of Arabia on a 6" iPhone, apparently that's how we'll ALL be doing it someday. Nobody seems to be quite clear on the idea of "The right tool for the right job", and that we can watch a TV rerun on the train commute, and a major-restoration hard-disk movie at home, probably because....not that many people actually watch a TV show or movie on the commute. They haven't quite figured out what the tools in the box are for, or which end of the hammer to pick up.
(I've watched iTunes/iPod on the occasional airplane trip--since the airlines have taken iPods and laptops so much for granted they've eliminated in-flight movies to save costs--but it had to be iPod since no one's ever allowed to use their cellphones in flight anymore.)

 

[Worth]

I have never seen a streamed movie I could stand even on a 20 inch monitor. On a HT sized screen it would have to atrocious.

Not necessarily. It depends on both the speed and consistency of your internet connection. I used to agree with that assessment until I got a stable 15mbps connection - now I'm shocked at how good HD Netflix material can look. Not as good as blu-ray, but better than cable, satellite, or any other HD source I've seen.

 

[David Norman]

Not necessarily. It depends on both the speed and consistency of your internet connection. I used to agree with that assessment until I got a stable 15mbps connection - now I'm shocked at how good HD Netflix material can look. Not as good as blu-ray, but better than cable, satellite, or any other HD source I've seen.

Possibly, but I've had a 15-30mbps service for several years and found it even at that level to be barely tolerable. I don't what it is, but my eyes are old enough that you'd
think it wouldn't be able to tell. i guess some people are just more sensitive to certain problems -- geometry issues just drive me crazy (stretching) as does transition/compression
artifacts and random noise bursts that seem to plaque the streams I've look at..

 

[DaveF]

Not to burst your bubble, but Kindle books can be loaned out for two-weeks-at-a-time to any other person with either a Kindle device or the Kindle software on one of their other devices. Sure, it's not indefinite loan, but it's long enough for someone to read most books not written by George R. R. Martin.

In practice, no. Kindle lending is up to the publisher, and it seems most do not allow it. I've yet to find a book that actually can be lent.

 

[Mark_TS]

Hollywood Reporter should be taken with a grain of salt: its purpose is to push industry product, news, etc
Somewhere I read that DVD sales still make up 60% of home viewing/sales-yet here they are trying to bite the hand that feeds them-by pushing BR and treating DVD purchasers as second class citizens;
THAT is the true definition of insanity and greed-the dollar signs in their eyes hoping every one would replace their DVD collection (which will be impossible) and buy new versions of a film every 5 years;


BTW whats a "Zune"?

 

[Ejanss]

BTW whats a "Zune"?  

It's what Sony claimed was "killing" Apple and the MP3 iPod.
Never heard of it either.

 

[Joshua Clinard]

I have totally switched my movie watching habits over to instant streaming. I don't use Netflix anymore as they don't have very many films I want to watch. I now use UV enabled vudu.com specifically. When I first heard about UltraViolet, and Wal-Mart's Disc to Digital service, back in March of this year, I was very excited. At that time I owned over 200 DVD's, and less than 25 Blu-Rays. I have since converted about 120 of those DVD's to vudu's HDX format . For me to have upgraded those to Blu-Ray discs would have cost me several thousand dollars. Instead I have spent about 400 upgrading the collection. I have also bought UV codes for about 20 new releases at 4 bucks a pop. I no longer buy DVD's ]that aren't Disc to Digital compatible. I am still waiting on the day for the rest of my collection to be added to the Disc to Digital program. I currently have 145 UV titles in my vudu library! Once I upgraded my discs, I gave them away, or sold them. I don't care about extras anymore, I just watch the film. For the first four years that I had DVD I watched extra's. After that they got boring. I didn't even watch most of the extra's on the Star Wars Blu-Rays. For those don't know a lot about UV and vudu, here are it's benefits!
Easy upgrade of owned DVD's to Hi-Def for $5 each, $2 for Blu-Rays
Don't have to worry about theft, or loss of discs! (This was a big one- a roomate once stole 40 of my DVD's)
Don't have to worry about children or dogs damaging discs
I can watch movies on my laptop, iPhone, iPad, or HDTV via an app available on hundreds of devices!
Access to my entire collection when I travel, i.e. at my dorm, hotel rooms, airplanes, in the car, or on on a bus.
Films can be downloaded for offline use on a PC, as well as iPad via the flixster app.
The quality on my 32 inch and 42 inch HDTV's are indistinguishably to Blu-Rays in terms of quality. HDX is 1080p with 5.1 sound, sometimes ever 7.1
I can share my library with up to 6 family members and freinds, you cannot do that with DVD's. No worrying about giving your movies to your heirs when you die!

 

[Ejanss]

I have totally switched my movie watching habits over to instant streaming. I don't use Netflix anymore as they don't have very many films I want to watch. I now use UV enabled vudu.com specifically. When I first heard about UltraViolet, and Wal-Mart's Disc to Digital service, back in March of this year, I was very excited. At that time I owned over 200 DVD's, and less than 25 Blu-Rays. I have since converted about 120 of those DVD's to vudu's HDX format . For me to have upgraded those to Blu-Ray discs would have cost me several thousand dollars. Instead I have spent about 400 upgrading the collection. I have also bought UV codes for about 20 new releases at 4 bucks a pop. I no longer buy DVD's ]that aren't Disc to Digital compatible. I am still waiting on the day for the rest of my collection to be added to the Disc to Digital program. I currently have 145 UV titles in my vudu library! Once I upgraded my discs, I gave them away, or sold them. I don't care about extras anymore, I just watch the film. For the first four years that I had DVD I watched extra's. After that they got boring. I didn't even watch most of the extra's on the Star Wars Blu-Rays. For those don't know a lot about UV and vudu, here are it's benefits!

And now, back to our program...
As our appropriately avatar'ed sales representative points out (what? No, he's just an average poster, nothing suspicious), Vudu/UV doesn't seem to know what angle they're selling:
- "You don't have to worry about your disks!" (Yeah, and if I sell my car and switch to taking the bus every day, I'll never have to worry about my BMW.)
But most of all, they have this fascination with the idea that we can have a "backup" to our disks....WHERE IS THIS COMING FROM??
I think someone on the low-tech end of the high-tech applications at the studio accidentally got hold of the Hacker's Argument--"We rip disks because, uh, we have the legal right to keep backup files!" (yeah, right, and you just "collect" the beer cans?)--believed it completely, and now, from outside looking in, are now utterly convinced that home-theater fans lose sleep over the idea of not having soft backups to the disks.
That's where all this is coming from: The suits don't watch the movies themselves, so how would they know one home-theater concern from another? They're guessing in the dark from guessed trends about The People Out There, like their notion that we apparently love cellphones so much we want to use them as our TV's, and that the idea that we can stream movies and TV on our phone/tablet apps means that we glue ourselves to our LCD screens the minute we step out our doors every day.
Recently had yet another survey from Wal-Mart asking why I was or wasn't (in my case, wasn't) using Wal-Mart's Vudu paid-upgrade service. One of the options for "Why not use" was "I don't want to pay for disks I've already bought."
Now, you'd think this rather simple, easy-to-grasp idea would have occurred to them first....
(Although, as the convincing argument counters, well, at least you're not paying much...)

 

[Patrick Donahue]

I've got to admit with all this talking of digital streaming overtaking physical media... I've had this thought in the back of my mind that with Spielberg releasing all of his mega titles all at once (Jaws, Indiana Jones, ET) it's as if he knows that this is as good as it's going to get with Blu-ray sales, so he better get what he can while the gettin's good....

 

[Ejanss]

I've got to admit with all this talking of digital streaming overtaking physical media... I've had this thought in the back of my mind that with Spielberg releasing all of his mega titles all at once (Jaws, Indiana Jones, ET) it's as if he knows that this is as good as it's going to get with Blu-ray sales, so he better get what he can while the gettin's good....

I've heard that trembling-under-the-bed argument on at least one or two other forums, and only with this much hypnotism in the press could an Embarrassment of Riches be seen as a Harbinger of Doom.
We're now only in Year Four that Blu-ray has been taken seriously at all (even after January '08, W-Day, we were predicting the "death" of the format for another year), which means it's only been two years that studios have had sufficient facilities to be able to technically HD Blu-master more than a handful of new release and core demographically-ensured disks per year.
The '95-'96 invention of DVD didn't leap off until '99-'00, and that was when the format war preventing hardware sales had finally died down, there were suddenly more mastering services available, studios could go through their Default Demographic canon (with Sony, any new technology means an excuse to test out Labyrinth, Spiderman, Fifth Element, Resident Evil 1 and Baron Munchhausen), and consider the shaky new step of actually putting classic catalogue on it the next year...At what point does an "experiment" become an established sales anchor?
I find the much more plausible argument that it took studios THIS LONG to realize people were actually buying Blu-ray. Those grizzled old DiVX-War vets who noted how long it took a very grudging Spielberg to finally put Jaws, Jurassic and Indy on DVD the last time before he threw up his hands and dumped all his classics on us at once--and DIsney abandon the "Limited Editions" for good reliable mass-market Gold Editions--are seeing history fall into established patterns, and the floodgates open at just the right time in the schedule.
Those who don't learn from the past, and all that.

I don't care about extras anymore, I just watch the film. For the first four years that I had DVD I watched extra's. After that they got boring. I didn't even watch most of the extra's on the Star Wars Blu-Rays.

Oh, well, that's convincing: "Extras are boring, you don't want them anyway! "
(That could catch on to other areas of marketing: "Eh, pockets are too much work, you can get pants cheaper without them!")
But no, let's get back to that "You don't want extras, do ya?" thing, and on the anal-retentively film-scholastic HTF, no less..."Friend", do you sense a little hostility in the room right now--like a cat who'd just wandered into a dog-filled junkyard--or was that just a little deliberately nasty bit of baiting to get the scrap going? We got rules around this here saloon, y'know, check your six-gun at the door.

 

[Alfonso_M]

This thread is evolving into what looks like the first salvos of a new "format war"; what's more interesting to me is that now I find myself aligned with my old nemesis, Blu-Ray

 

[Ejanss]

This thread is evolving into what looks like the first salvos of a new "format war"; what's more interesting to me is that now I find myself aligned with my old nemesis, Blu-Ray

From what we know from history "Format War" is a bit of a misnomer:
It's not really a "war between formats", it's usually a war between the public and the big-suit companies--It's a "war" between the sales-established populist favorite that's caught on from word-of-mouth fan-evangelism and public acceptance, vs. the "unwanted" format that corporations WANT us to buy because it puts the industry in a better and more advantageous position for them....Despite that lucrative format usually being lower quality, more expensive, offering no content except the movie itself since that's what the public apparently "wants", and usually involving hefty extra hidden fees, "second sales", and/or Pay-Per-View charges going into studios' pockets that most home theater buffs simply do not want to pay.
Pay-per-view DiVX vs. DVD. Dish Network vs. cable. Blu-ray vs. HDDVD becoming The People vs. Microsoft/Toshiba. Beta (and a format geared more for personal TV recording than for actually owning copyrighted copies of movies on tape) vs. VHS. Streaming your movies from some other corporation's "cloud" vs. that hard copy right in your hot little hand. (Even the anti-3D whiners bring up horror images of "Greedy studios selling us expensive glasses and making us buy movies again.")
The losing format usually involves the studio pushing their monopolistic luck, and telling the public they own the movies, not the viewers...Right after the viewers had already rushed out and bought a copy of Dark Knight Rises in the belief after being told they would "own" it for posterity. Bit of a confusing message, and most paying folks don't like to be confused.
A home-theater-buff's movie shelf is his castle; try to breach it with force, and watch the boiling lead spill down from the parapets....It ain't porn that wins ALL the format battles, y'know.

 

[Douglas Monce]

I've heard that trembling-under-the-bed argument on at least one or two other forums, and only with this much hypnotism in the press could an Embarrassment of Riches be seen as a Harbinger of Doom.
We're now only in Year Four that Blu-ray has been taken seriously at all (even after January '08, W-Day, we were predicting the "death" of the format for another year), which means it's only been two years that studios have had sufficient facilities to be able to technically HD Blu-master more than a handful of new release and core demographically-ensured disks per year.
The '95-'96 invention of DVD didn't leap off until '99-'00, and that was when the format war preventing hardware sales had finally died down, there were suddenly more mastering services available, studios could go through their Default Demographic canon (with Sony, any new technology means an excuse to test out Labyrinth, Spiderman, Fifth Element, Resident Evil 1 and Baron Munchhausen), and consider the shaky new step of actually putting classic catalogue on it the next year...At what point does an "experiment" become an established sales anchor?
I find the much more plausible argument that it took studios THIS LONG to realize people were actually buying Blu-ray. Those grizzled old DiVX-War vets who noted how long it took a very grudging Spielberg to finally put Jaws, Jurassic and Indy on DVD the last time before he threw up his hands and dumped all his classics on us at once--and DIsney abandon the "Limited Editions" for good reliable mass-market Gold Editions--are seeing history fall into established patterns, and the floodgates open at just the right time in the schedule.
Those who don't learn from the past, and all that.
Oh, well, that's convincing: "Extras are boring, you don't want them anyway! "
(That could catch on to other areas of marketing: "Eh, pockets are too much work, you can get pants cheaper without them!")
But no, let's get back to that "You don't want extras, do ya?" thing, and on the anal-retentively film-scholastic HTF, no less..."Friend", do you sense a little hostility in the room right now--like a cat who'd just wandered into a dog-filled junkyard--or was that just a little deliberately nasty bit of baiting to get the scrap going? We got rules around this here saloon, y'know, check your six-gun at the door.

There was no format war between DVD and Divx. Divx was only ever really pushed by one retailer, Circuit City. It was lunched in 1998 and was gone with in a year, with all unsold Divx discs being destroyed in the summer of 1999.. It never posed any competition for DVD, and was never in demand by consumers.
Doug

 

[Jason Charlton]

Originally Posted by Joshua Clinard /t/322642/blu-ray-state-of-the-union-are-you-switching-to-streaming-media/90#post_3972450
I can share my library with up to 6 family members and freinds, you cannot do that with DVD's.

You're right. I can share DVDs or other disks with a hell of a lot more than just 6 people.

Honestly, are you suggesting we can't "share" physical media?!?!?!?! And if the operative word in your statement is "library", then I submit anyone that wants to borrow ALL of my movies at once is not a very good friend...

Look, I'll admit that there may be benefits for those that like watching Avatar on their tiny phones while they're sitting on the toilet waiting for the inevitable return of their Taco Bell dinner, but that's a niche market.

I've never had problems with scratches or other damage to discs (and I have small children - but they know not to touch daddy's things - you see, I teach them that...). I used to have a dog and DVDs, too - but his lack of opposable thumbs made accessing the discs a bit of a challenge. I also take care not to leave things lying around.

I'd be much more concerned with the hoops I'd have to jump through and the time required to "re-catalog" my digital movies if/when I get a new computer. I'd also worry about servers going down or passwords getting lost... I also don't like having my entire home theater system connected to the Internet... I prefer an isolated system. It works perfectly for what I want it to do.

 

[Ejanss]

There was no format war between DVD and Divx. Divx was only ever really pushed by one retailer, Circuit City. It was lunched in 1998 and was gone with in a year, with all unsold Divx discs being destroyed in the summer of 1999.. It never posed any competition for DVD, and was never in demand by consumers.

DiVX vs. DVD became a war when studios wanted to support it. That's sorta the point.
There were rumors (and a lot of paranoia floating around) that Lucas, Disney, Spielberg, and one or two other studios with a valuable catalog to protect out of public hands, were all in favor of the new disk format going to the pay-per-view system of DiVX, and the usual big-money spins about how "technically better" the format was, even when the general market sentiment was heading for the wider, more common format.
Some of the very first "Evil George Lucas" theories date back to his supposed support of DiVX (when there were long release delays while Lucas finished up the deleted scenes on the Ep. 1 DVD, disk fans cried "He's always hated us!"), and Disney's "Vault" strategy and LD-upgraded Limited Editions date back to their original trepidation about putting valuable content into full-sale populist hands.
Like HDDVD and, yes, streaming, the "war" was down to the simple Dr. Seuss issue of "Marvin K. Beta, Will You Please Go NOW?", but had too much greedy vested studio irons in the fire to get off the stage and declare a winner without a fight.

 

[Steve Tannehill]

There was no format war between DVD and Divx. Divx was only ever really pushed by one retailer, Circuit City. It was lunched in 1998 and was gone with in a year, with all unsold Divx discs being destroyed in the summer of 1999.. It never posed any competition for DVD, and was never in demand by consumers.
Doug

There was most certainly a format war between DIVX and DVD. DIVX was announced in 1997, the year that DVD was supposed to be introduced as the next-generation video format. It introduced uncertainty to the mix a year before it was released. Many people held off DVD player purchases to see how DIVX played out.
DIVX Gold, the unlimited play DIVX disc, was a direct competitor to DVD.
Disney released Alice in Wonderland to DIVX before it released any title to DVD. (When I complained about this on my web site, Disney PR had the audacity to tell me that it was a lesser title. That was not the point--they supported DIVX before they supported DVD.)
That's a format war. Never forget.