Why optical disc won't die anytime soon (1 Viewer)

[Kevin Collins]

Fortune had a very interesting article on six reason why optical disc wouldn't be dying anytime soon. With all the attention being on streaming, VOD, digital copy, digital locker, etc, it's hard to wonder if our optical disc friend will continue to remain.

The decline of the optical disc has been significant. According to annual figures released in January by industry trade group the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG), overall home entertainment revenue grew 0.2% in 2012, surpassing $18 billion. Physical disc sales have fallen by about 30% since their 2004 peak, to some 700 million units, but the revenue picture has remained stable (with more than a decade of consecutive annual tallies of $18 billion-plus, the DEG says). The reason is diversification. Consumers remain hungry for content, but are finding more and more avenues to it — electronic sell-through (EST), subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) or transactional VOD has all amounted to the same pie, just sliced into more pieces.

Fortune lists six reasons why optical disc won't die anytime soon:

1) Kids need it — Geez... if that isn't true. My wife's Honda Pilot has a DVD player in it. I only buy Blu-ray discs, sometimes they come with the DVD. So, as long as we have young kids, guess what, we have to buy DVD's for the long trips.... How I survived as a kid without it on road trips across the continental US is beyond me...
2) The industry’s own marketing says so – UltraViolet, a cloud technology embraced by a broad consortium of distributors is selling the concept of multi-platform content access. That means if you buy a disc, you also get to access the digital copy, a “combo-pack” strategy that is now an industry cornerstone.
3) Specialization favors it -- all the small fry things like work out titles, music concerts, etc. still revolve around this format.
4) Blu-ray still the best viewing experience -- everyone on this forum knows this...
5) It’s the collector’s choice -- I guess I fall into that category with >2K HD optical discs...
6) For a lot of Americans, it ain’t broke -- why worry about an internet connection or the right software installed on your device if you can just pop a disc into your DVD/Blu-ray player.

All I know... I'm still buying HD optical discs... Now if my kids will or not is to be seen. Optical discs might be like 8 track tapes when I was growing up. I saw some people using them, but they were on their way out.

Are you going to keep buying optical disc?

 

[jimmyjet]

i want to own my own copies.

so i guess the question for me simply translates into what choices do i have to do this ?

 

[Robin9]

6) For a lot of Americans, it ain’t broke -- why worry about an internet connection or the right software installed on your device if you can just pop a disc into your DVD/Blu-ray player.

That describes my attitude. Frankly, I just don't "get" this obsession with doing things differently. What is the point? It isn't difficult to play DVDs and BRDs so where is the advantage in some new fangled method of watching films?

 

[classicmovieguy]

I enjoy the "tangible" aspect of owning a film on DVD or Blu-ray. Admiring the box art, seeing the movies lined up on shelves. Sure it makes my bedroom look like a small Blockbusters franchise but that is what you have to deal with! Apart from the space-saving component I seriously doubt physical media will ever really leave us.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I still buy optical media, but at a lower volume than I once did during the glory pricing days of SD-DVD, when you could get discs for little more than rental price. Now it has to be something I will watch multiple times, and/or the price has to be very attractive. I am waiting until the price drops on a lot of new releases whose initial release price is too high.

Streaming has replaced renting for me for those titles that I may only watch once. Plus, it has replaced almost all TV on disc purchases for me. Rarely do I have the time to watch a TV series on disc more than once.

 

[Cinescott]

I think the whole trend of diversified methods of delivering content will lead to higher prices for physical media, but that's about it. There's no going back to the heyday of DVD given all the new distribution methods, but I have yet to see any cable, VOD, streaming, etc. that comes close to Blu-ray. Maybe years in the future, but certainly not now. Even then, I still think there'd be a profitable market for disc. If not, I suppose I'll make my own backup copies. Can't believe the public would regress in quality for a higher price. It doesn't make sense.

I don't really see the point in 4K for home users. Honestly, how much clearer can these films be? If people can't see the difference between DVD and Blu-ray due to blindness, how are they going to tell the difference with 4K and Blu-ray, even with an 80" television?

A few bad transfers do not a bad format make. Is the internet infrastructure really going to support millions of people streaming @ 30 Mbps?

 

[FoxyMulder]

A few bad transfers do not a bad format make. Is the internet infrastructure really going to support millions of people streaming @ 30 Mbps?

Yes it will but not right now and not in the next ten years, at least not in the next ten years within the UK, after that who knows, i am not against streaming but i do like to own the media i buy, i think in the future streaming will be great quality and as good as disc based systems but it's not good enough for me on a large screen just yet.

I think new 4K releases will be an opportunity for the studio's to archive their catalog content and save it from the ravages of time and i think it will mean that some of those blu ray releases which came from old outdated masters will finally be done right, i think projector owners will see a difference, small but it will be there, dependent on the film and how it was shot, television owners will not see a huge difference, depends on viewing distance too but i think projector owners will see more of a difference, i think it all depends on how good this new H.265 codec actually is.

Ten years ago i read comments from people saying they don't see the point of 1080p, DVD was good enough, see where i am going with this, i think 4K is a natural evolution and should be welcomed by home theater enthusiasts, it sucks to have to pay to upgrade but we do it all the time with many tech products, of course some films are stuck in 2K land, a number of films have more than 2K but less than 4K resolution and quite a few digitally shot films are 2K only, for example you won't get Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith in 4K, they're have to upscale it.

 

[Persianimmortal]

Optical discs might be like 8 track tapes when I was growing up. I saw some people using them, but they were on their way out.

Basically yes, in the future optical discs will be around, but will be extremely outdated - akin to having a VHS tape, Laserdisc or 1.44MB Floppy Disk. They still make those by the way, but who on earth uses them?

The Forbes article is just an opinion piece backed up with very little fact. There are two very important reasons why optical media will become outdated and will (eventually) die off, particularly for enthusiasts:

1. File Size: There is no way, as file formats get larger to store higher quality video, like 4K, that optical discs will be the storage medium of choice. Blu-ray maxes out at 50GB. A 4K transfer can easily top that just for the feature. Future file formats will undoubtedly be even larger. And compression can only achieve so much without losing quality.

2. Portability and ease of access: Instead of a giant shelf full of hundreds of movies in plastic cases, the contents can be more efficiently stored as a library of titles on a single drive. You can then view movies by selecting a title on your display, and having it instantly load up from this digital library, rather than finding the physical disc, inserting it, waiting for it to load up on the clunky optical drive. At some point your movie library will also be linked to, or stored entirely, in the cloud, so that you can access it from any of your devices or displays, anywhere in the world.

As an aside, there's a third reason why optical media and associated paraphernalia (cases, slipcovers, inserts etc.) can and should go the way of the dodo: a waste of resources. So much plastic and ink is wasted on this stuff, it's just wasteful as it doesn't add to the movie viewing experience.

Basically, DVDs and Blu-rays are simply a digital file delivery mechanism. The ultimate product is the digital file(s) encoded onto the disc. By switching to more direct delivery mechanisms, such as digital download, and storing those files collectively on a large drive, which will eventually hold hundreds of high definition movies in something the size of a credit card, it's hard to imagine people in the future longing for optical media, the same way few of us long for VHS or LD or 1.44MB floppy disks.

There are other drivers which will hasten physical media's demise. A lot of portable computing/media consumption devices, such as tablets and laptops, don't have optical drives anymore. Even PCs are steadily doing away with optical drives. There's a good technical reason for it: optical drives and discs offer poor storage capabilities (size) and slow data throughput (speed) compared to even the slowest hard drives, much less compared to modern SSDs.

I can understand that people are hesitant to face change, and yes, in some cases, change is unnecessary. But the wasteful, slow and somewhat limited optical disc, while still loved by many, is ultimately doomed. And likely not as far into the future as you'd think.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Not to mention that streaming off "the cloud" only works when you have access to reliable broadband internet. Broadband is nearly universal in densely populated urban and suburban areas, but there are vast sparsely populated rural stretches in a country as large as the United States. In the FCC's Eighth Broadband Progress Report, 19 million Americans didn't even have the option of broadband service and an additional 100 million Americans choose not to subscribe to a broadband service.That means that for over 37 percent of Americans, electronic sell-through (EST), streaming services and most video-on-demand services simply aren't a viable option. But if you have electricity, both DVD and Blu-Ray work just fine.

 

[Andrew Budgell]

For me it comes down to a storage issue. I would love to continue to increase my collection, but space is an issue. I would love it if I could have all my films stored on a cloud and accessible from anywhere.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

Storage is always an issue, but in streaming, bandwidth is a serious issue. With limited access to high speed internet fast enough to make streaming worthwhile, I'm sticking with BD at this point. The bandwidth issue is huge in Canada, where prices for access are ridiculous. The same is true of cellular coverage; in both cases, access is limited by the fact that independents have to fight with the big three to get access to bandwidth. In cellular, it's a case of bidding for frequencies not already controlled by Bell, Telus or Rogers. There are rumblings that Verizon wants to buy one of the smaller carriers to gain a presence in Canada, as does Thomsen. For high speed, the independents actually have to buy bandwidth from Rogers, Telus, Shaw or Bell, meaning they're limited by what those companies are prepared to sell them. It's kind of a fecking nightmare, unless you want to spend $200+ a month on high speed &/or wireless, something I cannot justify.

 

[Andrew Budgell]

Stephen, I'm in Canada, too (well, actually I'm in London, England for a year, but will be moving back next year). Good point about the bandwidth issue, something I had considered, but I didn't think it would be that exorbitant. Very frustrating...

 

[Cinescott]

I definitely acknowledge the convenience of having 1080p (or better) material on a HDD. I have several "favorites" backed up on a 1TB drive and like the redundancy. However, I still consider the physical copy to be the "go-to" gold standard. I don't like to rely on a flaky internet service for titles purchased by me, nor do I like relinquishing control over that content to anyone.

Maybe the way this is headed is more towards an all-digital "cloud" paradigm, but with optical media with much higher storage capacity. Better for space and the environment. That's been the way of physical media until now; why should that trend end? 100GB discs? 1TB? The current 50GB is rarely fully utilized. I frequently see 2+ hour features with little supplemental material clocking in at 25-30GB on a DL Blu-ray. Why is that? Couldn't they have upped the bitrate and used more of the empty space on the disc?

Not to beat an already flogged horse, but Blu-ray's potential still hasn't even begun to be tapped. What about SD material on BD? Enough with the "confusing the audience" argument. Blu-ray has been out for 6 years. People know what it is. I'd love to get a whole season of some past favorite shows shot in SD on a single disc. Have the BRDA design a sticker that says "SD Content" or something. It's not rocket science. Material designed to play at 1-2Mbps could have a lot of breathing room on a single layer BD.

To get back on-target, there's so much yet to see from Blu-ray that I'd hate to see it die as a standard anytime soon. Optical drives can be made faster, data transfer rates can improve, but mostly, studios can add more consumer-friendly features to discs that are available right now: More multiple audio options (commentaries), seamless branching for alternate versions, better quality transfers, etc. These are the things Blu-ray can do for us right now (at relatively low cost) that streaming can't (at least not yet), so why not cash in on the advantages that already exist?

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I would love optical discs to continue to be the norm.

I haven't paid much attention to 4K. I am going to be
seeing it for the first time this September (outside of seeing
a projected demo a few years ago).

File Size: There is no way, as file formats get larger to store higher quality video, like 4K, that optical discs will be the storage medium of choice. Blu-ray maxes out at 50GB. A 4K transfer can easily top that just for the feature. Future file formats will undoubtedly be even larger. And compression can only achieve so much without losing quality.

I myself am wondering just what is being discussed (if at
all) about how 4K transfers are going to be delivered into
the home. Are we going back to laserdisc sized optical discs
in order to accommodate the bandwidth? I would think not.
Will most 4K features have to be pressed on two discs in
order to accommodate what will be needed for an uncompressed
4K feature?

 

[FoxyMulder]

I would love optical discs to continue to be the norm.

I haven't paid much attention to 4K. I am going to be
seeing it for the first time this September (outside of seeing
a projected demo a few years ago).

I myself am wondering just what is being discussed (if at
all) about how 4K transfers are going to be delivered into
the home. Are we going back to laserdisc sized optical discs
in order to accommodate the bandwidth? I would think not.
Will most 4K features have to be pressed on two discs in
order to accommodate what will be needed for an uncompressed
4K feature?

They have developed a new codec, it's H.265, far more efficient, also 4K doesn't need as high bitrates due to the pixel density, i believe it would be possible to fit 4K onto a BD-50 but not for long films which would require two discs, the H.265 codec could also be great for streaming, maybe on services like YouTube, i can imagine YouTube 1080p videos which don't have artifacts, wishful thinking perhaps.

 

[jimmyjet]

i think storage, is by far, the biggest drawback to our current system.

i wish the movies were currently sold in just tyvek sleeves. that would cut our storage to 10% of what we have today.

yes, i know i can get rid of the plastic cases.

but that also pretty much eliminates most avenues of being able to sell it sometime in the future, when i may want to upgrade to something better.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

Also keep in mind that prototypes of 4-and 8-layer BDs have been tested, increasing storage up to 200GB. Granted, these discs will probably require new players, or some sort of firmware update to enable focusing of the laser on the newer layers; there are also the other optical formats that are viable, like HVD, with capacities of up to 1TB. Given the combination of new codecs and possibilities with optical storage, I don't believe we'll see optical discs dying anytime soon, unless memory manufacturers find a way to make solid-state the wave of the future for physical media, which they very well could do.

 

[jimmyjet]

maybe i am missing something ? but what benefit does a terrabyte of storage give us for an optical disc ?

i can see that an individual movie could have an increased resolution, and still be contained on 1 disc.

 

[FoxyMulder]

maybe i am missing something ? but what benefit does a terrabyte of storage give us for an optical disc ?

Less compression of the main feature film, perhaps fit extra content in HD on the same disc as the main feature, boxets of TV programmes all on one disc.

 

[jimmyjet]

yea, tv programs would be good. since that is multiple discs per purchase.

perhaps combinations from studios - like the 50 disc warner brothers that i just bought ?