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

[benbess]

I love blu-rays. But I also really enjoy Netflix and amzn streaming.
Here's an example of a show my family discovered on streaming that I probably don't want to own, but we are enjoying a lot from Netflix: Murdoch Mysteries. It's a quality Canadian mystery series. Funny. CSI steampunk. A tiny bit of romance. Not too gory. Available on DVD only at c. $30 or so a season. But available on Netflix streaming at 720 it looks better than DVD and helps make our $8 fee a month well worth while.
I don't have the space or budget to own everything on blu-ray. And so streaming helps fill the gap for daily viewing.
We killed our cable a year ago.

 

[Patrick Donahue]

My problem with the physical media/streaming debate is it basically assumes that the future will be one over the other, which I don't think will happen.
Look at Coke - it can be purchased in 2 liters, 1 liter, personal bottles, 24 packs, 12 packs, 6 packs, snack size cans, at fountains, etc, etc. Nothing replaced anything, there are just more options to get a sip of Coke.
I feel the same will be true with movies. Will blu-ray continue to be a mass product found at a large section of Target 20 years from now? Probably not, but as long as there continues to be a niche for them, they will still be made available by the studios. I see it taking the shape of the market that currently exists for film soundtracks. They are released in limited quantities of 3,000-5,000 by companies independent of the studios through speciality outlets and there is a healthy market for them (and don't fret over the 3,000 number - that has more to do with musicians unions dictating that). We see that happening now with Twilight Time.
And you have to remember that the market can be turned around by the studios in an instant. If they decided their movies would only be made available through streaming after a year of being made available at Target for $20 a piece, you can bet the future of the physical market would be just fine. If anything, I see streaming as more of a threat to cable TV.
I am writing this on my laptop as I just finished watching Friday the 13th on Netflix, as a free SD viewing is all I need of that movie. As soon as I hit submit on the reply I will pop in the blu-ray of "Singin in the Rain" which I was more than happy to pay $13.86 for to watch it in 1080p with all the extras.
There is no fretting the physical media/streaming debate from these quarters.

 

[DaveF]

Originally Posted by Patrick Donahue /t/322642/blu-ray-state-of-the-union-are-you-switching-to-streaming-media/60#post_3955509
My problem with the physical media/streaming debate is it basically assumes that the future will be one over the other, which I don't think will happen.
.

Doesn't the decline of CD sales and increase of downloads suggest the future is digital data distributed by download rather than by individual physical media?

It might be a long time to wholly disappear, but I'd guess it will become ever more relegated to the smaller market of enthusiasts.

 

[FrancisP]

The problem is that a lot of internet providors are moving to tiered prices on downloading. That could put a crimp or a ceiling on how much data people can download and that means movies.

 

[Towergrove]

This is just being reported this evening in the media.
Consumer Spending on Home Entertainment Up in First Half of 2012

After steadily declining for the past five years, home entertainment sales have broken their downward trajectory, thanks in part to a 13.3% lift in Blu-ray Disc purchases.

More here:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/home-entertainment-blue-ray-disc-dvd-vod-sales-digital-entertainment-group-355694

 

[adklz]

I'm actually about to cancel my Netflix streaming account because my Verizon dsl has become so unreliable that I'll be lucky if my connection holds until I finish typing this comment. I prefer physical media, but streaming, when it works, is fine for those titles where I'm not too concerned about picture and sound quality. Even if you didn't care about sound and image, without access to reliable, high speed internet connections streaming can't replace physical discs. I live in North Quincy, which borders Boston MA. It's a pretty central location and yet my dsl has become virtually worthless and Verizon either can't or won't do anything about it. If I can't get even minimally acceptable download and streaming speeds in a major metropolitan area what do people do who live out in the middle of nowhere?

 

[Ejanss]

I don't have the space or budget to own everything on blu-ray. And so streaming helps fill the gap for daily viewing.
We killed our cable a year ago.

I'd have ALREADY killed my cable if it wasn't that Comcast forces it on you for their Internet deals, but I'm with you in sentiment: Streaming killed the Cable Network (which was near death anyway), and Instant Netflix has now become my "regular" TV....Not movies, just TV.
I don't watch current TV shows like "Modern Family" or "Desperate Housewives" nowadays--because, well, I'm straight --and don't shell out to Hulu for it...But ever since DVD killed off the Classic Rerun, there's been no local-station opportunity to watch the classics, like Dick Van Dyke Show or Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and I'm not about to shell out boxset prices for a series I haven't seen all the way through.
Netflix has now not only let me replace my cable, it's let me catch up on my classic reruns--Sunday night for Columbo, Monday night for MIssion:Impossible, Saturday night for Mythbusters...If I rented a disk, I'd have to sit and watch the whole thing before returning, but dialing up one episode a week lets me watch them as originally intended.
TV didn't "replace" the movies, and streaming Netflix isn't going to "replace" Blu-rays, but they each seem to have settled into their niches.

 

[Persianimmortal]

This is just being reported this evening in the media.
Consumer Spending on Home Entertainment Up in First Half of 2012
More here:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/home-entertainment-blue-ray-disc-dvd-vod-sales-digital-entertainment-group-355694

As always, these things are open to interpretation. The article notes a 1.4% rise in actual spending, which was driven by:

a five-fold increase in subscription streaming, a 13.3% lift in Blu-ray Disc purchases and healthy gains in both VOD and electronic sellthrough

The "13.3% lift in Blu-ray purchases" doesn't necessarily translate to any major lift in spending on BDs, as BDs are now falling in price and frequently heavily discounted. In other words its unclear how much the rise in BD sales actually contributed to a rise in overall spending. And that's not even taking into account profit vs revenue.
The article notes further:

The biggest gains came in subscription streaming, largely a function of Netflix’s move away from physical discs. Subscription streaming more than quintupled to an estimated $548.6 million in the first half of 2012 from $85 million in the first six months of 2012.

So again, the picture seems to be that streaming and digital-only sales are the driving force behind growth in consumer spending in this area.

Doesn't the decline of CD sales and increase of downloads suggest the future is digital data distributed by download rather than by individual physical media?
It might be a long time to wholly disappear, but I'd guess it will become ever more relegated to the smaller market of enthusiasts.

Correct, CDs are a good example. It's not strictly an either/or scenario in the short term, as both can and do exist side-by-side. But the physical media gets relegated to a niche, and as we have seen with BD, this means that catalog releases for example can be stifled. Of course we can still get many catalog releases from boutique labels like Twilight Time and Olive, but Nick Redman of Twilight Time himself is quoted as saying:

I think that home video, the physical media, is going to be like the soundtrack business became in the 90s, which is when the major labels got out of soundtracks, and the future of releases depended on niche labels to carry the entire weight of that small world. And I think that DVD and Blu-ray particularly is going to devolve to a third party world while the studios concentrate much more on the digital future: downloading and streaming and beaming it into your house directly. Physical media is coming to an end, which is why we called the label Twilight Time. I mean that was the joke: it’s Twilight Time. The sun is setting on the world of physical media. This is what it’s about.

 

[Kevin Collins]

As a businesswoman my IT director came to me the other day talking about the cloud. I had many concerns and I asked him:



1. If we go to a cloud system where is our data being stored? Can you show me where on a map? Which country? Is it even in a country that has the same values in privacy as the US?



2. Who will be maintaining the servers storing our important data. Do you have the person (s) names? What is their background (background checks)? Do they meet my standards and would I

have hired this person?



Our business was built on the foundation of our data. I would find it foolish to turn over the keys to that foundation to someone I don't know and have no Idea where they are located and rely on the "cloud" company to provide the proper screening and supervision of their employees and to maintain 100% privacy. It a risk that I and many business owners will not take.

Since I work on the Azure platform at Microsoft, I can fully understand yours and many others concerns about security of data in the cloud. It's a very valid case that hasn't been fully addressed by any cloud provider, particularly the one about where is the data stored and can the government of the country of where the data of that data centers data is stored could be breached.

However, on all major cloud players you can choose what country your data center resides, but that doesn't mean you would have the most efficiency for serving your clients.

Something that is being considered is a trust service where the cloud provider doesn't have the key for the encryption, thus the cloud provider couldn't decrypt the data for the government.

However, security wasn't my point regarding the reply to concerns about the cloud "going down". Building a robust cloud solution is no different then building a on-prem solution / data center that spans multiple countries and locations to provide fail-over. It's just that in those instances, it happens to be significantly cheaper to do it in the cloud than doing multiple data centers yourself. Netflix is a prime example of that as they largely abandoned their own data centers to move to AWS. Netflix didn't go down when AWS went down (both times) in VA. While other startups did go down when AWS VA went down, Netflix didn't, becuase they were geo-located across AWS multiple cloud data centers.

 

[Kevin Collins]

Its not dreaming at all. Its stuff like this that I see in the media that gives me pause, especially when it comes to Microsoft:

Talk is cheap. Microsoft would love to see everything move to streaming media. What I am saying is that all the efforts haven't resulted in much traction in regards to the competition. I worked in the "XBox division" for six years. All I am saying is that Microsoft is not a market mover in digital distribution compared to other digital distribution platforms. Microsoft has the XBox game console platform, which can only stream media if you have an XBox Live subscription. Last year the press reported that there were >35M subscriptions. Now what is not reported is how many Gold vs Silver subscriptions there are. Gold subscriptions is where the services to allow for things like Netflix are enabled. I can assure you that 100% of the 35M are paying for Gold subscriptions.

Apple sells over about 1M iPhones every two days. Android sells >900K devices a day. They are all connected out of the gate. Who is the market mover for digital distribution? Given that Apple and Android sell more than entire XBox Live installed base far less than a month, I think you understand where I am coming from on what Microsoft says in regards to Blu-ray and the impact it has on digital media.

So, if there should be pause, it shouldn't be because of what Microsoft ways, it should be from what Google, Apple, Hulu and Netflix say...

 

[Persianimmortal]

So, if there should be pause, it shouldn't be because of what Microsoft ways, it should be from what Google, Apple, Hulu and Netflix say...

To be fair, Kevin is correct that Microsoft is by no means the driving force moving us towards digital distribution. However Microsoft has definitely put its weight behind the movement by choosing to incorporate a cloud-based "Microsoft Account" login/synch system in the upcoming Windows 8. And we all know that the market penetration of Windows is massive. Once desktop PC users and small enterprises become accustomed to, indeed reliant on, cloud-based storage and app access for their everyday needs, the impact will be tremendous.
Already in PC gaming the concept of buying a retail boxed version in a store but coming home to find that your game can only be used when combined with an online account like Steam or Origin is commonplace (similar to the UltraViolet concept). The physical retail market for PC gaming is drying up as a result, as young people are now thoroughly used to buying only digital copies.
I accept that digital providers, especially large companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google, have every incentive in the world to make their systems secure, but the fact is that nothing is unhackable. Whether using complex loopholes or something as simple as phishing the login details from an unsuspecting account owner, it's impossible now to say that anything that is stored online is truly secure. I'm certainly not trying to scaremonger here, but the truth is that you can be locked out of your own digital library of movies, or find your streaming access cut off at any time. And recovery of your account could take hours or even days based on the levels of proof required. That's not even taking account the fact that service outages - despite all the redundancies in the world - still seem to occur, even for the biggest providers (Twitter had a recent outage, although some would say this was a good thing!).
To me the humble blu-ray disc simply makes more sense, in that it reduces the number of variables that can go wrong when I want to sit down and watch a movie.

 

[Ejanss]

My problem with the physical media/streaming debate is it basically assumes that the future will be one over the other, which I don't think will happen.
Look at Coke - it can be purchased in 2 liters, 1 liter, personal bottles, 24 packs, 12 packs, 6 packs, snack size cans, at fountains, etc, etc. Nothing replaced anything, there are just more options to get a sip of Coke. I feel the same will be true with movies.

I remember being in a focus-group chat about how I liked/used Ultraviolet (I answered truthfully that I didn't use it much, since I didn't own a single mobile device, I never watched "on-the-go" movies except on airplane trips where they won't let you use cellphones, but you can use a complete iPod file, and my only WIreless device that got Ultraviolet via Vudu was the PS3 in my living room that also happened to play hard 3D Blu-rays from the shelf that was next to it.)
The interviewer was clearly hired by Wal-Mart to test the waters on their new extra-charge disk-to-cloud service for Vudu, and asked, via chat, "But why would you want to keep the disks, if you already had a cloud copy?" I'm hoping that was just one of the questions on their clipboard, but the way it was worded, I kept hearing it as some sort of naively bewildered "But why would you WANT to?.....This is NEWER!"
Again, it's a studio fascination--pumped up by the eternal dream of keeping control over their movies, and being paid more than once to watch them--which means that it's being supported by a lot of studios executives struck with the Newness Of It All, without having had the actual chance to use it in practice. They don't really know specifically how it works, or why it should have appeal, but dang, it's New.
Marketers have an almost superstitious fear of what regular folks pay attention to and buy, and don't seem to understand why they don't buy something. This causes them to leap onto something they see people on the street consider "trendy", and say to them things like, "You like cellphones, don't you?....Will you like us more if we give you something to do on your cellphone?"
(Similarly, they don't know how or why CD's were out-popularized by single-song iPod MP3's, so, applying one lesson of the industry with a wide brush...gasp...what if it happened to movies? Since they can't personally answer that question from their own experience, they live in superstitious fear of it, and hope to embrace and ingratiate themselves to whatever unnamable terror is causing it.)

I am writing this on my laptop as I just finished watching Friday the 13th on Netflix, as a free SD viewing is all I need of that movie. As soon as I hit submit on the reply I will pop in the blu-ray of "Singin in the Rain" which I was more than happy to pay $13.86 for to watch it in 1080p with all the extras.
There is no fretting the physical media/streaming debate from these quarters.

I remember when they used to show movies on TV. This was back when local stations didn't have syndication and all-night news to take away their local individuality, and make all their programming for them--In those days, you could sit down, pick up a TV Guide, and discover that some old Humphrey Bogart movie you might've heard about but hadn't seen yet happened to be playing on the Channel 7 Midnite Movie Loft, so you could VCR it for the next night or stay up with popcorn (and commercial breaks for bathroom and another can of Coke), totally unexpected with no obligation. Sometimes, you just ran into a movie at complete random that ended up changing your life, and you spent the next few years of your life trying to find out the title of it.
That's how I am with Instant Netflix--I don't know half the movies on the list, and those that do, I've always been sort of curious about; I'll sit down and watch half of one, a third of another, and string them out over several nights. It's not like watching Gone With the Wind on 4K Blu-ray, it's the equivalent of the midnight local-station movie you didn't know was on until you read TV Guide. There's a place for those, too, but it's not Top Of the Heap, and Replacing All That Came Before It.

 

[Towergrove]

As always, these things are open to interpretation. The article notes a 1.4% rise in actual spending, which was driven by:
The "13.3% lift in Blu-ray purchases" doesn't necessarily translate to any major lift in spending on BDs, as BDs are now falling in price and frequently heavily discounted. In other words its unclear how much the rise in BD sales actually contributed to a rise in overall spending. And that's not even taking into account profit vs revenue.
The article notes further:
So again, the picture seems to be that streaming and digital-only sales are the driving force behind growth in consumer spending in this area.
Correct, CDs are a good example. It's not strictly an either/or scenario in the short term, as both can and do exist side-by-side. But the physical media gets relegated to a niche, and as we have seen with BD, this means that catalog releases for example can be stifled. Of course we can still get many catalog releases from boutique labels like Twilight Time and Olive, but Nick Redman of Twilight Time himself is quoted as saying:

Yes things can be open to interpretation and several articles have spun this story in different directions since it was released but I think it should be pointed out that according to the article physical media is not being hit with double digit declines anymore we are at a -3% decline and could possibly be up by the end of the year as we have the important 3rd and 4th qtrs still. Also it points out that a majority of home video spending is still with physical media which is hardly a niche.

 

[Jason Charlton]

Wow - this thread grew fast!

Not sure I can add anything that hasn't already been said. I have not and do not plan to start streaming any media. Quality of presentation is too important to me for streaming to be a viable option.

Yes, my Blu-Ray buying habits have slowed in recent years - but this is partially due to the economic downturn, partially due to the growing use of Netflix and Redbox to cheaply rent physical media with a decent level of convenience, and partially due to the relatively crappy quality of most recent movies (for me, I seem to find somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 movies a year that are actually WORTH watching - and I maybe make the effort to pick up 1 or 2 of them).

I'm not worried about the death of physical media - it's certainly not "right around the corner", and it very well might be "a ways off".

 

[Joe Bernardi]

I stream from Netflix and a few other providers only when I am watching on a 32" HDTV and doing my daily 60 minutes on my exercise bike.
Otherwise, it's Blu-Ray and DVD. I didn't start buying Blu-rays for for quite a while. The $30 price of most Blu-rays put me off. But now I'm buying only Blu-rays, and replacing many of my DVDs with Blu-rays, which I watch either on my 67" DLP or 120" fixed flat screen with my 1080p projector.
I don't have the internet speed to stream HD movies without their being downconverted.
Someone said that CDs are being phased out by downloads, but an entire CD is less than 100MB. How many will download large HD movies?
I'm sticking with Blu-ray until they start selling HD movies on SD discs or something similar. Of course, in big box stores, they'll be sold in packaging the sized of DVDs to cut down on theft.

 

[Mark-W]

Two words: bonus content
Until streaming is completely reliable,
the picture quality consistently matches that of 1080p,
and we have the ability, on the fly, to change from the original theatrical audio, the commentary track(s), or to the isolated score,
and do things like select the original cut or the director's cut,
then I am sticking with Blu-ray.
I am trying to imagine films like Citizen Kane or Blade Runner without having any of their bonus material readily available and I cringe at the thought.

 

[Sam Posten]

I use all of the above.
DVD
Bluray
Cable DVR and On Demand
Netflix Streaming
Amazon Streaming
iTunes downloads
I draw the line at Ultraviolet. I won't say I will NEVER be a UV user but I refuse to use their broke ass multiple login BS system with all its other warts.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

I can't use UV because it's not available in Canada, and I doubt I would anyway. I tried Netflix, but was frustrated by the quality and the lag times. I use Sony's Crackle service occasionally, but the inconsistency between titles for ad policies is frustrating. I have contemplated renting on my XBox, but have yet to pull the trigger. I recently upgraded my DSL, but until the content providers and internet services can come up with a solution (and yes, they will have to work together) that doesn't rely on data caps, I'm going to stick with BD.

 

[Dave H]

No interest in streaming/downloading especially since I sit fairly close to a 65" plasma. I need optimal quality.
In additon, the price of Blu-ray movies has dropped to almost ridiculous prices. I cannot tell you how many good titles I've picked up at $5-10 over the last year or so.

 

[Richard V]

I occaisionally use Netflix streaming, but find the quality not up to snuff for my standards. I will ALWAYS prefer Bluray, DVD physical media to streaming. Yes physical media takes up space, but it is reliable, of great quality, and ready to watch when I want. IMHO too many people are ready to accept less than stellar quality when watching their home entertainment, well I'm not, if there is a better quality sample, then I will take it EVERY time over something "convenient". To borrow a phrase from others, "They can have my Blurays when they pry them from my cold dead hands".