Physical Media might not be dead, but Physical Media in Retail Stores are accelerating the death (2 Viewers)

[Peter Apruzzese]

I’d pay good money to see a W.C. Fields short about that happening. Quick, to the time machine!

 

[BobO'Link]

For the majority of the history of cars, they didn't have CD players. One can only imagine trying to play an Edison Victrola inside a moving Ford Model T.

In 1956 Chrysler offered one as an option:

1960 Dodge Polara with RCA record player:

A 1960s era slot loading car record player - aftermarket. Plays 45s.

Chrysler even tried a trunk mounted changer in the early 60s.

And Peter beat me to posting that Laurel and Hardy bit...

 

[TJPC]

I read about these. Weren’t the tone arms so heavy that they were very hard on the records.

 

[David_B_K]

This is actually one of the many reasons I'm keeping my 10+ year old car - the built-in CD player. I know newer cars don't have these anymore. And, I haven't gone digital yet re: music.

My truck is even older than that. I put an aftermarket Kenwood stereo in it so I could pick up the local classical channel which now only broadcasts in digital HD. The Kenwood plays CDs but I far prefer using thumbdrives. Mine will take two thumb drives. The "rear" one is actually in my glove box. That one has all of Sinatra's output from Capitol on it. I use the "front" one to change out thumb drives with other stuff. My radio has up/down buttons with which I select the album (folder) I want. Because the Sinatra drive is always loaded, I am very familiar with the order of all the albums (I numbered them when ripping the albums onto the drive) and I can easily access any Sinatra song on that drive. I also have one with all the Beatles albums and singles. I carry extra thumb drives with classical and other artists. I much prefer this method to changing out CDs.

 

[MatthewA]

That must be partly why they invented cassette tapes and 8-tracks in the first place: they were easier to play in cars.

 

[BobO'Link]

The "8 Track" player began life in 1953 as a broadcast system to easily play commercials. It was called "Fidelipak":

The hole in the bottom left is where the pinch roller flips up from the player and presses the tape against a capstan to pull it across the heads. The tape pulls from the inside and winds back on the outside during its travels. Those were "single track" stereo or mono and came in several lengths for different commercial/spot lengths.

In 1962 a guy named Earl "Madman" Muntz adapted that system for a car player. It was 4 track stereo and used the same transport as the Fidelipak carts. He sold the units mostly in California and Florida.

The Stereo 8 Track cartridge system was developed by the Lear Jet corporation in 1963. They moved the pinch roller inside the cartridge, reducing player cost and complexity, removed some tensioning and other items, narrowed the recording/playback track so there'd be 8 tracks and thus doubled the recording time from 40 to 80 minutes.

In 1965 Ford began offering 8 Track players as a built-in option.

Muntz tried to keep his 4 track system going but by 1970 saw the writing on the wall and abandoned it.

Phillips introduced the compact cassette in 1962, mainly as a playback device for dictation machines. Improvements in fidelity and the introduction of Dolby audio and chromium tape by Ampex in 1971, coupled with their Model 201 home deck was the tipping point and the format began to be used by more home recordists and in cars.

I installed my first cassette deck in my car that same year and never looked back - all my friends had 8-track. I had fewer issues and far more flexibility (I made my own tapes for the car - I never purchased pre-recorded tapes as I could make better sounding ones myself). It was a Craig auto-reverse deck with a "quick mount" so I could remove it when I parked the car. The deck ran through a Craig "Powerplay Power Booster" (25watt output). One of the speaker pairs was 8" Jenson's mounted in the back deck. It was loud...

 

[Mike Frezon]

The "8 Track" player began life in 1953 as a broadcast system to easily play commercials. It was called "Fidelipak":

The hole in the bottom left is where the pinch roller flips up from the player and presses the tape against a capstan to pull it across the heads. The tape pulls from the inside and winds back on the outside during its travels. Those were "single track" stereo or mono and came in several lengths for different commercial/spot lengths.

If I only had a nickel for every set of pads I replaced on various carts across my early radio career...

 

[John*Wells]

Isn't what we watch on Streaming services actually just the Services using the DVD or Blu Ray and thereby charging us for the convenience of not having to get up and walk over the our players and Put in whatever we want to watch?

 

[Peter Apruzzese]

Isn't what we watch on Streaming services actually just the Services using the DVD or Blu Ray and thereby charging us for the convenience of not having to get up and walk over the our players and Put in whatever we want to watch?

No, they don't use DVD/Blu-ray for streaming.

 

[jcroy]

Isn't what we watch on Streaming services actually just the Services using the DVD or Blu Ray and thereby charging us for the convenience of not having to get up and walk over the our players and Put in whatever we want to watch?

Functionally in a figurative sense, more or less yes.

In a literal sense, no.

No, they don't use DVD/Blu-ray for streaming.

True in the literal sense.

 

[The Drifter]

No, they don't use DVD/Blu-ray for streaming.

Correct. This is especially true for brand-new TV shows that haven't even hit DVD/Blu yet - and may never be put on physical media.

 

[MatthewA]

What do they stream them from if not discs? Hard drives?

 

[jcroy]

What do they stream them from if not discs? Hard drives?

Probably similar to how search engine data is stored. Most likely the streaming data which is constantly being accessed is stored in giant ram memory arrays.

Storing constantly accessed data on hard drives would shorten the drive's lifetime to less than a week (or days). This was known very well from the early days of internet search engines.

 

[TJPC]

If I only had a nickel for every set of pads I replaced on various carts across my early radio career...

I had a huge collection of audio cassettes that I converted to CD. They were never mistreated and always in air conditioning. About 1/3 were unplayable at first and the tape had to be broken out of the plastic cases and put into another screw together case to play. The tape was fine, but all original pads etc. had deteriorated. BASF was especially bad, with the pads being a slimy mess.

 

[DaveF]

Isn't what we watch on Streaming services actually just the Services using the DVD or Blu Ray and thereby charging us for the convenience of not having to get up and walk over the our players and Put in whatever we want to watch?

What do they stream them from if not discs? Hard drives?

Lots and lots of hard drives and lots of lots of flash memory using custom hardware and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Here's some stuff I found with a little searching.

This article from 2014 is outdated but is probably still correct enough:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2489741/how-netflix-streams-movies-to-your-tv.html

Netflix also designs its own storage hardware, custom built for streaming video. It uses two types of server, one based on hard disk drives and the other on flash drives, and both are optimized for high-density and low-power use.

Most widely used are the hard drive systems. They cram 36 3.5-inch drives into a server about 6 inches high (four rack units) and 2 feet deep. The servers each store 100TB of data and stream between 10,000 and 20,000 movies simultaneously, Fullagar said. There are about 1,000 of the storage systems total in its network, he said.

Here's a really technical talk for networking pros, if you want to get super nerdy.



(I'm not a network engineer, but I have friends who are.)

 

[DaveF]

Most people just don't care. Their phone is "good enough." The way the TV comes out of the box set up is "good enough." They really don't care about quality, at least not the way you and I would define it, whether or not the stream/media supports more than what they're seeing.

FWIW: That "good enough" phone screen is higher resolution and higher quality with better contrast than most HDTV were a decade ago. The new OLED phones are probably better contrast and color accuracy, if not true 4K, than most TVs for sale in 2020. And the audio from headphones is probably better than most people get from their TV speakers.

 

[BobO'Link]

FWIW: That "good enough" phone screen is higher resolution and higher quality with better contrast than most HDTV were a decade ago. The new OLED phones are probably better contrast and color accuracy, if not true 4K, than most TVs for sale in 2020. And the audio from headphones is probably better than most people get from their TV speakers.

And the "apparent" size of that tiny phone screen may actually be larger than the TV in the living room/den.

Hold your phone at the distance you would normally use it to view a video. Keep the distance from your eyes consistent as you tilt up to align it with your TV. Unless you have a larger than normal TV screen it's likely that phone screen will *look* larger than your TV screen when done that way.

I'm not much of a fan of watching streaming video on my laptop but the apparent screen size is much larger than that of my TV when this experiment is done. Even my 7" Fire tablet looks larger.

 

[mark27b]

In Defense of the Disc: DVD, Blu-ray Disc Collectors Speak Out - February 24, 2020

https://www.mediaplaynews.com/in-defense-of-the-disc/

 

[bmasters9]

In Defense of the Disc: DVD, Blu-ray Disc Collectors Speak Out - February 24, 2020

https://www.mediaplaynews.com/in-defense-of-the-disc/

One commenter on there had similar views to mine about films as I have to television, in that he says that choice is why he prefers discs, and that his older tastes are not reflected on Netflix that well.

 

[John*Wells]

I skimmed the Article. My rationale for Collecting Physical discs remains. what happens if your ISP goes down for an extended period? Or suppose ISP start charging more for streaming usage? With Net Neutrality no longer in place, there is nothing to stop this from happening