UHD What is holding back UHD and what can be done to fix it? (1 Viewer)

[John Dirk]

By the way, I love Forrest Gump, but I refuse to pay almost $26 dollars for it on 4K/UHD disc. The 2017 version of Robert Crawford might have, but not the 2018 version, who has sworn to be more discipline in my disc purchasing. So far this year, I'm doing well in that regard.

I generally agree but might make an exception for that particular title.

 

[Angelo Colombus]

Bought my first 4K player two weeks ago and played Planet Earth II & Bridge on the River Kwai and loved the picture quality. I can even see a improvement in playing blu-rays too so I am happy I went 4K. Will be selective in buying UHD since I have a lot of blu-rays, dvd's, and my laserdisc collection and running out of shelf space.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

If the studios wanted people to upgrade, they'd discontinue the legacy formats. DVD should have been retired long ago (or at least as a stand-alone format). As long as single DVD releases are still available, and are considerably cheaper than blu and 4K, most are not inclined to upgrade.

I'm not sure I completely agree that they should have discontinued them. What I think should have happened was that when Blu-ray was introduced, it should have been priced the same as DVD, and they should have folded the DVD into the BD - just one SKU per title. I think they would have taken a short term hit on not being able to maximize profits on the brand new shiny kind of disc, but I think ultimately it would have encouraged people to slowly upgrade their equipment as circumstances allowed, and they would have been rewarded with already owning discs that would play in the new format. The combo packs with BD+DVD have been nice, but they cost enough extra compared to DVDs that I don't think the average consumer was enticed to spend the extra money on the chance that they might upgrade. If a BD+DVD pack had been the only physical media option, and was priced the same as just a DVD used to be, the transition could have been handled better.

TBH, I've grown lazy in my online forum reading as I lose interest in long posts.

Fair enough! I wish I was better at brevity, to be honest. Was just trying to get it all into one post so I didn't have to keep adding to it, but the length does get away from me at times. But I don't think I said anything that you didn't already know - you understand the technology and the marketplace as well, if not better, than I do.

I would love to see this but I am doubtful. It won't be the network [bandwidth] that prevents it but I just don't think the studios will ever allow it. They already take draconian steps to prevent us from making a legitimate copy of the physical media we've already purchased.

I disagree - but I also don't think they'll make an announcement one day that the quality of streaming is improving, I think it'll just happen incrementally over time. Companies like Apple, which have invested in both the delivery systems (iTunes) and the physical hardware (Apple TV) will push for it.

At this point, studios know that a brand new disc and a brand new stream will be pirated the very first day that it's released, without any loss of quality. That's already happening today and has been the case for years. The trick, I think, is to make paying for a movie more convenient than pirating it. I think most customers will be happier spending $4 a rental on something that just works instantly at the touch of a button, rather than having to keep up with the latest illegal downloading tricks.

I think the big battle that we'll see intensifying in the coming years won't be about paying more for this format over that format, but between paying for something vs not paying at all.

 

[Robert Crawford]

Josh,

It's on me as I moderate the forum, I have to read every post so I have develop some shortcuts in doing so.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

By the way, I love Forrest Gump, but I refuse to pay almost $26 dollars for it on 4K/UHD disc. The 2017 version of Robert Crawford might have, but not the 2018 version, who has sworn to be more discipline in my disc purchasing. So far this year, I'm doing well in that regard.

As many here know, I am of a similar mind. After watching the pattern of home video releases for the past few years, prices on releases almost always drop dramatically months (or sometimes weeks) after initial release. I see no reason to buy something at a higher price when a little patience can result in a significant savings.

If prices do not come down to my price point on a release (I am looking at you Disney and Warner) these days I am more inclined to just rent the film via streaming if it's a first time viewing. I am retired now and have a lot of other things competing with my discretionary spending, so I am more cautious on buying discs than when I was still working.

 

[John Dirk]

I think the big battle that we'll see intensifying in the coming years won't be about paying more for this format over that format, but between paying for something vs not paying at all.

This is one of those cases where I would absolutely love to be wrong.

 

[Malcolm R]

I'm not sure I completely agree that they should have discontinued them. What I think should have happened was that when Blu-ray was introduced, it should have been priced the same as DVD, and they should have folded the DVD into the BD - just one SKU per title. I think they would have taken a short term hit on not being able to maximize profits on the brand new shiny kind of disc, but I think ultimately it would have encouraged people to slowly upgrade their equipment as circumstances allowed, and they would have been rewarded with already owning discs that would play in the new format. The combo packs with BD+DVD have been nice, but they cost enough extra compared to DVDs that I don't think the average consumer was enticed to spend the extra money on the chance that they might upgrade. If a BD+DVD pack had been the only physical media option, and was priced the same as just a DVD used to be, the transition could have been handled better.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I was getting at. Their mistake was continuing to have a separate DVD option, at a lower cost, instead of just offering the combo pack. They continue to do this, with the DVD-only release frequently $5-10 cheaper than the blu combo pack and $15-20 less than 4K. For most people, they're perfectly happy with DVD quality. So why would they ever spend the additional money on a combo pack when they can continue to purchase the DVD-only version for less money?

And the studio still seems to insist that blu requires a premium price with the recent release of Black Panther at Walmart which was available in Blu-only or DVD-only packages (no combo pack), but the Blu was again at a higher price. IMO, they should have both been equal. They are doing the same thing as theaters with ever higher prices everytime there's some improved technology or presentation. Improvements should be a natural result of technological advancement and research, not always an opportunity for a larger money grab.

 

[Robert Crawford]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I was getting at. Their mistake was continuing to have a separate DVD option, at a lower cost, instead of just offering the combo pack. They continue to do this, with the DVD-only release frequently $5-10 cheaper than the combo pack. For most people, they're perfectly happy with DVD quality. So why would they ever spend the additional money on a combo pack when they can continue to purchase the DVD-only version for less money?

Yeah, that was a mistake, but people would have screamed bloody murder.

 

[Mark-P]

I think the mass audience is also looking for a different experience than what UHD can provide. If you're a home theater junkie, there are incremental improvements from BD to UHD that make the decision to upgrade a no-brainer.

But if you're the average consumer, especially if you're watching on a television that's under 65" and has never been calibrated, what you're getting right now with HD broadcasts and streaming is already better than you could have conceived of ten or twenty years ago.

The biggest leap for most people was the jump from VHS to DVD. Besides the improvement in picture quality, for the first time, DVD allowed a mass audience the ability to watch a film without having to rewind it, in a format where the picture quality wouldn't degrade or get worn out after multiple viewings. A DVD looks just as good on its 100th time in the player as it did the first. DVDs were also entirely sell-through, and Netflix-by-mail was also super convenient. This allowed most consumers the opportunity to buy movies cheaper and easier than it used to be to rent VHS tapes. The mass consumer is looking for the perfect nexus of quality, convenience and affordability, and for a brief period, buying DVDs was often the cheapest and easiest way to watch the movie you wanted to watch when you wanted to watch it.

But it turns out that ownership of films wasn't the goal for a lot of people. The sales numbers might have made it look that way when those stars aligned, but if anything, I think the average consumer realized just how infrequently he would rewatch movies when a collection of viewed-once titles started stacking up.

Streaming changed that equation. Most people when they sit down to watch a movie aren't looking to analyze a film in depth for their seventeenth viewing, or even looking to view a specific movie and nothing else. They're looking for the experience of watching "a movie" - and that's something that streaming is perfectly equipped to handle. The problems that the home viewer had with VHS and that infrastructure, which led to DVD selling so well at the beginning, have largely been addressed by streaming. With streaming, you can see the movie you want, when you want it. With streaming, you don't have to leave the house to see something. With streaming, you can spend less than $10 a month to get a subscription service like Netflix, or you might already have Amazon Prime for shipping and use that for streaming as well, making it essentially free. If there's a specific movie you're looking to see that's not on a subscription service, you can usually rent it for $4. I think for most people, that's enough. Streaming is "good enough" for a mass audience. And the problems that disc lovers have with streaming are slowly but surely being addressed. Concepts like Movies Anywhere make it so that a purchase made in one digital store will be accessible in a different service. Bonus features are now being included with digital purchases. Movies are more compressed via streaming than on disc, but as broadband access continues to improve, we'll one day get to a point where a streaming versions is bit-for-bit identical to a copy on a disc. And there's probably a lifetime limit on how many times people can reasonably be expected to pay for the same content in a different format. There was a pretty good argument for rebuying your favorite movies on DVD after you had paid for the VHS. There was still a good argument for buying the same title for a third time when Blu-ray came out. It's a lot to ask people to go back to the well for a fourth time. The average consumer might feel that they're trapped in a never-ending game of whac-a-mole, where each time they modernize their collection, a new format takes over and they have to start all over again. Meanwhile, if you happened to be an AppleTV/iTunes user, you just got all of your SD and HD purchases upgraded to 4K versions for free. That's probably more attractive to people who are more casual purchasers.

And in general, I think the perceived value of pre-recorded entertainment is at an all time low. We're being trained by subscription services like Netflix that we should only spend about $8 a month to have access to a huge library of content. We're being trained by iTunes that renting a movie should only be $4. We're being trained by MoviePass that no one should spend more than $10 a month to go to the movies. We have an epidemic of people buying pirated content, as easily as using hacked Amazon Fire Sticks and other such devices, buying them at legitimate retailers like Amazon and Walmart, watching pirated content on interfaces that look completely legitimate, and coming to believe that not only are they not doing anything wrong, but that the content itself doesn't have that much value.

In the face of that, UHD isn't really competing with Blu-ray or paid digital purchases - it's competing with free or almost free. How do you tell an audience that's now getting used to only spending $10 a month to see unlimited movies in theaters, or $8 to watch unlimited movies at home on Netflix, that they're doing it wrong and should instead spend $30 on a new set of discs? And if studios can't sell enough discs, they'll lower the price, which will reduce revenue, which will make it harder to justify making more discs. It feels like a race to the bottom at times.

If Blu-ray is already a niche market, then UHD is a niche within a niche. I think it has the potential to do just fine among a smaller customer base that is more willing to spend money than a general audience, but I think it faces a more difficult road as a mainstream format.

As usual, a very good dissertation, Josh, but with one minor oversight. iTunes only upgrades HD purchases to 4K, not SD purchases. I think you are confusing that with Movies Anywhere which made most SD code redemptions get bumped up to HD, but SD purchases have and always will remain SD.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Yeah, that was a mistake, but people would have screamed bloody murder.

Criterion tried to do this, to put out only combo backs - but they tried way too late, around 2014 or so. I think it might have been different had they tried just including a BD with the DVD, at the same package cost, when they first got into the BD game.

Disney also experimented with this a little at the dawn of Blu-ray - I remember when Sleeping Beauty first came out on Blu-ray, which I believe was their first major BD release of an animated classic, the version that was packaged as a BD+DVD combo in BD packaging came out first, and then the DVD-only (or was it a DVD+BD combo in DVD packaging?) came out maybe six weeks later - the intent seemed to be to drive people to buying the BD combo first. But it was priced too high for customers who hadn't yet upgraded to BD to be interested in future-proofing.

And at this point, it's probably impossible to convince media buyers to future proof, given that DVDs haven't gone away yet. You're not going to convince someone that it's essential to protect themselves for a changing media landscape when a twenty year old format is still outselling the ten year old format, which is outselling the one year old format.

 

[jcroy]

Some possible reasons:

- apathy
- boredom
- burnout
- etc ....

 

[jcroy]

And at this point, it's probably impossible to convince media buyers to future proof, given that DVDs haven't gone away yet. You're not going to convince someone that it's essential to protect themselves for a changing media landscape when a twenty year old format is still outselling the ten year old format, which is outselling the one year old format.

I agree.


(On a tangent).

Back in the day when it came to media formats in music, I was always skeptical of "futureproofing".

I saw some older relatives giving away their large collections of old vinyl records, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, etc ... and replacing everything with cds at twice the price. (They gave me some of their old vinyl records). It seemed like madness to me.

By the time dvd was around, I didn't believe one bit any of the hype that alluded to "future proofing". (In my case, I only started buying a lot of dvds/blurays in 2011. Over the entire 2000s decade, I had very little to no interest in dvd/bluray).

 

[Mysto]

Early in my personal computer life I bought a 40 mb hard drive. All my friends kept asking "how will you ever fill it?" My first modem was a 300 baud acoustic coupled (put the landline phone in the cradle.) Earlier in my life my dad bought a TV. All the neighbors and friends came over to see it. It was a monster. 17 INCHES. Computer storage is in Terabytes or virtually unlimited on the cloud. My current wifi is 100 mps. Now a small home TV is typically 55" - with 65" rapidly becoming the de facto standard. Over time storage will grow - transmission speeds will increase and TV's will continue to grow in size - I don't know when or how large but I know it will happen. When it does people will go to a higher resolution picture because they will have to. I don't think it's a question of if but when. Maybe we are a bit early - satisfying a need that for the average guy does not yet exist, but will.

 

[jcroy]

Over time storage will grow - transmission speeds will increase and TV's will continue to grow in size - I don't know when or how large but I know it will happen. When it does people will go to a higher resolution picture because they will have to. I don't think it's a question of if but when. Maybe we are a bit early - satisfying a need that for the average guy does not yet exist but will.

I want a holodeck !!!!

 

[Lord Dalek]

One point I want to make about streaming is that unless you're living in a major metropolitan area or are willing to spend more than top dollar on your internet connection, you will probably never have close to enough of a bitrate to stream 4k content for more than 10-15 seconds. At best it'll be 1080p with HDR applied.

That's the dirty secret nobody at Netflix is willing to tell you.

 

[jcroy]

For several highly technical reasons (which I don't really want to get into at the moment), currently I'm holding off on buying any 4kbluray discs.

This may become permanent possibly.

 

[jcroy]

One of the technical reasons, is that I'm waiting to see when the first reports of 4Kbluray "disc rot" start to appear.

Going back to the late-2000s, the first widespread reports of bluray discs being non-functional and/or having "rot", were Lionsgate blurays released in 2007 which started having these "rot" problems in 2010. Primarily early Lionsgate blurays titles like American Psycho, Basic Instinct, etc ....

 

[Sam Posten]

Some possible reasons:

- apathy
- boredom
- burnout
- etc ....

You missed the big two:
Price
Additional hardware required.

 

[Rob W]

I was in Best Buy a few weeks ago browsing the remnants of a once-vibrant disc section and saw two teenage girls looking at the UHD racks. One of them picked up the UHD Pitch Perfect and asked her friend "Why is this in 4K ?" and they both just laughed.

 

[DaveF]

One point I want to make about streaming is that unless you're living in a major metropolitan area or are willing to spend more than top dollar on your internet connection, you will probably never have close to enough of a bitrate to stream 4k content for more than 10-15 seconds. At best it'll be 1080p with HDR applied.

That's the dirty secret nobody at Netflix is willing to tell you.

Isn’t that literally 60% of the US population? Lots of people can stream 4K. Not everyone, but many. (But this gets at America’s inadequate and overpriced internet providers.)