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Topic: Anyone consuming HD or Blu-ray?
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David Stambaugh
Film God
Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002
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posted 03-13-2008 02:05 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
In less than 5 years most personal computers are going to be far more parallel and powerful in operation than they are now. The huge performance increases that are on the way will at least lay down a lot of groundwork for much faster Internet speeds to be possible.
What is the correlation between the performance of my home PC's processor(s) and my Internet connection speed? They have nothing directly to do with each other. The technology that dictates the speeds at which providers can move a digital bitstream across a copper wire or fiber optic cable are unrelated to whether I'm running a 386/20 or an overclocked Quad-Core. What am I missing?
Comcast News Item
Comcast promising ultra-fast Internet
Story Highlights
Comcast to demonstrate faster new Internet technology at CES
Will be able to download high definition movie in four minutes
Cable company also plans to offer 1,000 HD videos this year
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) -- Cable companies aren't known as nimble innovators, but Comcast Corp. is out to change that perception this year with ultra-high-speed Internet service, more high-definition content and gadgets that link video, phone and broadband services.
"We're about innovation and having the best network," Chief Executive Brian Roberts told The Associated Press in a preview of his speech at the Consumer Electronics show on Tuesday.
Roberts is expected to demonstrate a technology that delivers up to 160 megabits of data per second: It will allow him to download a high-definition copy of "Batman Begins" in four minutes. The technology, DOCSIS 3.0, will start rolling out this year.
"If it's as successful as we hope, in 2009 and beyond we will have it available in millions of homes," he said.
Robert hopes the speed-up will boost growth of Comcast's broadband service, which has been slowing.
Cable systems largely enable download speeds up to 10 Mbps -- compared with up to 50 Mbps from Verizon's fiber-optic service FiOS.
"Cable looks like it will be able to keep up with the Joneses, thank you very much," Craig Moffett, senior analyst at Sanford Bernstein in New York, said of the new technology.
Roberts said Comcast plans to offer more than 1,000 high-definition videos this year, including up to 300 movies on demand that may be free or included in a subscription or a pay-per-view service.
That's a salvo aimed at DirecTV Group Inc. in their race to amass high-definition content. Philadelphia-based Comcast and El Segundo, California-based DirecTV settled a lawsuit last month over which has better quality HD.
Roberts said Comcast will be creating "superservers" to store the extra video-on-demand content and supplement those in the neighborhood that move shows and movies to customers' cable boxes.
When a customer wants to watch a show that's not stored in the regional server, the computer will dial into the national server to access the content and bring it to the home, Roberts said.
These national servers will enable Comcast to offer 6,000 movies on demand -- 3,000 of them in high-definition -- without requiring customers to get a new cable box.
Moreover, Roberts said the cable system is a "secure, licensed world" that should reassure movie studios that their content won't be easily pilfered.
To supplement its horde of movies and TV shows, Comcast plans on Tuesday to officially launch its Fancast Web site, which has full TV episodes for old and new shows as well as some movies.
The site also incorporates Fandango, the movie-ticket purchase portal, which Comcast bought last year.
Within months, Comcast subscribers will be able to check TV listings on the Fancast site and have the digital video recorder attached to their TV record a show.
Roberts also said that Comcast's Tivo service has been launched in New England and he expects wider deployment soon after. Tivo will be available as an add-on service for a fee Comcast will share with Tivo Inc.
In voice, Comcast is rolling out a caller ID service that pops up on TVs and computers of customers who buy its video, Internet and phone package.
And, with VTech, Comcast is developing a cordless phone with a mini-screen where users can access e-mail.
The phone, now in testing, also will offer viewable voice mail like Apple Inc.'s iPhone does, where users can see a list of messages and choose which to hear first. And it will offer weather forecasts, sports data and a phone directory.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 03-13-2008 02:54 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
Watching movies on tiny screens of portable devices, such as an iPhone is pretty much a joke. Rotate that iPhone sideways, squint at the screen and try to appreciate Lawrence of Arabia letterboxed on a 480 X 320 pixel display. People prefer to watch movies on as big a screen as possible.
How many people buy full-frame movies instead of the OAR version? These people either don't know or don't care about composition and are willing to sacrifice it in order to make it work with the device they have.
LoA is an extreme case of letterboxing, but it is also a fairly rare case of an epic movie. How many movies are that caliber vs. the type of movies like 40 Year Old Virgin, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and College Road Trip? Those movies aren't going to be drastically different when experienced on an iPhone, an Apple TV, or a Blu-ray disc.
I've never watched a full movie on my iPod, but I have watched TV shows. A show like Lost loses something in the process, but your average sitcom does just fine.
The best case scenario I can think of is that downloads will only replace DVD, and Blu-ray will be able to get a foothold as the home media choice for the mainstream public.
The new Sony BDP-S350 will be $400 when it is released in Summer and Panasonic's DMP-BD50 will be $500 (albeit with more features that will make it more comparable to the Sony S550). Sharp's $399 player won't even have BD-Live capability, and neither will Samsung's BD-P1500 which will be $400 when it's released in June.
None of these examples show any promise that Blu-ray players will even get down to $300, much less $200, any time soon. In fact, an this article on Tom's Hardware shows that Blu-ray player prices have crept up since the beginning of the year.
No one I know personally is willing to spend $400 on a Blu-ray player, even if I kept my opinions to myself. It's just too much money to spend on a discretionary (luxury) expense for most people, especially if they are happy with DVD's.
I can understand that the Blu-ray manufacturers want to keep their prices as high as possible for as long as possible, but the price for that desire is time. They risk losing the market altogether if they wait too long to get more players into people's hands. There are just too many ways for people to get entertainment to think that, just because HD DVD is gone, they have the luxury to milk the high prices as long as possible.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 03-13-2008 04:54 PM
One thing I read quite some time ago has stuck with me as being so obvious, it makes perfect sense. What escapes me is where I read it and who said it... ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
If someone were to take all the available movies on Blu-ray and put them on a storage network in a local cable company office, that company could technically deliver every movie available for sale without spending a dime in external bandwidth. (External bandwidth is one of the two concerns which have cable companies all in a knot. The other concern is simultaneous capacity to each home in a neighborhood network).
Currently, there are 540 Blu-ray discs that can be purchased today. Even if you assume 50GB per disc, that's just over 26TB of storage. If you consider that getting rid of the extras could get the storage requirement per disc down to around 30GB, that's only 15TB of data. That's not an unreasonable storage array to put in every regional office.
Now, take that to the next step and have each household have a DVR that has 250GB (for example) of storage dedicated to non-recording storage, and you could have 8 full-length movies in 1080p24 video and lossless compressed audio at the ready without any waits. The movies that are on the box could be stored either by IP download or by RF data transfer during idle time on either the data and/or video connections.
If you wanted to watch a movie that wasn't on your box at the time, you could either queue it up for download at a later time, or if you wait a few minutes, you can watch it buffered as the movie downloads. I have to wait a minimum of two days to get discs from Netflix, so waiting an hour or so would still be much better.
These storage requirements assume high bitrates for the stored audio and video, which probably aren't necessary. Using an efficient video codec and Dolby Digital Plus or DTS HD for audio, you could probably increase the number of movies by a third. Devoting a larger amount of hard drive space would also increase the number of movies immediately available.
I see Netflix doing this in the next couple of years, as they have been rumored to have a box in development to do online download rentals. There was a time when I thought they would get together with TiVo, and they may still. TiVo's relationship with Comcast could also come into play, either with Netflix or without.
Doing it without local area storage will mean running up against cranky ISP's that won't like being exposed for how badly they've oversold their capacity, which would slow adoption.
Technically, all the pieces are available. All it takes is for one or many of the companies involved to see that there is money to be had, and I think it will happen. It's doable while maintaining the same quality of packaged media, and even more doable if consumers are willing to accept lower quality for more movies and/or lower prices.
Downloads are inevitable. The only question will be: Which packaged media will survive?
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 03-13-2008 06:37 PM
The movie companies are probably salivating for online rentals. Just imagine. Cutting two steps (distribs, stores) out of the delivery chain; getting people to pay EVERY TIME they want to watch a movie; no inventory costs; no shipping, returns, waste, etc.; and instant delivery to as many people as necessary. Instant gratification. No backorders, no paperwork, no billing (since it would all be on credit cards). Those guys are probably having wet dreams just thinking of it.
The music companies would love to see this happen, but it makes a lot more sense for movie companies. After all, a person might listen to the same CD a hundred times or more, but how many movies would the average person watch that much?
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