Travis McClain

Six UV accounts can be linked, and when they are, all UV digital content owned by all six is shared. Just to demonstrate, here's a mostly complete list of what my group has.

Last year, I cashed in my Amazon credit for a Sony streaming player and it had the same effect on me. I should have mentioned that as one of the other key factors.

"Phases and stages"-based purging has been part of my life since childhood. My mom indulged whatever indulged my brother and me, but we always had to get rid of things from previous phases that no longer interested us. So it was that when I moved on from He-Man to Transformers, I got rid of my He-Man toys. This gave me space for the new toys, and because my mom owned a consignment shop, we sold my old toys and used that money to buy new ones. I've applied this same mindset to everything else in my life ever since. It's just ingrained.

That's definitely a legit concern and this is an area where I would definitely encourage even borderline cases to be classified as keepers.

I have a very modest, even pedestrian, setup, but my friend has sunk a lot of money into his. The sound system is spectacular and his HD digital projector uses an entire wall. He swears by Vudu's HDX-level A/V quality. He's not that keen on Netflix, and I can easily see where if that was the basis for someone's views on the A/V quality of digital movies, it would be dubious at best.

We're getting there already. Just offhand, I was recently looking at which TV incarnations of Batman I don't yet have in my library and I discovered that The Adventures of Batman cartoon is presently only available on Amazon Instant Video and iTunes. I wish Warner Bros. would at least also make it available through a UV-compliant digital retailer. My Sony streaming player will access my Amazon Instant Video library, but I prefer the shared ecosystem of UV. I feel selfish about digital content my friends can't also access.

The Warner Bros. Archive is available for digital purchase, but presently only accessible from a Roku. I wish they would expand their availability, too. Warner Archive has also started producing HD masters of their content. Here's an example of how a studio has been able to invest in making their deep catalog available, in HD no less, precisely because the digital market and Made-on-Demand discs allow them to do it and still turn a profit. Warner just picked up Paramount's deep catalog, and film aficionados should be thrilled about what that means going forward.

Criterion's deal with Hulu has also seen them make available for streaming a whole ton of movies that they haven't issued on disc yet. I would imagine a lot of those movies may never have been issued on disc in the United States by anyone. Right now, you can go stream Persona, for instance. Criterion has yet to release it on disc, but the previous DVD from Universal is out of print and fetches discouragingly high prices on the secondary market. I'm happy to have switched from Netflix to HuluPlus, precisely because of the expanded Criterion streaming library.

Criterion has also begun making some of their DVD bonus content available on HuluPlus, allowing you to watch those interviews and film introductions that are the hallmark of "The Criterion Treatment", so that's nice.

milo bloom

Interesting about the sharing, I'll have to think about that some more.

Travis McClain

It's pretty neat, I think. Get the right mix of six people together and you can really build a diverse library in a hurry.

Another little thing I forgot to mention is that there are some movies that are available in a digital format in their OAR that were only ever given pan & scan DVD releases. For instance, I used the Disc-to-Digital service on my P&S DVDs of Doc Hollywood and My Fellow Americans. Now I have them in their OAR in my digital library.

Alan Smithee

Vudu HDX looks pretty damn good for what it is, but I still see some compression artifacts on it, and audio isn't perfect either. I would never trust every movie ever made to be always cheaply available on a subscription service- stuff comes and goes from Netflix all the time, mostly you'll be expected to 'buy' unlimited access to individual movies or pay about $5 to rent them. Just as people taped movies from movie channels in the 80s, if it were possible to do the same with movies from Netflix I'd be looking into that option- though I'd only do that for the rare stuff, quality from that just isn't that great most of the time.

Travis McClain

I think growing up seeing more movies at the second-run theater than first-run, I'm desensitized to a lot of A/V issues unless they're really conspicuous. I can see edge enhancement if someone points it out to me, but otherwise I don't think I've ever really been conscious of it.

For movies that I really love, physical is still the way to go. I haven't really brought myself to actually pay to own digital movies, with the few exceptions I already noted where the DVDs were P&S but the digital versions were OAR. I'm certainly not going digital-only, or even digital-primarily, but I'm content with digital for the vast majority of things.

zyzzle

I will never pay for *any* streaming product until its quality meets or EXCEEDS the current Blu-Ray release / standard. Yes, I'm talking about high-quality encodes, 30 to 40 MBits/sec, .h264 / AVC mpeg4, 23.976 fps, 1920x1080. 25-40 gigabytes per film.

I know I have a long time to wait, so I'll keep buying my physical copies, until such time that I'll be forced to go back to the original 35mm / 16mm source material for a quality copy.

Fuck streaming, and the lowering of the bar that the studios are trying to impose on us (and, succeeding, too, as 99% are sheep / lemmings who blindly acquiesce).

Spottedfeather

I'll never pay for streaming, period. I'll never stream. For one, you don't get the bonus features that film fans love. Second, the quality is crap. Third, you go to watch a movie that you remember seeing on the service and it's not going to be there forever. It's just a dumb idea all around.

Travis McClain

We all have our expectations, standards, etc. But do try to remember that the standards you hold to so fiercely today were a pipe dream even for optical media not too long ago. Would you have held out for such technical specs and bypassed the DVD era? In five years, will 4K resolution make you contemptuous of the Blu-ray Discs of the present?

I'm pretty keen on bonus content, too, so I feel ya on this, but there are a few counterpoints worth noting:

There are still numerous movies that were only given a bare bones DVD release so far anyway, so there's nothing lost there.

There are quite a lot of catalog titles available only in MOD DVDs from Warner Archive Collection or the Universal Vault series; is there an appreciable difference between the burned discs and the digital files for those titles?

The Criterion Collection on Hulu has begun making some bonus content available to stream; movie introductions, interviews, etc. It's far from complete, even for that one distributor, but it's a start.

iTunes Extras do include bonus content. In fact, sometimes iTunes Extras includes exclusive bonus content. The latest controversial example is that if you want the commentary track for Star Trek Into Darkness, it's only available in iTunes.

That's so reductive as to be wrong, as one of my professors would say. I've been streaming regularly since 2010 from Netflix, then switched to HuluPlus last year. I can think of some examples of movies that were so bad it was distracting (Alice in Wonderland comes to mind), but those were the exception - and keep in mind, almost all of my Netflix streaming was in SD through the Wii. Now I've got an HD streaming player from Sony, I'd say I've only seen a handful of movies that were disappointing.

Also, as with my response to zyzzle above, it's worth recognizing that the typical streaming movie is comparable in quality to - or better than - the standards of some previous home video formats.

It's true that studios take films in and out of service at times, but the legitimacy of this complaint isn't as clear as it may seem. For streaming purposes, remember you're not buying any movie. You're buying access to whatever movies Netflix, Hulu, or the streaming service provider can make available to you. It's fair to be frustrated that certain movies are not presently available to you, but only as fair as it would be to be frustrated that they were unavailable to you if you went to a brick and mortar rental store and found those movies were unavailable. Them's the breaks with rental services, and it's disingenuous to hold streaming rental services to such a higher standard - particularly since streaming libraries are often exponentially vaster than their brick and mortar counterparts.

If you want to buy a digital movie, then that's yours outright. Even if a movie goes "out of print" for sale or rental to digital viewers, you still have yours. Yes, there is the concern over the collapse of a specific service, and that is a legitimate concern. It's a point of contention I have that prevents me from committing to actually paying to own digital movies.

Ultimately, the question is: Are you willing to sacrifice ever getting to see whole swaths of movies because they're not available in your ideal format? If not for streaming, I would likely never have discovered that I love the films of Ingmar Bergman. Given the discouragingly high MSRP of Criterion discs, even now that I know I love them, I'm unlikely to ever own more than a few. And I'm okay with that. I got to see them. At present, I can go back and re-watch them. If at some point, they're not available online, so be it.

I still prefer to own my absolute favorites on disc. I find myself content to see the majority of movies for the first time via streaming. If I really, truly love the movie, I can then set about adding it to my disc library. I live in a small town in Kentucky. Our last rental store closed four or five years ago. For me, it's either Redbox, streaming, or nothin'. Streaming is a compromise, but it's an increasingly favorable one.

Alan Smithee

It still feels more 'secure' having actual discs for those than digital files. I suppose they instead could make files that you could download and burn yourself (CinemaNow, long before they had their streaming service and were picked up by Best Buy, tried that for a while) but in that case I would probably make multiple copies just in case any went bad later, and I probably wouldn't be able to make packaging as good as what the Warner discs come in. Other than being on burned discs, most of those have the same quality as store-bought DVDs.

I probably won't support 4K, or at least not buy any movies on it, if it comes out as a streaming/downloaded-only format. Some Vudu HDX movies look better than standard DVDs, but I'm not spending any money for the "disc to digital" deal for those- if I want them in better quality I'll buy them on Blu-Ray if they're available or just live with the DVD. As I've said before, even having a VHS tape feels more permanent than 'owning' anything on Vudu (and I can transfer that tape to DVD to offset any concern about the tape ever becoming unplayable.)

Dick Laurent

A lot of it depends on what your network can handle. For me the Netflix movies look exceptionally better than any DVD. Not quite as good as Blu-ray, but no visible artifacts and with the DD+ soundtrack it really is a good addition to physical media. I pay for three streaming services and still collect DVD and BD. There's nothing wrong with having choices.

I love the Criterion collection on HuluPlus. You also get many films such as Eraserhead that haven't been released by Criterion, but is part of the HuluPlus Criterion collection.

Troy Stiffler

1. Netflix and Hulu are awesome, for movies that you just "sort of" want to watch. Hulu is great for TV shows. It's like an alternative to cable TV. It's also pretty damn good for watching all kinds of older movies and "catch it on cable" movies. Take "My Idiot Brother". Good movie. But I never felt the desire to go out and buy it. I don't mind watching it at some lower bitrate or whatever.

2. After trying it for awhile, I don't like Netflix rentals. The "extras" on most discs are very missed. I always like listening to commentaries and whatnot. Not possible with the Netflix/Redbox method. With the big backlog of movies on Hulu and Netflix, I think I'm going to cancel my "physical rentals". If Netflix wants to compete with it's rental system, it needs to put up the money for full copies of the movies (I assume they get discounted prices on the "rental only" copies).

3. I've purchased some movies on Amazon streaming. It's alright. Again, no features. Just the movie. If it's a release that has a commentary you desire to hear, the service isn't for you.

4. Purchasing a physical Blu-Ray for your anticipated releases is still the way to go.

5. The big upset for me - is that I no longer feel the need to run to the used record store every week or two and pick up some new movies. Really, with Netflix and Hulu, it'll be a few years before I go through all of their older movies.

6. I really don't like owning shit. It's just my style. A big DVD collection isn't for me. But a big streaming Amazon collection would be cool - as it's portable.

7. Speaking of Amazon, I really like their streaming song service. It streams without a problem on the 3G network. I don't have to own CD's, or even download the music to my cell phone/etc. Just log in and turn on what I want.

smurr05

Personally , I will buy, collect and watch DVD's until I am six feet under!!!

Regulus

seconded!

Sondheim

Well, to be fair, I think the concern - which I sort of share - is that streaming sort of feels like a step backwards in the A/V department. Up until very recently, all the new home video formats have represented a step forward in that area. You had VHS, and then you had laserdisc, and then you had DVD, and then you had Blu-ray - but streaming just doesn't follow that same path.

It's true that Blu-ray quality home media would have been unthinkable 20 years ago - but now we do have Blu-ray, so I can understand some people's concern that many (though certainly not all) streaming files look like subpar DVDs.

If a vast majority of people are "just fine" with the current quality of streaming, then there may come a point in the future when that's all we have available for most films - while those who care about A/V are forced to buy premium prices for a "niche" physical format or to invest in "antique" Blu-rays and DVDs (or film prints?)

For the record, I'm not someone who rejects any old format as soon as it becomes "outdated." In fact, I still watch films on VHS on a fairly regular basis, since a lot of the movies I'm interested in were never released on DVD. I really don't get hung up on video quality issues - but I do still think the purpose of home video is to replicate the theatrical experience as closely as possible, and I'd be dissatisfied if VHS was suddenly the only thing available to me.

(Once again, I'm not anti-streaming. I just think there is some validity to zyzzle's concern. I am optimistic, however, that streaming quality and consistency will improve drastically over the next decade.)

zyzzle

^ Yes, that hits the proverbial nail on the head, much more eloquently expressed than my acrid attempt above. Current streaming is a step back, when it doesn't have to be. The studios are 'testing' the lowest common demoninator, the 'lowest AV quality' which people will accept. So far, that seems to be subpar DVD quality, which I'll certainly agree is preferable to any A/V format up to and including laserdisc, in most cases. Streaming will only 'improve' as slowly as the studios / media companies are forced by consumers to do so. How long did it take us to win the P&S vs OAR battle? 20 years? It may take as long to win the quality-streaming battle. Encoders are improving, but there comes a point when you can't compress the bits without intoducing terrible digital artifacts and / or awful Guassian-blur (DNR) effects.

And, even I probably won't buy into 4k, as the quality difference does not seem to my eyes to be worth the upgrade hassle and expense, unless you're going to be viewing on a professionally-configured 100 - 120" screen and have a dedicated home theatre room. Perhaps in 10 years, they'll be 'average' and expected in our homes, but I think not, as most of us have more pressing matters on our hands.

So, current blu-ray is a wonderful compromise, a point where returns are not diminishing on, say, a 60" display which is within range of many of us, myself included. High quality 1920x1080 .h264 encodes are also within the realm of reality when it comes to our current broadband connections.

The studios know this, of course, but don't want to spend the extra money to give us a better streaming product.

dvdshonna

I think the Studios are cutting their own throats. ..I don't believe the $7.95/month subscriptions will last. ..Not enough money to replace what they are losing in disc sales (even for catalog titles).

Ash Ketchum

There are many reasonable positions expressed in this thread so far and I'd like to hopefully add another.

I had my first experience with streaming over the Labor Day weekend when I stayed at a friend's summer house and had access to his Hulu account on his laptop. It was during the Criterion Challenge, so I went through the Criterion offerings and was bowled over by the sheer range of stuff. So I picked a film I don't have in my collection and had never seen before: a samurai film called SWORD OF THE BEAST (1965). I enjoyed it immensely and just may pick it up on DVD during the next 50%-off sale. Would I have preferred having a DVD copy and watching it on my bigscreen TV? Yes, but sometimes you have to take what you can get.

It occurred to me, in looking over the selections that Hulu offers, that what streaming services like Netflix and Hulu provide is comparable to what local TV stations used to offer in the old days before cable, when every channel played movies, both famous and obscure, old and fairly recent, at different times of the day. I remember when I watched movies on TV in the old days, we never thought, Wow I'd like to own a copy of this. We thought, this is great, I have to sit and pay attention to it. Or, the next time it's on I'll watch it again. Back in the day, I used to go through TV Guide and check off all the movies coming on that week that I wanted to watch. In the pre-VCR era, if something I wanted to see came on at 3:00 AM, I'd go to bed early (10PM) and set the alarm to wake up at 3AM and watch it. Those were some satisfying viewing experiences, because you focused on the movie and paid close attention.

As I've gotten older and my collection of tapes and DVDs has grown into something huge and unwieldy, the existence of streaming services looks more and more promising. Right now, I have enough films on tape and disc to last me the rest of my life. I've learned to finally stop acquiring new stuff and focus on what I have. At some point I'm gonna have to start giving away or throwing out old VHS tapes and eventually some of the DVDs as well. If anything happens to me, it will be a huge burden on my daughter to go through it and get rid of it all. But if I want to watch new stuff, I have to do it on cable or subscribe to a streaming service. I don't want to buy anything anymore (plus I have to save money for my retirement).

On the other hand, last week I got a hankering for old school kung fu so I got a box of VHS tapes out of the closet and pulled out BRUCE AND SHAOLIN KUNG FU, a film I reviewed many years ago, and put it in the VCR. Pan-and-scan, taped at the slow speed (EP) and horribly dubbed in English...and I loved every minute of it. I've actually been reading up on Japan's behavior as occupier of China and Korea during WWII and this film just happens to be set in both countries during the Japanese occupation, something I'd forgotten since my last viewing of it. (I just remembered that I have this film on DVD in one of the p.d. Bruce Lee rip-off sets, but the quality is about the same as the VHS edition. I'm convinced they just transferred the VHS tape to disc.)

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

With the exception of only a couple of times, I always ended up sleeping through the alarm. Even if I chose the buzzer instead of the radio.

orangerunner

It's funny how the thought of owning a movie never really crossed our minds back then. If you missed a movie in the theatre you waited two years and it would finally come on TV. If you missed it again on TV, you often would have to wait another year for it to play again.

In hindsight, it was an ordeal of having to arrange your schedule to fit in watching a movie but i think it also made the movies special and memorable because of the effort involved in seeing them.

Nowadays, the ready access to anything you want at the press of a button just makes movies rather disposable and devalued.

But, hey, it's also nice getting DVDs for $2 instead of $29.95 back in the VHS days.

dvdshonna

Netflix Dropped Your Favorite Movie? Get Used to It
The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us," chief content officer Ted Sarandos told GQ in February.

Over the past year or so, Netflix has been shaking up its catalog of movies and television shows and even dropping classics like Goldfinger, Scarface and SpongeBob SquarePants. And the cuts will keep coming,

Just in the last year or so, it shed thousands of old movies -- from those named above to classic comedies Big and Young Frankenstein to dramas like Elizabeth
But streaming customers don’t watch that many movies -- 80% of the time they opt for TV shows..

With producers making ever-greater demands in licensing deals, Netflix may find itself on the losing end of bidding wars from existing rivals like Amazon and Hulu, or rumored new entrants like Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL).

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-e...164043268.html
--

I predict consumers will be subscribing to multiple services and paying more for less content as streaming services evolve. ..I'm holding on to my favorite DVD titles (always have).

Josh-da-man

Yes.

I really don't see any that our much anticipated 'streaming only' future will be anything but a big nickel-and-diming pain in the ass.

mickey65

Me also!

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I predict producers realizing they'll lose money because consumers aren't going to pay $8 a month for multiple subscriptions and it'll slowly work it's way back to being centralized, such as with Netflix for movies and Hulu for TV.

Travis McClain

If those streaming services allow viewers to drop cable/satellite, then the threshold for what they're willing to pay is noticeably above the $15.98 that a combination of HuluPlus and Netflix subscriptions presently cost.

As for Netflix shoring up its streaming catalog, it should be noted that we're still talking about a rental service. There has been at times some confusion among the anti-digital contingent about the difference between streaming digital and owned digital. The impact that Netflix cutting titles will have on viewers who are no longer gobbling up everything published on disc will probably not be all that noticeable. It would be unreasonable to expect Netflix to make available at all times every movie, if only for the obvious reason Netflix seems hellbent on deconstructing the perfect rental model they once offered.

A much greater impact on the digital crowd would be if Walmart closed Vudu, or withdrew it from UltraViolet. These are the areas where digital ownership is vulnerable in a way that optical ownership is not. Even if a title is no longer offered for sale to new buyers, once you own it, you continue to have it in your library; that's the advantage of digital ownership over digital renting.

Still, at present, Netflix's streaming library represents a vaster selection than I imagine most people have in their communities these days. Netflix doesn't have Goldfinger anymore? Neither does the video rental store that closed down six years ago here. We're down to Redbox kiosks for in-person rentals now. Whatever Netflix does offer is still more than we have in my community. And that's why these cuts will irk digital renters, but will not deter digital buyers. If anything, enough cuts may prompt more people into buying digital content, or at least renting a la carte through services like Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, and Vudu.

Alan Smithee

When cable movie channels started out, a lot of them showed the same movies- I remember in 1985 Alex Bennett (a favorite radio personality who was in San Francisco at the time) joking how he subscribed to every cable channel, so he could watch "Iceman" 50 times a week. Then in 1987 Showtime started getting Paramount's new movies exclusively, so if you wanted to see those movies you had to get Showtime. I think HBO fired back with exclusives on their side as well. Same thing could happen with both Netflix and Amazon Prime. I barely have time to watch what's on Netflix though so I'd probably just stick with that- nothing I have supports Amazon VOD anyways.