Warner, New Line, Paramount, Universal ... The Studios/Networks Thread - Part 2
#301
Originally Posted by BuckNaked2k
Did anyone else catch this? What the hell is this guy implying?? That we'll be able to burn our own copies of Blu-ray movies with a BD recorder???
#303
DVD Talk Limited Edition
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Malvern, PA
Posts: 5,010
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Originally Posted by dsa_shea
This never was an "everybody buy Blu now thread". But it has become a borderline 100 reasons to no longer support HD thread simply because of what has happened over the last few days. Now that it appears that there no longer is a war people are now pointing out their sudden lack of desire of HD and trying to be persuasive in making others still feel uncomfortable in spending their money on Blu-Ray players based on the supposedly "ridiculous prices" of the players.
#304
DVD Talk Hero
Join Date: Dec 1999
Location: Hail to the Redskins!
Posts: 25,295
Likes: 0
Received 49 Likes
on
38 Posts
Originally Posted by The Edit King
Sorry to break up the party and I'll be out of your way in a moment, but boes this mean there won't be any more firmware upgrades for my XA1?
#305
DVD Talk Gold Edition
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: In the Universe.
Posts: 2,923
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Originally Posted by DVD Josh
I disagree. The formats came out a decade after their predecessor media and right at the time of the affordable HD boom. With the 2009 change over, HD will be more popular than ever. With cable and sat said to offer 100 HD channels by the end of the year, you will see more and more HD displays in houses and it's appropriate to have HD players to go with them. As for whether is enough of an upgrade, it sure looks like it to me.
The masses care about the things they are educated on. Don't kid yourself and think that most people didn't see much of a difference between VHS and DVD at the outset either. They asked the SAME QUESTIONS you bring up now. Attitudes will change, just like the did with DVD.
Again, this is an incorrect assumption and a misuse of facts. Why would anyone HAVE To replace their collection? Will their BD player not play standard DVD media? Yes it will, and it will also upconvert it. I am most buying new releases and titles I didn't have on DVD with the occasional upgrade. People will just continue their normal buying habits.
This is again incorrect. Firmware upgradability means that people are not forced to buy new equipment every time a new feature is added. It's probably one of the biggest ADVANCEMENTS in CE technology over the past decade.
#306
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 9,334
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Firmware upgrades used to be a great thing and added functionality to devices, until CE companies realized (and this isn't a Blu specific problem) they could release poorly tested equipment into the wild and just have consumers fix their problems
#307
Since all the other threads got closed I'm just going to post what I was gonna say there for the sake of discussion: Paramount may be denying dumping HD-DVD, but Warner Brothers did the exact same thing in December.
#308
Member
Join Date: May 1999
Location: NYC
Posts: 249
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Originally Posted by DVD Josh
Paramount ain't' going to make $50M on BD right now. However, holiday season 08 is a different matter.
#309
If you want Pan's Labyrinth on HD DVD, you better buy it soon. New Line says that their 1 and only HD DVD release is their last. Once retail copies are gone, that's it. They haven't announced their BD plans, but will be releasing more catalog and day & date this year.
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/sh...o_Blu-ray/1351
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/sh...o_Blu-ray/1351
#310
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
I totally lost track of this thread, so I don't know if this has been posted, so let me know if it has and I'll replace it with a photo of a super model or something:
CES News: Blu-Ray May Give HD-DVD Users An "Olive Branch"
With the HD-DVD disk format seemingly on the ropes, The Digital Bits web site is reporting that the rival Blu-Ray group is thinking about helping owners of HD-DVD movies and players make the transition to the Blu-Ray camp once the HD-DVD format officially shuts down. The help might come by trading in HD-DVD movies for Blu-Ray titles or giving a discount for Blu-Ray players for people who bought HD-DVD players prior to the end of 2007. Here is a snip:
By the way the same web site stated through unnamed sources that prior to Warner Bros.'s Friday announcement that it would go Blu-Ray exclusive, Microsoft was planning on having as much as 30 percent of its keynote event devoted to HD-DVD. With the surprise Warner Bros. announcement, those plans were allegedly scrapped and Microsoft, a major supporter of the HD-DVD format, never mentioned the format during the hour long presentation.
With the HD-DVD disk format seemingly on the ropes, The Digital Bits web site is reporting that the rival Blu-Ray group is thinking about helping owners of HD-DVD movies and players make the transition to the Blu-Ray camp once the HD-DVD format officially shuts down. The help might come by trading in HD-DVD movies for Blu-Ray titles or giving a discount for Blu-Ray players for people who bought HD-DVD players prior to the end of 2007. Here is a snip:
One last note this evening: That idea I floated yesterday, that the BDA should offer an olive branch to HD-DVD consumers? I mentioned it to senior BDA executives this evening, and I think you can safely say that they're going to move forward with something along these very lines in the weeks ahead. We'll post more when we can, but the idea was definitely warmly received. In fact, plans are already in the works. We'll post more on this as things develop.
#311
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 1999
Location: location, location...
Posts: 439
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Pan's Labyrinth HD-DVD
Originally Posted by Mr. Cinema
If you want Pan's Labyrinth on HD DVD, you better buy it soon. New Line says that their 1 and only HD DVD release is their last. Once retail copies are gone, that's it. They haven't announced their BD plans, but will be releasing more catalog and day & date this year.
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/sh...o_Blu-ray/1351
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/sh...o_Blu-ray/1351
#312
Member
Originally Posted by namja
VHS to DVD = a hugh technological leap.
DVD to Blu-ray (or HD DVD) = improvement in a similar technology.
People were willing to fork over some money for a disc instead of tape.
Not as many people are willing to fork over same money for a better disc.
DVD to Blu-ray (or HD DVD) = improvement in a similar technology.
People were willing to fork over some money for a disc instead of tape.
Not as many people are willing to fork over same money for a better disc.
I still have my vcr, well 2 actually, but one is a tv/vcr combo and the screen size is 9inch. I use these for the films that arent on dvd(usually really really old films).
The difference between the dvd and VHS is noticable. However, the high def format is simply jaw dropping. But i guess the grass is always greener on the other side.
As soon as the prices for the high def tvs, and for these players fall out of the sky i will bite.
#314
DVD Talk Hero
Here's a good editorial on why disc-based media will be dead before Blu-ray can even catch on.
Last week the big news, or so it seemed, was that Warner Bros announced they would go all Blu-Ray. The format war is over, was the consensus, and Blu-Ray has Betamaxed HD-DVD. But to me this was a minor skirmish in a bigger conflict, one whose eventual victor has barely begun to enter the fight. While everybody was paying lots of attention to already-archaic disc based physical storage media, the future winner - digital downloads - gained some ground as Netflix announced a new set-top box that would allow subscribers to download movies from the internet and watch them on their TVs.
Digital download is where this is all going. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are distractions along the way; the truth is that anyone who replaces their entire DVD catalog with hi-def discs is going to feel like a major schmuck in about a decade or less. There are a few hurdles standing in the way of a world where all of our entertainment is streamed to us on demand, but they're all relatively minor, and they're all obstacles that are going to be surmounted by the inexorable forward march of technology anyway.
A lot of people reading this will immediately object to a future where you no longer buy physical objects that you store and display, but the truth is that these people are in the minority. Ten years ago I had more or less finished replacing my vinyl with CDs, and I couldn't picture a world where I would ever want to get rid of all those discs sitting on so many shelves. Even when Napster came along, with its novelty and its ease of use and its freeness, I figured that people would still want to buy CDs. They want those liner notes! They like owning the thing! Except it turns out that they don't. The whole world of music distribution is being turned upside down by the fact that people don't mind getting their music online, and while they're happy to pirate it, they've also been proven to be happy paying for it. All those CDs I used to own? They're in boxes today, their only function in life to hold up my bedroom television. Many of them are ripped on to my iPod, and the ones that aren't... well, let's just say that if I decide I want to listen to Touch Me I'm Sick and it's not on my iPod, there are easier ways for me to get it than to dig through the boxes. I buy CDs occasionally now, but I'd rather download my music, and I like it when someone offers me a reasonably priced way to do it legally.
Here's the rub when it comes to music and movies and ownership: people have been owning music on physical media for decades now. Our grandparents bought records. Fuck, Edison invented that shit. But it took just a decade for the change to happen, for people to essentially begin abandoning the buying of CDs (I am aware that a lot of people still buy CDs. In this case the change is like the old cliche about turning an aircraft carrier around; it'll take you some time. But we're at a point of no return with the music industry, where digital delivery is becoming utterly mainstream and not just for early adopters/hipsters/cutting edge techies). Now compare this with movies, which we've only been owning in a real way for about a decade. Before DVD, VHS tapes were rarely priced to own at first release. Only serious movie people had big collections of pre-taped VHS movies. But with the incredibly low price point of DVDs, everybody could build a library of their own. Still, they've only been at it for the last ten years or so, and if a decades long attachment to physical music delivery could be severed so quickly, the way people buy movies will change much faster. Just this past weekend, Bill Gates sat down with Reuters and spelled out the reality of the current format war: 'In the long run, people don’t want physical media. You don’t say to yourself, what’s the format battle after CD. If someone tried to introduce a new music format, you’d laugh and say ‘well isn’t that my phone, my iPod and my Zune?’ And you’d be right.'
I have to admit that my life is better without the CDs, at least in terms of my environment. All of a sudden I have space where there was none before. And I'm looking at my DVDs, which tend to clutter areas and quickly outgrow their shelving, with a longing for them to be gone as well. Who am I showing all these things off for anyway?
The key to digital download conquering all is ease of delivery. The new Netflix system still isn't quite there - you attach a Netflix box to your TV and your computer and then you log onto their site, choose a movie and watch it on the TV - because people want to do it all with one remote control. The Xbox Marketplace has something very much like that perfect system, where you can sit on your couch and quickly and easily scroll through movies, pick one, wait a few seconds for the download to hit a certain point and then start watching. I blew through all of Survivor: China like this; it was just so easy to get the next episode that I couldn't figure out a good argument to not do it (besides the whole 'Why are you spending a whole night and afternoon watching Survivor?').
Like I said, there are still obstacles. There's the fact that America's internet needs to get faster, and it needs to reach more people. Then there's going to be digital download's own version of the format war, which will be about how stuff is distributed. It is a sale model or is it a rental model? Will it be like some new internet music services, where you pay a monthly fee for access to streams of thousands and thousands of songs? The battle's already begun as Fox has forced Steve Jobs to step off his adamant 'sale only' policy at the iTunes store. The truth is that corporations are going to want to force you to pay to watch their content every single time. Ubiquitous delivery will be only the beginning of all this. That's going to get especially sticky in a world where portable players become more commonplace. I recently bought an Archos 605 Wifi, a wonderful personal video player with 80 gigs of memory and a beautiful 4.3 inch touchscreen, and the device has revolutionized the way I watch things - not least because I can put a dozen movies on this pocket sized device, bring it to a friend's house and plug it into their TV. When digital download is king, the distributors are going to want me to pay to put movies on there, as well as on my TV or other display devices.
While I'm waiting for that final format war to heat up, I look at all the people caught up in this new one and shake my head. In ten years movie discs will be like vinyl - they may still make them, but they'll be for a niche group of collectors. I'll grab a Blu-Ray player when they're dirt cheap, and I'll pick up a new movie here and there, but who wants to invest in an already almost obsolete technology when the next big thing is just on the horizon? The only answer comes from how far off you think that horizon to be.
Digital download is where this is all going. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are distractions along the way; the truth is that anyone who replaces their entire DVD catalog with hi-def discs is going to feel like a major schmuck in about a decade or less. There are a few hurdles standing in the way of a world where all of our entertainment is streamed to us on demand, but they're all relatively minor, and they're all obstacles that are going to be surmounted by the inexorable forward march of technology anyway.
A lot of people reading this will immediately object to a future where you no longer buy physical objects that you store and display, but the truth is that these people are in the minority. Ten years ago I had more or less finished replacing my vinyl with CDs, and I couldn't picture a world where I would ever want to get rid of all those discs sitting on so many shelves. Even when Napster came along, with its novelty and its ease of use and its freeness, I figured that people would still want to buy CDs. They want those liner notes! They like owning the thing! Except it turns out that they don't. The whole world of music distribution is being turned upside down by the fact that people don't mind getting their music online, and while they're happy to pirate it, they've also been proven to be happy paying for it. All those CDs I used to own? They're in boxes today, their only function in life to hold up my bedroom television. Many of them are ripped on to my iPod, and the ones that aren't... well, let's just say that if I decide I want to listen to Touch Me I'm Sick and it's not on my iPod, there are easier ways for me to get it than to dig through the boxes. I buy CDs occasionally now, but I'd rather download my music, and I like it when someone offers me a reasonably priced way to do it legally.
Here's the rub when it comes to music and movies and ownership: people have been owning music on physical media for decades now. Our grandparents bought records. Fuck, Edison invented that shit. But it took just a decade for the change to happen, for people to essentially begin abandoning the buying of CDs (I am aware that a lot of people still buy CDs. In this case the change is like the old cliche about turning an aircraft carrier around; it'll take you some time. But we're at a point of no return with the music industry, where digital delivery is becoming utterly mainstream and not just for early adopters/hipsters/cutting edge techies). Now compare this with movies, which we've only been owning in a real way for about a decade. Before DVD, VHS tapes were rarely priced to own at first release. Only serious movie people had big collections of pre-taped VHS movies. But with the incredibly low price point of DVDs, everybody could build a library of their own. Still, they've only been at it for the last ten years or so, and if a decades long attachment to physical music delivery could be severed so quickly, the way people buy movies will change much faster. Just this past weekend, Bill Gates sat down with Reuters and spelled out the reality of the current format war: 'In the long run, people don’t want physical media. You don’t say to yourself, what’s the format battle after CD. If someone tried to introduce a new music format, you’d laugh and say ‘well isn’t that my phone, my iPod and my Zune?’ And you’d be right.'
I have to admit that my life is better without the CDs, at least in terms of my environment. All of a sudden I have space where there was none before. And I'm looking at my DVDs, which tend to clutter areas and quickly outgrow their shelving, with a longing for them to be gone as well. Who am I showing all these things off for anyway?
The key to digital download conquering all is ease of delivery. The new Netflix system still isn't quite there - you attach a Netflix box to your TV and your computer and then you log onto their site, choose a movie and watch it on the TV - because people want to do it all with one remote control. The Xbox Marketplace has something very much like that perfect system, where you can sit on your couch and quickly and easily scroll through movies, pick one, wait a few seconds for the download to hit a certain point and then start watching. I blew through all of Survivor: China like this; it was just so easy to get the next episode that I couldn't figure out a good argument to not do it (besides the whole 'Why are you spending a whole night and afternoon watching Survivor?').
Like I said, there are still obstacles. There's the fact that America's internet needs to get faster, and it needs to reach more people. Then there's going to be digital download's own version of the format war, which will be about how stuff is distributed. It is a sale model or is it a rental model? Will it be like some new internet music services, where you pay a monthly fee for access to streams of thousands and thousands of songs? The battle's already begun as Fox has forced Steve Jobs to step off his adamant 'sale only' policy at the iTunes store. The truth is that corporations are going to want to force you to pay to watch their content every single time. Ubiquitous delivery will be only the beginning of all this. That's going to get especially sticky in a world where portable players become more commonplace. I recently bought an Archos 605 Wifi, a wonderful personal video player with 80 gigs of memory and a beautiful 4.3 inch touchscreen, and the device has revolutionized the way I watch things - not least because I can put a dozen movies on this pocket sized device, bring it to a friend's house and plug it into their TV. When digital download is king, the distributors are going to want me to pay to put movies on there, as well as on my TV or other display devices.
While I'm waiting for that final format war to heat up, I look at all the people caught up in this new one and shake my head. In ten years movie discs will be like vinyl - they may still make them, but they'll be for a niche group of collectors. I'll grab a Blu-Ray player when they're dirt cheap, and I'll pick up a new movie here and there, but who wants to invest in an already almost obsolete technology when the next big thing is just on the horizon? The only answer comes from how far off you think that horizon to be.
Last edited by slop101; 01-08-08 at 04:53 PM.
#316
DVD Talk Hero
Hey, if they'll sell me fast internet access (over 20Mbps) for $10/month or less, sure, I'd for the download buffet of music and movies, but who's going to really subsidize that internet infrastructure in the next 5-10 years? And will it become every citizen's right to have cheap internet access, a la water, so that we can get our entertainment piped into our homes in blazing fast fashion?
#317
DVD Talk Gold Edition
Join Date: May 2007
Location: The Phantom Zone
Posts: 2,656
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Hmm, interesting. I just went to amazon.com, and the page you're directed to immediately has links everywhere promoting the HD-DVD items for sale. Are they trying to liquidate or promote?
#318
DVD Talk Reviewer
This is something people keep inferring to but although digital downloads may be a bigger thing in the future, I don't think that anybody is really going to look at a hard drive, and look at hard media such as something on disc, and think it's going to last. You could plunk all that money down on digital movie downloads, run out of space and have to delete movies in order to download new ones... or the service can go down, whatever. A hard drive can fail. Hard media is still going to appeal to many, many, many people. Not only that, but people like to show off their film collections. Hard media isn't going anywhere. I'd feel much more comfortable with having my DVD's than having them all on a hard drive that could fail on me in two years.
#320
DVD Talk Special Edition
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 1,055
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Originally Posted by Yavin
Hmm, interesting. I just went to amazon.com, and the page you're directed to immediately has links everywhere promoting the HD-DVD items for sale. Are they trying to liquidate or promote?
I'm not seeing any new sales . . .
#322
DVD Talk Special Edition
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 1,055
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Originally Posted by bunkaroo
I don't think he meant sales, just more links to the items they have available.
Ahhh. That's determined by your browsing history, though, isn't it?
#323
DVD Talk Hero
Originally Posted by Patman
Hey, if they'll sell me fast internet access (over 20Mbps) for $10/month or less, sure, I'd for the download buffet of music and movies, but who's going to really subsidize that internet infrastructure in the next 5-10 years? And will it become every citizen's right to have cheap internet access, a la water, so that we can get our entertainment piped into our homes in blazing fast fashion?
Related Chart: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/I...speedchart.jpg
Related Article: http://www.gearlog.com/2007/06/in_ja...ady_read_t.php
#325
DVD Talk Special Edition
I think Paramount should spend less energy on rumor control and more on distributing their new HD-DVD releases like Zodiac so their customers can actually get them when they're released. No CC, Target, or Netflix...