(from the first 10 pages)
While Steve has valid points, I think he exaggerates and underestimates respectively for the popularity of downloadable/streaming for high quality video and the footprint of blu ray. Big name movies like Avatar and The Dark Knight sold MILLIONS of copies within a week of release on blu ray. By comparison, SACD and DVD-A aren't even known as a format by most consumers. It's a law of diminishing returns...
Things like "market update" rates are often highly deceiving: just look at Vista vs. XP, etc. In any case, I do think that the consumer's cynicism for YA format has manifested itself in the dual-physical-media (DVD+BR) boxed sets that the studios have responded with...which has at least contributed to the "BR" sales bumps that have been seen: the value paradigm is future-proofing.
Meanwhile, itunes still only has 720p whereas the HD standard is 1080p..
Sorry, but this is where your own diminishing return / audiophile argument backfires on you: while the 'phile understands that 720 isn't 1080, Joe Public Sixpack merely sees both as "HD".
Physical media is on the way out. Sure, right now you can't get the highest quality video from streamed sources, but I think within the next 5 years with faster access and better streaming technology, we'll be there...
Yes, but the problem is that 5 years is a long time, and the ISP content provider is very strongly angling to make us all pay for our bandwidth consumption. This is what I see as the fundamental opposition to Steve Job's "everything streaming" business model.
Take a look at your ISP monthly bill today, now compare it to what you paid ~3 years ago: has your value paradigm DOUBLED yet (Ie, are you paying half as much)? Mine hasn't. And unless we happen to be lucky enough to be in one of the really hot competitive market areas between Cable & DSL, we've probably not even seen any significant bump up in bandwidth at our current monthly price.
Right, but Macs need slot-loading drives (otherwise all Mac models would have to undergo extensive redesign), and slot-loading Blu-ray is still expensive as ****.
That's one of the items in the so-called bag of hurt.
1) Slot-loading Blu-ray = expensive
2) ...
I recently went over to the Lenovo website to find out how much a slimline BR burner would cost to add to a new Windows laptop I was going to buy ... bottom line was that it was $1000 for the hardware ... and it wasn't even a slot-loading slimline such as what Apple currently designs their products to!
As such, even if the rest of the issues were simple, the cost of the Apple-relevant form factor hardware exceeds the cost of a Mac mini.
Why would anyone want a hard copy? To me, it's like having a bank account...
I still have them mail me a physical copy of my statement each month...its a lot more convenient (& cheaper) than for me to print it out every month (keep in mind US Tax laws' requirement for 7 year retention).
Why have piles of DVDs or Blu-Ray discs when you can just store them on an external HD?
If the purchase price was the same, why would you turn down a FREE archival quality backup copy?
FWIW, I'm still buying (not all, but most) of my music on CDs for this reason.
What about those people with Macs who are in content creation and would like to shoot high-def and burn their movie creations to Blu-Ray for sharing their HD creations with others?
Does this mean that content creators, who have been the mainstay of Apple's "pro" desktop line, have no options to create Blu-Ray movie/video content? I'm asking because I'm not too versed about content creation, but it would appear to be a very important market that Jobs is saying doesn't matter because everything will ultimately be on iTunes. ????
This is what I see as a huge concern as well.
Honestly my biggest fight against download only media is the inability to buy it used...
Or to afterwords, give it to a friend.
Same problem exists with eBooks too.
I dislike shooting HD video on my camcorder (which, btw, only has a FireWire output, Steve), editing full-res HD with Final Cut or iMovie, and then having no easy way to watch it on my large plasma television.
And there's no way to share it with others unless I down convert to SD and burn a DVD, or upload the footage to a website (Youtube, Vimeo) that will compress the hell out of it.
Ditto here ... I'm starting to shoot 1080p and the next question is invariably the "Now What?" for how to not iPad-ize them to make them available for friends to view.
Actually you aren't in the minority. I don't know anybody that has Blu-ray.
Another factor for BR is the "What Next?". With the DRM being so tightly wound today on BR, the question is if one is going to be willing to throw away that $500 that was spent for 10 BR movies, and spend another $500 to buy the same movies again in the "What's Next" post-BR format.
I have a friend who has a very large (and expensive) collection of the old (pre-DVD) Laser Disk ... think he's happy to have invested in a 'dead' format which the manufacturer left him no way to export his media investment to _anywhere_ else?
What I see as an underlying consumer issue here is the 'abandonware' aspect of things: when one of these formats is abandoned by its seller, the seller should be required to publish & distribute free export tools.
-hh
