If BluRay licensing is such a "bag of hurt" how is it getting done on Windows?
This is an excellent question. I would venture to guess that the most likely answer is that MS doesn't actually have to really pay the $X/unit fees because of the $15M cap ... with roughly 95% of the market, their license fees per unit works out to nearly zero: $15M / 250 million units per year = 6 cents per PC.
...Bluray is also a good storage media, all those photographers and media types out there would love to get their hands on bluray im sure.
Hmm.. Given that my still photo collection's copy in iPhoto is now 160+GB, maybe it really is time to reconsider BR backups as cost-competitive to HDDs....
...The main problem with digital distribution (from iTunes) is the cost. here in the UK, i just looked at the iTunes music chart. Number 1 is Eminem, £7.99, physical media album is available for £1 more, higher quality, CD inlay, playable in the car, can lend to friends, and obviously your paying the costs for the physical part, the case, inlay, cd etc.
This problem is even greater with Video...
Agreed. As an educated consumers, we also know that the distribution costs to the seller are reduced if he doesn't have to manufacture a physical disk, but he's not passing along any of that savings to consumers, plus we as the consumer are getting a less valuable product, since we cannot resell it used.
Thus, the current prices on the downloaded versions are effectively a rip-off by comparison to the old school physical media...and even if there's zero cost savings from my pocket as a consumer, I'll still stick with the old school physical media copy. Even if I then choose to rip it, my consumer-centric value-added is a free archival backup copy.
As the owner of a front projection home theater system and several large screen TVs, I'm here to tell you that 720p just doesn't cut it at screen sizes greater than 50".
No contest ... but does the mainstream marketplace care?
Please let's not conveniently neglect the fact of the USA's conversion to digital in 2009 (yes, just last year) and all of the news on the Federal "Coupon" shortfalls...in the end, the Feds issued 45+ million coupons, which exceeds all the copies of BR that Avatar sold (despite all the hoopla on the "success" of the latter) by roughly 6:1 ...
BR movies are awesome, but they haven't caught on for everyone because not only do you need a BR player (which are much cheaper now) you need a TV that can play 1080p...
...and continuing on my above statement, since it appears that the Studios counted those Avatar DVD/BR combo sets as "two units" sold, what this suggests is that the home consumer reality is probably closer to 12:1 in favor of the old pre-DTV tech.
...It's my opinion that most people don't give two hoots about the difference. Get over it....Not enough of a difference for me to replace all my DVDs.
Agreed. The Enthusiasts need to keep in mind that the average consumer's value paradigm isn't necessarily the same as their's. There's quite a bit of legitimacy in the consumer-centric question of "What do you mean I have to go buy it AGAIN?", particularly since that for many of them, they probably have just done this in their recent memory to get t
o DVD from VHS.
It's not an insult...
Keep it up. You've been reported.
+1. If you hadn't already done so, I would have pushed the button at this point.
Well I'm not reading through 30 pages of posts, as I'm just catching up with this topic...
Page 40 baby! Read every post en route (almost there)
That is blatantly false. Normal sofas are between 5 and 8 feet away from your TV...
But for those of us who actually listened to our parents (
"Don't sit that close to the TV - you'll go blind!"), their typical viewing distance is also not going to be ~5ft, but ~10ft.
With screen sizes of 40 to 50"...
Until we consider what is typical in the market. There were estimated to be ~70 million pre-digital TV sets in USA Population potentially subject to requesting Federal $40 coupons to buy NTSC-ATSC converter boxes - - and over 45 million did so ... do you really think that these were all in the 40"-50" (and probably CRT) category? If so, I have a timeshare on some swamp land to sell to you: the reality is that they're typically be in the CRT and <30" category.
But please continue to stack the deck in favor of your straw-man:
...1080p is a noticeable difference at that range :
...Do I have to repost that graph from a few pages back ? 5-8 feet away, a 40" TV will have a very noticeable difference in quality between 480p, 720p and 1080p...
"Very" noticable? The odd thing this chart you provided is that it clearly doesn't say what you're claiming: its threshhold lines explicitly say "Benefits of ...
starts to become noticeable".
What the above chart
unambiguously shows that differences between 1080 vs 720 simply are not perceptually present until we really start to stack the deck, typically by only considering a large screen at a short distance.
For your typical non-videophile, it has only been very recently (past ~24 months) where NTSC-based CRTs have transitioned to DTVs that weren't CRT based, which was the enabling technology to go to screen sizes significantly in excess of 36". As evidenced by 45+ million set top converstion boxes, there's still a relatively huge percentage of domestic households that are using setups that are comparatively small in size, plus they technologically lack the hardware to resolve 1080.
Add an economic downturn on top of that, and most of what we have here is a niche group of videophiles debating things that the general mainstream public isn't going to realistically have a majority transition to for still a few more years. Yes, it is coming ... but are we are absolutely not already a year past the mainstream 75% adoption point.
No I really do want to give people a hard copy. You younger folk might love hitting the net and finding all your memories that way but there are still quite a few of us and older that like to have a collection of discs and walk into a room and pop one in...Find the disc with the bride and groom on it and bam! instant wedding memories.
Having stuff at ones fingertips is good too, but this is really a matter of being able to provide to someone else, a physical & tangible gift that requires no hard work on their part. For example, my parents are still on dial-up (no broadband available short of satellite).
...It doesn't store thousands of hours in Blu-Ray quality.
Thousands of hours? Hope there's a huge dose of hyperbola here. Unless its your career, this had better be your only hobby...and even then, an insomniac.
How often do you really use your optical drive anymore and for what? How often do you see "normal" people use it? How many people really have a BluRay drive or even a burner? Nobody cares!
Data exchange? That's the domain of memory sticks.
Backup? External hard drives are much better and actually safer for handling the amount of data.
Audio + Video? CDs are dead, and only an insignificant minority watches movies on a computer.
Archving? Yeah, as if so many people do that. See Backup.
Optical drives are DEAD in computers. A few people will of course need them and not buy a computer without them, but their number will shrink very quickly.
Again, it is a total different story for home entertainment.
This is a good point. Locally, my work opticals were literally dead until quite recently, when the local IT shut down USB Thumb drives as being insecure .. we've thus had a resurgent need to burn CD-Rs at business meetings to exchange info, etc .. even though email still does bear the brunt of it.
At home, the use of Optical media is typically to make physical copies of my own works, to share with family. Even a downright tiny (25MB) movie takes forever to download across a typical home connection ... not even counting the fact that Mom & Dad are on 56K dial-up (see above).
Then comes data caps.. and what about rural areas?
Also 30mbps is definately on the HIGH end of consumer data connections.. I would say the average connect right now is 6mbps down 1mbps up.
I suspect you're probably high ... I'll doublecheck with my wife (she has hard data from work), but I think she's said that the median USA connection speed is like 3up/1down.
This only proves that Jobs is in fact a LIAR. He said the reason for no support was that licensing was a "bag of hurt" and that is clearly no longer true AT ALL.
So a statement from 2008 (or 2009) retroactively becomes a lie because some of the licensing mess he was commenting on finally got straightened out in 2010? I'll remember that for the next time that you tell me what your local weather is...
-hh
