beyond 100 wrote:

Aye, there's the rub! Folks on here wanting and wishing for 4k, Kaliedescape, etc won't see such at affordable prices for a long time.

And, Kaleidescape continues to lose court case after court case: http://www.kaleidescape.com/news/pr/legal-update.php

BR is in a "dead man walking" state. The content is relatively expensive (compared to other available alternatives) and the market is clearly moving towards consumers who prefer to not deal with physical media.



Times change. There was a time where Outlaw was in front of the pack in terms of features and well out in front in terms of price/performance. That's no longer the case. There are a growing number of competitors in the (Emotiva is frequently mentioned) space that implement the same business model. Design the product using "commodity" components, do what you can to add value with support, and then outsource production to China/Timbuktu/wherever. After seeing the sad/comic Keystone Cops attempt to deliver a successor to the 990 over the past FOUR years, I don't think I would feel comfortable buying something as complex as a theater processor from Outlaw any longer. They clearly have very little control over the process and the management of both process itself and the piss poor management of customer expectations with respect to delivery dates has been a complete joke. That might sound harsh, but let's just call a spade a spade. I find myself wondering if this flailing around is a result of poor capitalization, poor management, or both. Outlaw has ceased to be relevant (at least for me) in the enthusiast home theater market. Sad, but time marches on.....

Best,

Ritz, when you state that Blu-ray is in a "dead man walking state", I think that this is your anecdotal impression of where the market presently stands. But I don't believe it's supported by any solid evidence.

Here is an interesting news article from Reuters that contradicts some of your claims: Hollywood hopes rise as Blu-ray, digital offset DVD decline.

The article indicates that in 2011:

"Sales of Blu-ray discs surged by 23 percent, the group said. That growth was spurred by strong Christmas sales of Blu-ray players".

"Blu-ray growth partially offset the continued decline in DVD sales. Packaged good sales, which include both formats, fell by 0.6 percent from a year earlier, to $2.1 billion."

"Home sales of film and tv shows reversed that decline, and increased by 0.5 percent if sales through electronic outlets such as Apple's iTunes service are included. Consumers purchased $165 million of those so-called electronic sell-through products."

"The industry's largest growth engine continues to be online subscriptions, such as those offered by Netflix, which grew five-fold in the quarter, to $548.6 million."

I hardly call an industry generating $2.1 billions a "dead man walking". From this industry association's data, it seems that sales of packaged goods (DVD & Blu-ray) still outnumber the electronic downloads and streaming by a factor of 4 to 1.

Here's another anecdotal observation of my own this time. When I go to stores selling BD, I see a lot of folks picking-up cheap BD titles for anywhere from $5 to $10 or even $15 for some fairly recent releases.

As bandwidth from the ISPs in the 50 to 100 Mbps range becomes AFFORDABLE, you'll begin to see the streaming really hurt hard media sales. We're not there yet though. And when we get there, don't kid yourself, the quality of the compressed streaming 1080P content will not be in the same league as the PQ that you get from Blu-ray. As I mentioned in a previous post, resolution is NOT the only criterion for picture quality. Contrast ratio, color saturation and color accuracy are considered to be more important aspects of PQ than resolution and that's precisely where the streaming content providers will chop off with an assortment of compression algorithms designed to reduce bandwidth requirements, all at the expense of PQ but allowing them to claim 1080P HD nirvana. Oh... the beauty of marketing!

And if 4K content comes along in a few years, it will most likely be back to square one with a new physical media as bandwidth will likely be insufficient or prohibitively expensive for a few years more to come.

Best regards

^^^

Good post.

Jam, I absolutely agree with you on the disc vs. bandwidth assessment but I have to ask why the sales of discs have gone down. It is because streaming is too convenient and cheap right now. Whether DVD or BD the facts are that the sales of BD didn't cover the sales lost by DVD even though the BD are more expensive. The figures you cited are sales not profits. What I hope this foretells is that the demand for BD decreases and the price comes down too. Most streaming providers are desparate to cut bandwidth usage down as much as they can. Verizon will cease to have an unlimited plan when an upgrade occurs and this only a year after going to the standard 2GB/month usage limit.

As far as I am concerned discs are the only way to go for PQ and sound. Everything else is subject to how many people are using the bandwidth at the same time. It is only a matter of time before we hit the wall and lose even more quality.

Because, IMO, most people don't give a crap about audio and video quality. They are just in it for the convenience:



Yup.

I think there is something else at work here too. When I watch something on TV, I watch it because I specifically want to watch it. But I think for a lot of people (most?), they just surf until they find something they can put up with. Here's another way to look at it: my Netflix queue has over 300 titles in it. But only 39 of those are streamable. So in my case, I simply cannot survive with streaming alone.

For my wife, that poor selection of streaming titles satisfies her, because she looks through the titles that Netflix has until she finds something she's OK with.

See the difference? I watch a movie because I specifically want to watch *that* movie. My wife will just search for *something*, *anything* to watch, just to occupy her time. I think most people are in the latter category. Audio/videophile vs the average Joe (or Mary).

I don't see how it could be any other way, because otherwise, how could the average person be satisfied with the selection that Netflix (and other streaming services) have? I.e., they don't care about the poor selection, video, and audio quality, they just care about price and convenience. Which IMO, is a shame.

Unfortunately many don't care about picture and audio quality that's true but I'm not too sure that bluray is going anywhere far. Kalaidescape is a precursor to what will eventually be successful later on. This isn't going to be an overnight thing. 4K may not make too much of a difference on home sets...maybe on projection. It's all about licensing and getting top quality audio/video streaming legally done by a big dog in the buisness which may not be as far off as we think. This industry is evolving fast and the new becomes old faster than you think.

The videophiles on here are not going to be satisfied with The Cloud. As Jam and XenonMan point out, physical media are the only source of best quality video. Yes, providers will compress every bit of content possible while still claiming 1080. The huge issue that is being touched on here, but not discussed, is the bandwidth available (internet download speed) here in the U.S. To increase that significantly, even to equal the best avialable in other parts of the world, much less to get to 4K, would be a monumental cost (new satellites and other infrastructure). No studio, or all studios together, or a provider or all providers together have enough money for that.
Hank's wild guess: one entity has enough money to attack this: Apple. Apple never leaks its next big play - could it be Apple iCloud Infrastructure? Maybe an additional investment by Amazon?

Now back to reality...

The question remaining is whether there are enough "videophiles" out there who care enough about the quality delta to support the BR ecosystem over the long haul. I don't see it. Most people simply don't care.

Perhaps this is best moved to its own thread and this thread can be reserved for the 978 delayed-release and missing feature follies.

Best,

XenonMan, the fall in sales was not very high, just 0.6% in a recessed economy. Unfortunately, I think it's a trend that's starting because of downloads and streaming. And you're right in pointing out that those numbers represent sales and not profits. The profit margins must also be lower in the optical media (DVD & BD) as the cost of manufacturing and specially distribution are higher than in the download and streaming market. So that's another factor why the industry wants to move in that direction. The prices in optical media will definitely decrease as has happened in the CD market in the last few years but it will become a great opportunity for the BD enthusiasts to get really good bargains. I don't know how some users could have lived with a 2GB/month usage limit and those ISPs really hit customers hard ($$$) when they exceed those limits. I had a hard time living with a 30GB/month limit 3 years ago and I have since moved to an ISP that offers an unlimited plan at a much cheaper rate than I use to pay with the larger provider.

I think Kevin and beyond 1000 are also right in that most consumers don't really care about PQ and specially SQ thereby choosing the convenience of streaming. That's a sad statement considering that folks are buying these large $1K+ HDTVs that a have much greater potential that's just being wasted. Mind you, a couple of my own friends that work in the IT industry, one as a network admin and the other as a senior programmer, still don't get it or just don't really care.

I think there's a second category of consumers, much lower in percentage than the majority, that seems to care but just isn't knowledgeable enough about the technology and that are easy prey for the sleazy marketing tactics that take advantage of this lack of understanding. Heck, those folks just bought themselves a fancy new $1500 to $2000 1080P HDTV and are downloading or streaming what those providers are touting as HD content that can be anything from 720P to highly compressed 1080P and there's seldom a mention of the sound format. But this is where some of the responsibility may lie squarely on our doorstep. We the knowledgeable enthusiasts must, when we have the opportunity, at least attempt to educate those that aren't informed.

The last category are a very small minority of enthusiast videophiles and audiophiles. Those are the nuts like ourselves that understand the technology and really care about the overall quality of the experience. We may perhaps be in the 2 to 3 percent, if not lower. And like Hank indicates, most of us are never going to be content with the cloud unless they can one day provide the same level of quality as can be had on physical media, at a reasonable and competitive cost of course.

Another reason I feel IT companies and service providers want to move all kinds of services on their clouds, is that it's a scheme to gain greater control of the consumer's needs, in doing so they gain greater and increasing control of their wallets. Before long, people won't know how to do relatively simple things if not through the cloud; welcome to the Matrix.

I agree that bandwidth cost are likely to remain higher in the US and Canada. Part of it may have to do with the large distances that have to be covered, except in large metropolitan areas where the higher population densities make it more affordable through economies of scale and increased competition. Yet I also feel from my experience in Canada that most ISPs in North America, typically the larger the guiltier, want take advantage and just gouge their customers to increase their profits. In some Asian countries like Singapore and Korea, they already have Gigabit Internet services.

Like Ritz says, we should move this discussion to another thread although I don't know if there's much that remains to be exchanged about this topic.