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I love Blu-ray. a really lot. It delivers to me the most pristine near reference quality video that I have ever seen. a good 1080p Blu-ray (or HD-DVD for that matter) transfer is like 90% of the quality that the people who made the movie have available to them.

for years really, we've been hearing that digital delivery (lets call it "DD") and on demand (OD) content is what "we" want. and now that Blu-ray is here, many industry people and analysts are saying that its just a stop gap soon to be overshadowed by DD.

what?

I think half of that must come from the fact that nobody wants Sony in control of a major standard. because seriously, they otherwise are crazy and too absorbed in not letting us REALLY buy stuff anymore.

Blu-ray delivers up to 50GIGs of sweet 1080p content straight to my eyeballs in a matter of seconds. also important to many is that you can hold it in your hand, put it on your shelf. no place has the infrastructure to support DD and OD content of that size and quality. even with the best compression techniques, it cannot be done in any realistic way. and even then, its compressed. I just got LOST season 3 on Blu-ray. I already have rips of the broadcast 720p in H.264. a codec that was supposed to be the savior of compressing HD content. its pretty good. but the Blu-ray is atleast 3 times better. seriously, in H.264, it is really not even apparent why Sawyer gives Kate the nickname "Freckles". But on Blu-ray, you can see details that are completely lost otherwise. they aren't even resolved on screen. if I were to buy an HD version of LOST in a DD form, what would the end quality be like?

lets say I bought the whole season in the same quality as my H.264 tv rips. at 1 gig per episode, that is 23 gigs. That would take a long time to download. even on some of the best 4 megabyte per second internet. which most people don't have. I'd say most people (being optimistic) that have broadband, are probably seeing average download speeds of about 400kbs. and that's all for content that is 3 times inferior to what I can go buy and take home with me and load up in a few seconds. what If I wanted to download LOST season 3 in quality exactly equivalent to the Blu-ray release? I'm not sure what size Blu-ray discs LOST comes on, but lets swing low and say its the smaller 25-30 gig discs. Season 3 includes 5 discs of episodes with some special features like commentary and a 6th disc of all the other extra features and content. that's about 180 GIGS OF DATA.

I just don't see how DD and OD content can be talked up so much. It's all great in theory. Oh boy wouldn't it be great to click a button and less than a minute later you have 30 gigs of content? But I just don't see it as a reality even in the next 10 years. lately they even been saying that the internet is outgrowing the world wide infrastructures. after buy and take home HD discs are allowed to exist and prosper in the market over the next couple of years, along with the HDTV push, people are not going to accept compressed 1/3 quality stuff. if they could even feasably download it. I already avoid watching DVDs if I can. most people would even have trouble downlaoding a DVD9's worth of content. or stream it oh gawd. and that's not even talking about how we are going to store it all, if we will even be allowed to.

There is still a lot more to all of this, but there's a start.

*all of my paragraph's were indented, but they didn't post as such*

[Toptube]

so lets say you were downloading 7 gigs @ a constant 400kbs (an average speed from the cable internet that I had in Washington state)

that's about 5 hours before your video is finished downloading.

maybe that's cool for someone who would otherwise be waiting 3 days for the physical disc to come in the mail, but what about those that are renting and want to watch it now? and then how many times do you get to watch that downloaded rental until it expires? you still have to store it somewhere, so now we are just buy hardrive players instead of optical disc players.

and then what if i'm buying or renting a whole season of something? a season of LOST @ 4 gigs per episode is 90+ gigs.

my point is, for digital content delivery to be viable, we really need a push for waaaaaaaay better bandwidth per person, across the board. internet hasn't really improved across the board for a few years. and I don't feel is going to change anytime soon. and even when that does happen, we are still gonna have to buy the new kind of players with hardrives to store everything. and pay out the ass per month for new faster internet and digital subscriptions. when by that time a lot of us will have already had Blu-ray players for awhile, that play content that looks as good or better, on a physical medium that has a lot less questions about useage and storage rights.

[Toptube]

digitally delivered movies, shows, and concerts are also most certainly not going to inlcude several audio format options, including bitperfect and lossless.

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currently, Blu-ray has a couple of things that aren't really being used yet. it supports Y Pb / Cb Pr / Cr Super-White, which the PS3 has included support for in an older update. also, HDMI 1.3 has a feature called "Deep Color" which BD movies could eventually support, but none currently do. the PS3 is like one of two BD players right now with an HDMI 1.3 connection. most are 1.2. Most HDTV are shipping now with 1.3 so I imagine "Deep Color" support in Blu-ray transfers will be starting pretty soon.