[winkerwatson]

of course the funny thing is that aderack is entirely correct

when my mum can get a blu ray/HD DVD player for £20 then they might have a chance but they'll never break out of the elitist ghetto
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tim?

[JamesE]

I don't think Glasgow plebs have ever driven a market forward winker

except crack and heroin, of course

[aderack]

And Iron Brew. Of course.

[Intentionally Wrong]

[tacotaskforce]

[aderack]

Was anyone else at the final E3? Did you notice the way every single game was hooked up to a HDTV, and every single game was upscaled and horizontally stretched? And nobody fixed any of them for the entire show?

I mean. I don't know what the hell that says. I'm sure I spot irony, however!

[SplashBeats]

It's Bru, Aderack.

I see HD-DVD/Blu-Ray floundering until HDTV has achieved a HOME PENETRATION RATE similar to that of actual TV. A good 60% will spur on the market, a 80% will solidify it.

Though, I predict that will take a few years and we might be phasing out physical media by then. The popularity of the Xbox 360 video download service as well as iTunes tells me that this might just be the case.

[aderack]

[Intentionally Wrong]

[JamesE]

[Maztorre]

That's kind of a misnomer.

A better example would be people rejecting mp3s as a format because they aren't as high quality as SACDs or whatever, which they aren't (in droves!!).

Sony were just too late with Blu-Ray from a manufacturing standpoint and also the speed at which they pushed through HDMI as a standard (there was a hubbub about that wasn't there?). We'll be using non-physical media in PS4, with a disc drive as a legacy device if anything.

[JamesE]

People like owning the physical media. One hard drive crash and you've lost anything which is no longer on sale.

It would be good for the environment, though, so I probably support it.

[Maztorre]

Steam, the Nintendo VC and I believe Playstation Network all record your purchases so you can restore your content to a new HDD or other device.

I think it was Phil Harrison (could someone dig up the interview? I'm at work) who said that PS4 will probably forgo discs for most content. Based on their proposed 10 year lifespan for PS3, I'd say he's probably on the money.

But yeah, throwing in a cheap DVD/BRD recorder for backups if necessary would be pretty nice next-next-gen.

[Felix]

[aderack]

[Shapermc]

[Maztorre]

[klikbeep]

[dmauro]

The New York Times has an article on the subject.

Off the subject, one of my WoW characters was named Miss Gnomer and they made me change the name (in the end I just substituted the i for an international character).
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[Toups]

[SuperWes]

[Pijaibros]

I don't believe it's too early.

People always want the latest shiny things, but there's no incentive for it to really be adopted. Especially if the device to play the new format is much more expensive than what is already there.

Sony has tried to push all sorts of things onto us and failed. Beta-max, Minidisc, multi-media compact disc, super-audio, music clip, and I guess the UMD can be tacked on there now.

This is all in the past 15 years!
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[Toups]

[dmauro]

There is still an incentive to buy DVDs over HD-DVDs: the cases.
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[SuperWes]

[Toups]

[SuperWes]

[Toups]

[SuperWes]

[aderack]

The same discussion happens everywhere on the Internet at once. The following (up until the break) is from another forum, from a few weeks back. I pasted it here because some of the above points reminded me of it.

[SuperWes]

Yeah, that whole color TV thing? It'll never take off!

HD TVs are selling like mad to people who may or may not actually care about picture quality, but at least like to pretend that they do. These are the people who are going to end up with HD-DVD Drives and Blu-Ray players. They're not going to pay $500-$1000 for them, but when they get down to $200 and $100 for a stand-alone they'll be upgrading because, well, because then it's the same type of upgrading that they did to their TV.

It's not a question of if a next-gen video format will take off, it's a question of when. My guess is you'll start to see sub-$250 HD-DVD players as early as 6 months from now, with the prices of discs falling by $5 at around the same time. When the price gets more comparable to that of DVDs it'll catch on simply because it's backwards compatible and there's really no reason for it not to. The picture is undeniably better, and there's a large enough number of people who do want it to happen to keep studios interested.

This isn't PSP movies, which anyone (including hopefully Sony) could have told you was a bad idea, it's a format that genuinely does let you take advantage of your HD TV.

The only real question is whether or not a discless format will take off before one of the tangible formats really gets going. For that to happen the US Government would have to make a concerted effort to get cheap, ultra-high speed networks going in all major cities or someone would have to write an insanely good, mostly lossless video compression/decompression algorithm that lets them use existing network speeds. Neither is likely to happen within 8 years, and it's more likely that they'll both happen at around the same time.

In any case, the formats are currently too expensive to be mainstream at all, but as soon as they drop it'll take off. We'll discuss this again next Christmas.

-Wes
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[aderack]

[Toups]

[DarwinMayflower]

Apparently HD pornos are not good for the industry at all. Mainly because just as HD clearly shows the faults and blemishes of certain celebrities (Rosie O Donnel being the worst to suffer from an HD upgrade); the faults and certain blemishes of Porn Stars are also shown. I.E. breast surgery which is more apparent in HD than ever before, as well with faces. It's kind of sad that after all those years that people watched scrambled porn on television that absolute clarity would make porn even worse to watch.

[DonMarco]

[aderack]

I think the problem in this discussion is that Wes and others are saying these formats are great in that they let people take advantage of their existing HDTVs, whereas I and (I think) Toups and some others are arguing more about the content itself, and whether it warrants any of this new equipment. We're starting in different places, with different intents.

There's no argument that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray do a good job at complimenting other high technology. I don't really see where that need enter the discussion. The real question is to what extent this technology collectively benefits the medium. Surely there are decent arguments to be made on both sides of that question, and all the gray areas in between.

For what it's worth, Kojima doesn't give a shit about any of it. We've got the porn discussion, which actually has implications outside of that realm. I know that a lot of shows (yes; Doctor Who, for one) are avoiding moving to HD because of the increased budget and preparation time it would necessitate for the extra detail that would be required in sets, makeup, and costuming. And again, there's the issue that the increased detail really doesn't add much of substance to the discussion.

I'm interested to see what the aesthetic or practical arguments are for the upgrade, apart from "it looks cool/better". I'm sure there's something reasonable out there! When is "good enough" not good enough? And why?

[PianoMap]

When "supposedly better" is cheap enough. Because practical realities like pricetag blow faked revolutions out of the water.

Also, I suppose there is something to be said about the little details. Sometimes the details of a set or prop just aren't good neough and the visual image goes over our heads. However, even in this case I would call using something like HD to try and fix that, "cheating."
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o-/< --- o-\< --- o-|-| --- o^-<

[Baines]

[aderack]

What you seem to be implying is that actual demand isn't a prerequisite for building a market.

Am I getting this, so far? Because, well. That's kind of silly, if so.

What I'm saying is that there are two ways of looking at this: from the perspective of technology for its own sake; and from the perspective of the medium.

For people who care primarily about the former, demand takes the form of the newest, hypothetically best equipment they can afford. Part of my argument is that this is in essence a niche market: for most people, hardware is simply a tool; they'll take whatever gets the job done. Some people have argued that once the high tech hardware comes down to a price where anyone can buy it, the average person will say "to hell with it" and go with the ostensibly better technology. This is, overall, a reasonable assumption. It's based on a few uncertain factors, though:

1: will the hardware indeed come down to a reasonable level?
2: will there be enough media to warrant the upgrade?
3: will the average person understand the difference? The purported benefit?
4: will DVD still be a thriving format in its own right?
5: will standalone DVD players (without HD-DVD or Blu-Ray capacity) still exist?

All of these depend on the HD formats doing well enough in the short term to enjoy some crossover appeal outside the "geek squad". Which brings us to my argument, based on demand factor #2: the medium. Do the new formats offer enough of a difference for the average person, who just wants to watch a movie or a TV show and otherwise not to be bothered, to give a damn? And in large enough numbers that the market will reach critical mass, crowding out DVD?

And, well. Without going in depth on the wiles of consumer psychology, I think I've made my case about as well as I'm going to on that issue. That strikes me as the central question, though.

Something else I'm not sure if you're picking up is that I'm not saying there will be no market at all for these formats; rather, that the market is going to be more like Laserdisc or DVD audio than DVD video. These are all formats developed specifically for the purist. They're like the Neo-Geo of A/V; they're not populist, inasmuch as there already is a populist format that does its job perfectly well, and in that what they have to offer has little to do with real contemporary concerns. These are simply positioned as high-class alternatives; not as a completely new concept -- which makes their appeal nebulous and qualified, rather than absolute.

So they'll be there, on the periphery, as an alternative. It's just, they're innately that: an alternative.

There will, of course, eventually be a populist successor to DVD. When it does come, it will take a new form that can't even be compared to the three formats we're discussing; it'll be too different, and account for real, organic concerns that aren't even on our radar right now.

[SuperWes]

[Toups]

Actually, for #1 to even happen there needs to be enough support to began with from tech heads and videophiles to warrant it. Given how expensive that stuff is to manufacture, I reckon they'll need to be moving a lot of product to reach a point where it becomes cheap enough to manufacture en masse for a profit. I still think it's too early to tell.
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