The guys over at Pocket-lint recently interviewed Andy Griffiths, director of consumer electronics, Samsung UK. According to Andy, Blu-ray has only 5 years of life left. Geez! Didn’t Blu-ray just win the format wars? And now it’s demise is already being predicted?
Andy further states that Blu-ray will be replaced by another format or technology. I do admit that the CD-type media is starting to show its age, and should be replaced by a new media format. How many times have you rented a DVD/Blu-ray and it shuts down 10 minutes to go in the movie because the disc is scratched? Of course, it is entirely possible (probable) that physical rental of movies discs will be replaced by some sort of downloadable version sooner than later.
But a new format? My vote, which does not count in the corporate world, would be to have the technology to bypass the need for new hardware players every 5 years. But, of course, I’m sure one would have to still invest in 4320p, or whatever they will be calling the latest screen resolution, to take advantage of that latest format.
Sorry, I have no desire to invest in the “latest” every 5 years. I remember the good-ole-days when you bought an appliance, you expected it last 10 years or more. In an effort to maintain sales, is the corporate world going to try and force the average consumer to recycle their perfectly good hardware every 5 years?
I get the feeling that hardware appliance makers have been studying the software market. Anywhere from 1 year to 5 years, the consumer is subjected to that software upgrade path. That is quite often very painful to the pocketbook. No wonder torrents are doing well! To bad there are not hardware “torrents”. Not until we have that “beam me up, Scotty” technology…
The original article can be found here. What are your thoughts on this? Am I all wet?
September 9th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Well, I tend to agree that the makers are looking for ways to get you to buy new appliances every couple of years, but I don’t think we will have much of a new format. I think, much like 5.1 surround (remember when everyone was trying to get 7.1 and 10.2 surround sound to be the standard? How about the Yamaha amps that instead of a center channel had a center channel, left, right, then two front satellites?), we are going to soon be at the limitations of resolution and size. Very few people are going to have a place to put a 110″ TV and even right now it takes at least 56″ to see the difference between 1080i and 1080p. So if 56-60″ becomes the normal “Living Room” set, there will not be a need for much more than a 1080p set and therefore, not much of a need for an increased resolution.
Discs *are* showing their age. I think that the format of the future exists already, it just needs to get cheaper. I think that what we’ll end up with is a kiosk that allows you to scroll through movies and select the one you wish to purchase and the size you want. You then insert your USB(3?) stick (basically a SSD device) into the kiosk, pay your money, then download the movie on to your portable hardware. Plug that in to your receiver when you get home and you have your movie. For huge releases, they could release special edition keys (Get your Spiderman 17 usb drive preloaded with the movie only at BitBuster’s movie service kiosks!!) As a digital media, the movie industry only pays to have one hard copy made and leaves the rest of the copies up to the individuals, they just pay for the movie to be downloaded. And downloads could have different price points. Want yours in lossless dolby at 2160 resolution with all the special features? Your copy will be 10 please. Want just the 5.1 in 1080p? OK, that’ll be 5 please. You have a disc player? How very analog!