[Tig] Is packaged media close to end of life?

[Bob Kertesz]

My HD TiVo uses around 15-20 gig for a decent quality 2 hour movie. Not as
good quality as my HD-DVD player, but pretty close.

The Internet download programs it offers are SD only, and are mostly quite
poor quality (a show called Cranky Geeks with tech columnist and gadfly John
Dvorak comes to mind), but at least some of that issue lies with origination
quality - the show looks like it's lit and shot by students at a local cable
station. The 2-3 minute "infomercials" which it regularly downloads to the box
and promotes on its guide pages are also SD, but VERY good quality - as good
as national network spots. But as I said, they're short.

I did try out the Amazon downloadable SD movies (Amazon Unboxed?) once as an
experiment, and the quality was laughably awful. A touch better than VHS.

There are groups offering hardware boxes for sale (~$400) and then movies for
rent, all of which are downloaded, and they claim high quality, but have very
few HD offerings at the moment. I haven't seen those images.

I just don't think the vast majority of people are equipped for or are even
interested in downloading their movie entertainment now. It's fine for very
low bandwidth music, but it will take some serious time to download 30 gigs of
movie, and we are an instant gratification society, not willing to wait until
the next day for anything.

In the end, though, DRM will kill online movie downloads. The studios just
won't allow it without DRM, and as soon as people realize that they can only
watch a downloaded movie once, or must watch it within 72 hours, or can watch
it as many times as they'd like  but only within 24 hours of downloading it,
and that they either have to gather around the computer's LCD or else have
specific hardware (which is more expensive than an HD or BluRay DVD player) to
feed their big screen which complies with HDMI or DVI DRM, the concept will
die a painful expensive death.

I think packaged media with movie content will be around for a good long while
yet.

OTOH, if I owned a music CD pressing plant, I'd be on the lookout for another
line of work. That industry is dead, it just doesn't know it yet. The major
record labels have killed it with predatory pricing and crappy product. Who in
their right mind is willing to pay $10-14 for a music CD with two or three
good songs when you can buy just the songs you want for 99 cents each or less?

--Bob

Bob Kertesz
BlueScreen LLC
Hollywood, California
bob at bluescreen.com

The Ultimate in ULTIMATTE® compositing.  
For details, visit http://www.bluescreen.com

>The article at http://tinyurl.com/29m8ga claims that all forms of 
>packaged media will be comming to an end soon, to be replaced by 
>Internet distribution of music and movies.  The claim is that unless 
>HD-DVD or Blu-Ray gets its act together soon, the future of packaged 
>media will be over.  Everyone will be using video on demand, or 
>scheduled video on demand.  The article also claim that DVDs look as 
>good as HD to most people.
>
>While I have no doubt that eventually the Internet can be used for 
>mass distribution of movies, it seems to me that it is quite premature 
>to claim that this will happen any time soon.  An HD movie takes 
>20-30GB of space with "full" quality.  The idea that a hundred million 
>people would be transferring 30+ GB per day in the US alone seems 
>pretty mind-boggling and unfeasable any time soon.  Dedicated local 
>mirroring facilities would be required and the edge networks would 
>need quite a boost.
>
>My DISH DVR now offers Internet-based video, but I notice that fully 
>half the offerings are porn, at $12 per pop, and even regular movies 
>cost about $3.  I have yet to try it.
>
>Does anyone have a different opinion as to the future of packaged 
>media?