There has been a lot of talk lately about how Blu-Ray will win the HD disc format war, or already has. What's weird about it is that the declaration is largely predicated on sales of PlayStations and ignores cost, but regardless, perception is reality.
So where does that leave me? Well, I think I spent a total of around $400 on the format if you include the player. That includes about 40 hours of content when you include the bonus materials, and if you further consider that I pretty much watch everything with Diana, that means it came out to about $5 an hour per person. I guess that's not a horrible loss. Transformers alone was so worth it. :)
Going forward though, I can't help but wonder if this format war is irrelevant. Music has finally reached the point that makes sense, where we can pay nine bucks for DRM-free, 256k MP3's from Amazon. iTunes is even giving me the gradual "privilege" to "upgrade" my existing music from iTunes to the DRM free, higher bit rate versions for a fee (while these are AC3 files, honestly that format isn't going anywhere). It seems as though music has finally reached a logical place.
The big question is, how long will it take movies to get to a similar place? There are several hurdles that make things a little more complicated, not the least of which is the movie industry has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the present. In an ideal world, here's what I hope to see...
1) The right player for the TV. As far as I'm concerned, I have that, and it's called Apple TV. The negative point here is that it's still a part of the whole DRM ecosystem, but it's a start. A lot of people criticize Apple for this, but I honestly don't believe Apple does DRM because they want to. I think the product is solid enough that people would want to use it regardless if they could.
2) HD I can own. DRM is of course one of the issues in this regard, but it seems to me that other technical issues have largely been solved. H.264 is the codec that has been delivering the best bang for the buck for awhile now on the quality and file size curve, to the extent that it has been integrated into Flash.
3) DRM has to go. It's not that I want to make copies of everything for all of my friends, or even accept copies from my friends. It just annoys me because for now devices have to phone home.
4) The special feature thing isn't special enough. Face it, a lot of people buy DVD's because of the special features that lend more insight into the movie. That's certainly my motivation for ownership. But this perk hasn't been figured out for the download age. Sure I can buy a movie online, but I miss out on all of the extras. I'd hate to see us take a step back.
5) Archiving is still hard. This is actually something that people in TV and film are still trying to figure out as they've adopted tapeless formats (myself included). I don't know what the answer here is. I mean, you can buy an external hard drive now for the cost of several HD tapes, so I suppose that helps, but what is the real life span of these devices? Do we really know? Obviously storing things "in the cloud" is the long-term strategy, but bandwidth has a ways to go, and it gets weird when you think of millions of people storing exactly the same bits.
It's funny how I let go of owning physical CD's years ago, but I still like having shiny discs for movies.
Yeah, and when is the Mini-Mac going to offer an integrated Blu-Ray DVD drive?
Until the quality of an HD download improves, I will still want Blu-Ray discs.
About special features, you can embed multiple audio tracks in a digital file, and the other video content could potentially offered as additional downloads. But then there is the matter of how you present all that additional content and keep it open enough to play on multiple devices.
The thing I fear most is no standards and every studio creating their own box to let you download their content. I want to be able to download my content from where I want, to what I want.