Bluray not going to make it?

[DMGrier]

So I was watching cnet TV on my android phone and the guy on there said that bluray will be a thing of the past with the way streaming video devices are taking over.

What do you all think? I am unsure of this being that bluray has better picture quality and not to mention as computer games and softwares gets bigger they are excellent storage disc. Thoughts and opinions?

 

[Troncoso]

I don't think it's a question that disk based media will fade away all together, besides perhaps back-ups. Streaming quality is getting better and better, even enabling HD. I give it 5 years, til any manufactured media is either download only, or sold as usb drives or memory cards.

 

[Motoxrdude]

ATM streaming can't touch blueray as far as quality goes, but i'm sure in a couple years it will.

 

[Okedokey]

Australia is getting optic throughout with a throughput of up to 1Gbit. Physical media and local computational processing will be outdated in less than 5 years.

 

[Russ88765]

Optical storage is still needed for backing up the video data and/or files. As long as it has a place of prominence, not to mention preference among certain circles of viewers, it should remain in full swing for long into the future. CD's are still around, and look how long it's been for them.

 

[Okedokey]

Optical storage is about as poor of a choice for backup as you can get.

Where internet speeds reach sufficiently high levels (as they're already) backups are done on the cloud. In future computational processing (graphically as well) will be done externally and piped to your 'dumb pc'. Its gone in complete circles. CDs are only around for old people who know nothing else or collectors who feel they need a hard copy. itunes and similar has destroyed that business model too.

 

[SuperDuperMe]

^^^ I dont agree, i am neither old nor a collector, but i prefer cd's.

I think i have only ever bought a few single tunes from amazon, never bought music from itunes.

If i want music i buy cd's. It personal preference and im sure many out there agree.

i personally like to have soemthing physical, hence the reason i try my hardest to buy games from stores.

 

[Okedokey]

DVDs and optic media are not recommended for any backups at all, ever.

Hoever this post is not about mike's personal preference, its more about (as I read it) the future viability of the medium. Which is very very limited.

 

[Russ88765]

If you're computer fries or goes to crap to the point of totally unsalvageable, you might be glad you had your things put somewhere else ahead of time. Blu-ray imagewise seems to hit more than enough needs for even the most picky viewers, and besides- i'm sure video game consoles will continue to use blu ray now that it's been proven successful on the playstation 3. With bigger and more demanding titles, the switch would only make sense unless you want to monopolize the market with places like Gamefly or Steam. The more options available to the customer, the more those markets compete and keep prices somewhat reasonable at least.

 

[speedyink]

Blu Ray will eventually fade away, yes, but I don't think it'll be as soon as 5 years.

Blu Ray movies are at a MUCH higher bitrate than any streamed 1080p content. One could then argue that streaming will only get better, but in order to stream Blu Ray quality, 1080p video to millions of viewers most of the world will need a better internet infrastructure put into place. I highly doubt the entire planet will be covered in fibre optics within five years. My guess is that Blu Ray will stay prevalent in less internet developed countries, where physical movie sales will get a bite taken out of them in more developed countries, but will stick around because of my second point.

Physical copies. Some of us need the sense that when we paid 10 or 15 bucks for our album or movie, we actually got something for it. We want something with physical presence in our hands to show us that yes, we did indeed buy that movie. With digital downloads stored on our hard drive, there is aways that chance the hard drive will pack it in, you somehow acquire a virus, a component in your computer fails, or anything that can happen with computers happens. Not only is your computer gone, but all of your music, all of your movies, everything is inaccessible. No popping in a movie into the player to stay entertained while it's down..when the computer is down, you're entertainment is down. The cloud in my opinion is one step below that. Not only do you not have any physical copies of your movies, you have no physical copies of your data now. Internet down? Screwed. Your particular clouds server down? Screwed. I mean yeah, it has it's benefits, but it is definitely not for me. I'll keep my data where I can see it, thank you very much.

As for gaming consoles I can only hope that they keep it physical. The point at which home consoles get rid of the optical drive is the point I stop buying consoles.

Now I kind of sport of mix of the digital copy world and the physical world. I refuse to buy any large game in digital form. I'm spending 40-60 bucks per game, I want a physical, always there backup should anything happen. Movies and music however I'm all digital for ease of streaming throughout the home.

 

[Okedokey]

A couple of points. There wont be another console release as imo as they lose so much money on the process and laptops are already losing their optic drives.

Blu Ray movies are at a MUCH higher bitrate than any streamed 1080p content.

1080p is 1080p. In fact Blue Ray is limited to this resolution at 29FPS. The internet is more than capable of streaming 1080p @ 40Mbps (blue ray bitrate) in most developed countries. In fact optic cable can reach speeds easily over 100Gbps, making the 25/50GB capacity on a blue ray laughable. Korea, Australia, NZ, UK USA all have cable / optic fibre options and there are already siginifacnt business models that disagree with your suggestions that optic media is necessary

itunes
netflix
steam
origin
cloud computing (back ups etc)
netbooks with applications online (not requiring a dvd)

Most modern computers in the future will move towards centralised off site storage and processing which makes cds, dvds and the like redundant. I don't even have a DVD drive in my PC. I emulate iso mounting where required and back up iso's on hard drives/NAS. Not optic media, not least for the high relative costs compared to say 2 x 2TB in RAID, but also because optic discs are not considered stable or reliable enough for back up, particularly re-writable ones. I also don't want the inconvinience of having to use 80 (lol) blue ray disks to back up my stuff.

 

[Aastii]

A couple of points. There wont be another console release as imo as they lose so much money on the process and laptops are already losing their optic drives.



1080p is 1080p. In fact Blue Ray is limited to this resolution at 29FPS. The internet is more than capable of streaming 1080p @ 40Mbps (blue ray bitrate) in most developed countries. In fact optic cable can reach speeds easily over 100Gbps, making the 25/50GB capacity on a blue ray laughable. Korea, Australia, NZ, UK USA all have cable / optic fibre options and there are already siginifacnt business models that disagree with your suggestions that optic media is necessary

itunes
netflix
steam
origin
cloud computing (back ups etc)
netbooks with applications online (not requiring a dvd)

Most modern computers in the future will move towards centralised off site storage and processing which makes cds, dvds and the like redundant. I don't even have a DVD drive in my PC. I emulate iso mounting where required and back up iso's on hard drives/NAS. Not optic media, not least for the high relative costs compared to say 2 x 2TB in RAID, but also because optic discs are not considered stable or reliable enough for back up, particularly re-writable ones. I also don't want the inconvinience of having to use 80 (lol) blue ray disks to back up my stuff.

I agree 100%.

I was speaking to a guy today that helped to develop Ethernet and the OSI model way back when and is still out there developing networking technologies and he was explaining how that you can say goodbye to the media as we know it now within the next 10 years in favour of, as bigfella was saying, cloud computing and storage elsewhere.

You won't need an optical drive, you won't even need a hard drive, everything will be stored over the net. It is already a reality in some cases - Music, Movies, TV, Games, software, all of it can be streamed rather than be run from your own system. You can save all of your data on the cloud. If anything, now you could go back in time to the sizes of drives that we had a decade ago, there is no reason to have anything larger than 20-30GB if all you are doing is using the net, watching films, listening to music, playing games, a bit of programming maybe... If that is all you do

I can now download games faster than I am able to install them from disc and this is true for anyone that has super-fast broadband. It isn't just that optical drives are becoming obsolete, consumer hardware is too

 

[tremmor]

I agree with most comments for backup anyway.
I remember years ago and got into this. They did say back up would
last longer with rewritable and good for a 100 years. I never trusted one
back up either way. Ive always had to critical backups like pictures etc.
I just back up on two hd's. I will not loose both the same day.
cd's or dvd's is just portable to me like a micro drive.

 

[Russ88765]

In fact optic cable can reach speeds easily over 100Gbps, making the 25/50GB capacity on a blue ray laughable. Korea, Australia, NZ, UK USA all have cable / optic fibre options and there are already siginifacnt business models that disagree with your suggestions that optic media is necessary

The thing is that it depends on the consumer's pockets. How many of them can afford to buy a disc vs what it costs to get that searing network speed to compensate for not having the disc? Also, what if your network should fail or go down for some unforseen reason?

 

[Okedokey]

The consumer that can afford the BlueRay drive, and discs with the requirement of larger back ups or storage and a computer that can actually play back full H264 content (i.e. requiring a good CPU), can afford the $50 per month for high speed broadband. Proven by the simple success of the business models outlined above.

Secondly, most knowledgable users will have a local back up, but not on optic drives. Read, SATA II/III hard drives in RAID. Very cheap (normally) and easy to set up.

But if you insist that the network may go down, it will be in all likelyhood very temporary - say a day at the most. Hardly a reason to go out and buy 80 blue ray disks. How much would that cost?

Essentially, blue ray was the intermediate technology that satisfied a consumer need for portable HD content with requirements larger than ~5GB where internet services weren't up to scratch. That is now a moot point as internet can cover this with a very good uptime.

 

[Aastii]

The thing is that it depends on the consumer's pockets. How many of them can afford to buy a disc vs what it costs to get that searing network speed to compensate for not having the disc? Also, what if your network should fail or go down for some unforseen reason?

Right now, a consumer on a tight budget can afford neither bluray nor high speed internet. As bigfella pointed out, Bluray hardly comes cheap and if you can afford the technology, you can afford the required internet speeds.

The price of high-speed internet is ever-decreasing. The fact that experts predict that all forms of local storage will disappear, probably within the next decade, is reason enough to believe that Bluray isn't going to last.

The only people that will still use them are people reluctant to change, however the same person I was referencing before also gave a good reason for why that in itself is stupidity. He was explaining how that he has gone to other companies to give advice and said to them switch from IPv4 to IPv6 due to the larger addressing space and because of the massive increase in efficiency and a lot of the time he was met by reluctance because they weren't happy to change and adapt.

Swapping to Bluray would be adapting to change and moving forward, however it is sort of flogging a dead horse when there is better potential in current technology that meets or exceeds what Bluray has to offer that can definitely move along much further, much faster

 

[jamesd1981]

In a lot of places specially here in the u.k. internet speeds in many areas are barely able to handle normal video never mind blu-ray, i think a lot of it will depend how much investment goes into proper infrastructure for high speed internet, i mean it defies logic how they can expect years old crappy lines that were only designed for phones to be able to properly run high speed internet, with the prices we pay they should be forced to totally relay the whole line network country wide.

On another note while streaming is still not great, has anyone yet seen shops or rental places using flash drives or memory cards for films instead of discs ?

 

[Aastii]

In a lot of places specially here in the u.k. internet speeds in many areas are barely able to handle normal video never mind blu-ray, i think a lot of it will depend how much investment goes into proper infrastructure for high speed internet, i mean it defies logic how they can expect years old crappy lines that were only designed for phones to be able to properly run high speed internet, with the prices we pay they should be forced to totally relay the whole line network country wide.

On another note while streaming is still not great, has anyone yet seen shops or rental places using flash drives or memory cards for films instead of discs ?

BT are putting in a full new infrastructure across the whole of the UK with full fibre optic. They say by 2013 everyone will be at the minimum for high-speed internet (2Mb if I remember correctly), however expect it by 2015 rather than the date they say.

Even so, 2Mb isn't ideal, but with that said around cities you can almost guarantee you will get the 50-100Mb that is currently the top end in this country.

I guess being in Scotland a lot of it has been neglected because of you being so sparsely populated up there relative to England. I know here, luckily sat between Liverpool and Manchester, I get the 50Mb we pay for at any time of the day


=EDIT=

You won't see flash media used to distribute media because it is too expensive. Compare the cost of a single DVD or Bluray disc to even a moderately sized flash device and the price is thousands of % different

 

[JLuchinski]

On another note while streaming is still not great, has anyone yet seen shops or rental places using flash drives or memory cards for films instead of discs ?

All of the video rental stores around me are closing. I don't think they would survive if they went that route. The bottom line is people are lazy and streaming is way beyond convenient. Don't have to go and pick the movie up or return it, no late fees. I don't think people overly care about video quality either. But I agree, Blu-Ray is going to be gone soon.