I'll have to agree with the XB360 devteam on this one: "Blu-Ray is overkill."

DVD's just went mainstream in 2000ish if I recall correctly, and 7 years into it's life we are already trying to replace it? I guess no one ever heard of getting the most mileage out of technology we already have.

I myself will stick with DVD's. They are good enough, and I really don't give a damn either way for Hi-def. i hope Apple stays out of the war altogether and doesn't pick sides.

This has to hurt HD-DVD

Warner Bros drop support for HD DVD

It's an irrelevant battle; the war will be won by online downloads, not a physical media format.

I own an HD-DVD player ($180 on Amazon including TEN free movies, couldn't pass that up). It's got an awesome picture, but then of course an HD download does too. Watching an HD-DVD on it or an HD download on the Apple TV is all the same to me. Actually if I could stop building cabinets to house our growing DVD collection, that would please me greatly.

I think it should be about getting use out of what we already have, not building bigger.

But as far as the battle goes, Blu-Ray looks to be winning the war now.

I just hope Apple stays out of the fray altogether.

I love how tv ads for high-definition always show you a sample of how amazing high-definition looks. If it looks amazing on the low-definition tv you're viewing the ad on then you don't need to fork out for the high-definition tv.

If movie studios put their catalogues exclusively online, and halt retail sales of disks altogether, then they would have amazing control over who can download their content. It might have a negative impact on the movie marketplace in SE Asia because internet connections to US servers from SE Asia are generally slow. High speed download of copyrighted material is difficult, especially when downloads are blocked due to IP addresses originating outside of the continental US. For example: I can't view music videos on MTV because of my IP location.

Furthermore, most SE Asians don't have any easy way to get access to US credit card or banking accounts, so would be unable to buy content. Without movies on retail discs, people living in SE Asia would be starved (of movie content) to death. We might see the black-market entrepreneurs become even wealthier, and people here actually dependent on them to get their content.

Currently, there are a few retailers here in BKK selling legitimate Thai version (region 3) DVDs, but if movies become download only in the future, these legit retailers will surely vanish, and the black market will be the only option. I wouldn't want to see that happen because most of what is on the black market is low quality junk, highly compressed, poorly edited, rife with misspellings, etc.

Instead, you'll have to start building hard drive racks with ventilation systems to house all of your downloaded HD content.

In this country I have never seen a single blu-ray in wide distribution. All movies/music videos are DVD. Blu ray is still very unpopular here

In BKK, Blu-Ray is showing up quickly, and the titles are very expensive. I've seen stores selling legitimate Blu-Ray discs for 10 times the price of the same titles on (standard definition) DVD.

Damn, I can't believe that progress reached Bangkok faster than Russia!=)

Content Delivery Networks are the answer. They use controlled P2P-type technologies to make distribution fast and low-cost. A friend of mine is engineering the technology behind one of them, and it's pretty amazing. They are essentially a controlled Bit Torrent.

I have four terabytes in my home office right now, consuming very little space. TB drives are $300 today; how big will drives be next year?

I was informed last night that 4 major studios dropped HD DVD and went with blu ray. I think Blu Ray will be the more dominate one now.

And how much is average blu-ray cd rom?
This may be fine, but I usually use the same type disks in my Mac, PC, DVD-player (connected to TV) and my stereo-system, that supports DVD. In case if blu-ray wins the market completely, I'll have to change a lot of expensive hardware:)

I have been following the news very closely this week, and haven't seen any news of 4 studios dropping HD-DVD. Warner has dropped it, and there is rumor of two more possibly next month. I think you're going to have to support your statement with some links or an audio recording to be credible.

Interesting, but how many full-length HD movies at 1080 (compressed or non-compressed) do you have stored on your 4 terabytes of disk space? Do they include all of the extras?

Do you have them backed up just in case something knocks out the original data? This is going to be a big consideration because content providers, such as Amazon and iTunes Store, are probably not going to allow more than one or two downloads per purchase. So, backups are a must-have.

That sounds like something worth looking into, but I would assume that there won't be any strong offerings available in my region until a few years after the technology hits the US and Europe.

I really don't know, there's a lot of other data there, and I'm not the one in charge of media in my house. If I was, we'd have very little, I don't really care that much. As far as I know, the movie fairies deliver them to us. In general you can assume around 10GB/hour for full HD. I don't believe we have backups, but it is in RAID 5.

However all of that is irrelevant since we're talking about a future service, which will depend on technologies to make it work. Five years ago would you guess that TV shows would be purchased from Apple?

Unfortunately, AppleTV only supports up to 720 lines of resolution, not 1080.

Predicting Apple’s technological route
 

Perhaps not five years ago, but I certainly thought that movies and TV shows were the next natural step as soon as the iTunes Music Store was launched in the Spring of 2003. And that it was only a question of time.

After all, Jobs (and Apple) has always yearned for the Cool Factor -- which goes a long way toward explaining a lot of their strategic choices. Such as providing user friendly technology that is complementary to the entertainment industry.

Yeah, I’ve wondered about that myself. And furthermore it seems the storage space is paltry, given how cheap large disks are. They could at least provide other configurations as an option.
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Here's what I, Cringley says in part about Blu-Ray, and the rest of his article is a good read -- Cringely prognosticates: "End Game: Why Apple Will Buy Adobe".

Robert Cringely has always been eminently readable, intelligent, well argued and entertaining. Everything that a certain other self-appointed pundit with a wider distribution is not.

...even when he is wrong, which he quite often is, he’s well worth reading.

Thanks for the link!
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