Alternative HD distribution vs. the failing Blu-ray format!

[Olivier Depaep]

Originally Posted by Martin Mayer

Anyone know of a UK supplier/stockist?

Play.com (check the 'where to buy' on the WD TV website for more UK retailers).

[Aric Mannion]

What can this thing play exactly?
.mov, .avi, mpeg2, mp4, mkv, wmv...
I can't find the specs. Do you still need to go through the long process of compressing your movies to weird formats with specific sizes, containers, mbits per second, etc...?
Or can you just play your self contained Final Cut movie.

[Mark Fry]

Checking a couple of sites just now, including Best Buy, the price has gone up to $129.99. Weaker dollar exchange rate or higher than expected demand - or both? Even so, it's still not "expensive".

[Aric Mannion]

Ok I see what it can play now:

Music - MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA
Photo - JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG
Video -MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264)
Playlist - PLS, M3U, WPL
Subtitle -SRT (UTF-8)

But what does that mean for my HDV (final cut pro .mov) from my apple computer? The problem with the PS3 and the xbox 360 is I have to spend days compressing my videos, they look like crap with low bit rate, and they NEVER work.
I would feel a lot better if it said: "MOV (mpeg 2)"...

[Josh Mellicker]

I am kind of anti Blu-ray... it looks great, but it's slow to load, slow to get around in. And for a small publisher to pay $3000 (to join) and $1500 per title, plus replication, it shuts out too many small, low budget producers.

Cisco released some very interesting numbers on web video traffic a couple days ago. Their prediction is that the fastest growing segment of web video over the next 3 years will be web video played on a TV!!

Wha? Who has a computer connected to their TV?

Today, almost nobody. But in three years, a third of the web video viewed will be on a TV.

I made some graphs and wrote an article from their report here:

Video Is No Longer The Future of the Internet. It’s the Present. at DVcreators.net

Rumors are that there will be dedicated fullscreen H.264 hardware acceleration chips so that even the cheapest computers will be able to play 1080p H.264 without dropping frames through an HDMI or DVI output. That is an important puzzle piece.

Then, video podcasts already exist to deliver free content at very high quality. The last puzzle piece is a way to sell HD programs. If you are a major Hollywood studio, that means iTunes, Amazon Unbox, Netflix, or many others.

If you are not, there's MOD Machine.

Leaping Brain Labs, Inc. Overview

It is an exciting time to be a video producer! I love how technology steadily crumbles the walls between the big money and low-budget producers until almost anyone has an equal chance to deliver HD video to households.

[Aric Mannion]

I don't really like this WD thing, it hasn't made my life any easier. But it would be good to carry around along with a hard drive to present your work. I can't think of any other use for it as it wasn't compatible with any of my entertainment media files.
Apparently Roxio Toast 9 can make blu-rays on a dvd. That's not to shabby, in fact that sounds easy. I don't care if it's blu-ray HD-DVD or anything else. I just want people to decide so I can offer some HD.
But as far as that insane $1500 cost to make a blu-ray that I keep hearing about... What is that referring to?

[Richard Alvarez]

Aric the $1300 dollar cost is for distribution licensing rights. Follow this link

DVD vs. Blu-ray


But here is a snippet of the article -

-----------

There are two sets of fees. First, there are those involved with BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) licenses, which are content provider and content producer licenses that allow for the use of the Blu-ray logo. The AACS (Advanced Access Content System) licenses, which are specific licenses mandated by the BDA, require that all replicated Blu-ray ROM discs carry AACS content encryption to prevent piracy. So there are two sets of licenses, and two sets of fees, which make life twice the fun.

Let’s deal with AACS, because a lot of people are very confused about why it is so expensive. Let’s look at a typical independent publisher, for example. You would first need to acquire a licensing agreement, which is the signatory relationship between the publisher and the AACS licensing authority, for which they charge a $3,000 fee. It is my understanding that the fee goes to AACS to cover their administrative overhead and their expenses.

The second licensing fee is the issuance on a per-title basis of an AACS title key, which is the actual encryption information that licenses a particular title to a specific publisher, and then allows the replicator to embed the content keys that allow the player to unlock and play the content. The way that Blu-ray players are set up, they must have an AACS key embedded on a replicated disc or they just won’t unlock the content to play, period. So to cover the costs, because the AACS license administration is outsourced from the AACSLA (Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator), they charge $1,300 per title certificate.

-------
So Aric, it's not an issue if you're simply creating a handfull of discs, but it you're tryng to replicate and release a full length project, then it can run into quite a piece of change. Documentary filmmakers are really getting hit by this.

[Steve Shovlar]

This device would be cool if it had a 500Gb hard drive built into it. As it stands you would have to lug an external hard drive plus this around as well as your TV to a trade show for it to work.

Thnk its just as easy to take my PS3 and a blu-ray dvd on a loop to be honest.

[Robert Rogoz]

Originally Posted by Josh Mellicker

I am kind of anti Blu-ray... it looks great, but it's slow to load, slow to get around in. And for a small publisher to pay $3000 (to join) and $1500 per title, plus replication, it shuts out too many small, low budget producers.

Cisco released some very interesting numbers on web video traffic a couple days ago. Their prediction is that the fastest growing segment of web video over the next 3 years will be web video played on a TV!!

Wha? Who has a computer connected to their TV?

Today, almost nobody. But in three years, a third of the web video viewed will be on a TV.

I made some graphs and wrote an article from their report here:

Video Is No Longer The Future of the Internet. It’s the Present. at DVcreators.net

Rumors are that there will be dedicated fullscreen H.264 hardware acceleration chips so that even the cheapest computers will be able to play 1080p H.264 without dropping frames through an HDMI or DVI output. That is an important puzzle piece.

Then, video podcasts already exist to deliver free content at very high quality. The last puzzle piece is a way to sell HD programs. If you are a major Hollywood studio, that means iTunes, Amazon Unbox, Netflix, or many others.

If you are not, there's MOD Machine.

Leaping Brain Labs, Inc. Overview

It is an exciting time to be a video producer! I love how technology steadily crumbles the walls between the big money and low-budget producers until almost anyone has an equal chance to deliver HD video to households.

Josh, you have some major omissions in your assessment of of HD delivery via internet. First of all it's less then 50% of households with fast internet connection ("According to new consumer research from Leichtman Research Group (LRG), 69% of all US households now subscribe to an online service at home, and high-speed Internet services now account for about 60% of all online subscribers"). To put it in the perspective these are the pure numbers: cable- 25,772,886 households, DSL - 20,172,216 households, total:45,945,102. These are the numbers from 2006, but as far as I remember 2008 was not that much different (add about 500 000 new accounts per year is the usual number).
You also have to look at contracts with providers. Comcast has very strict limits on bandwidth and downloading or even streaming any high volume content. Dual BD holds up to 50GB and forget about downloading such numbers. "That limit is now set at 250 Gigabytes a month (upload and download included), per residential customer account, as of October 1, 2008, under the companies new Acceptable Use Policy" makes it for 5-7 movies per month.
To sum it up- HD via internet is years away, and it will be relatively small market what it happens.

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by Robert Rogoz

Comcast has very strict limits on bandwidth and downloading or even streaming any high volume content. Dual BD holds up to 50GB and forget about downloading such numbers. "That limit is now set at 250 Gigabytes a month (upload and download included), per residential customer account, as of October 1, 2008, under the companies new Acceptable Use Policy" makes it for 5-7 movies per month.

That's over five times the limit currently proposed by Time Warner Cable. (Reference link: Time Warner bandwidth caps to be expanded) Policies and pricing like this will seriously stymie Internet downloads for VOD and will retain the disk delivery model.

It's interesting to note that TWC is a corporate cousin of WB, a creator of that content and major supporter/user of BD.

EDIT: Charter seems to be going the same direction: Charter Communications to start bandwidth caps

[Robert Rogoz]

The other issue with "internet delivery" system is protecting copy rights. Any downloadable content is way too exposed to p2p.
I bet SDXC card players will be way sooner then any web HD content. BD will stick around for a while and the cost will continue to drop (both of the players and the media itself). As the matter of fact BD players aren't much more $$$ then top of the line DVD players as we speak. Even outfits like Costco is selling them now for about 200 bucks.

[Josh Mellicker]

Originally Posted by Robert Rogoz

Josh, you have some major omissions in your assessment of of HD delivery via internet. First of all it's less then 50% of households with fast internet connection ("According to new consumer research from Leichtman Research Group (LRG), 69% of all US households now subscribe to an online service at home, and high-speed Internet services now account for about 60% of all online subscribers"). To put it in the perspective these are the pure numbers: cable- 25,772,886 households, DSL - 20,172,216 households, total:45,945,102. These are the numbers from 2006, but as far as I remember 2008 was not that much different (add about 500 000 new accounts per year is the usual number).

Your stats are out of date. A quick google search reveals that even a year and a half ago, 75 percent of U.S. households subscribed to broadband:

Three-quarters of U.S. households have broadband - Research - BizReport

By now it could be 80% - 85%.

And there is no "usual number" in a market that is undergoing explosive growth. In fact, the number of consumers watching video streamed through a browser has doubled over the past year:

Number of US Online Households Watching Broadband Video Doubled In One Year | Press Release | ABI Research

Also- don't forget about international markets- increasingly important for entertainment and educational video. There are 352 million broadband households in the world and growing fast.

Originally Posted by Robert Rogoz

You also have to look at contracts with providers. Comcast has very strict limits on bandwidth and downloading or even streaming any high volume content. Dual BD holds up to 50GB and forget about downloading such numbers. "That limit is now set at 250 Gigabytes a month (upload and download included), per residential customer account, as of October 1, 2008, under the companies new Acceptable Use Policy" makes it for 5-7 movies per month.
To sum it up- HD via internet is years away, and it will be relatively small market what it happens.

HD via internet has been going on for years. Have you watched "24" on Fox.com? Or hulu.com, theWB.com, the hundreds of HD podcasts from every major broadcast network, or HD videos on Vimeo or YouTube? Hundred of millions of people have watched HD via the internet, and the numbers keep increasing.

I don't like the download caps, but 250 GB still gives each household about 200 movies per month, or 6.5 movies per day, which is more than most people watch I think :) As long as people restrict their movie viewing to 2 or 3 HD movies a day, they'll still be under the caps.

I'm not saying DVD or Blu-ray is going away this year, or even in the next few years, there will always be people that don't own a computer. It's just that savvy comapnies, like Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Roku and many more are leapfrogging Blu-ray by offering HD movies over the internet today, and it's important that producers be aware of the current situation and future trends to stay ahead of the curve.

VHS, DVD and Blu-ray are three ways to sell video, MOD Machine is the fourth- a brand new format, with definite advantages (see:

Leaping Brain Labs, Inc. MOD Machine vs. DVD

for a comparison)

[Josh Mellicker]

Originally Posted by Robert Rogoz

The other issue with "internet delivery" system is protecting copy rights. Any downloadable content is way too exposed to p2p.

With unprotected movies this is true, but, for example, with MOD Machine, the movies are scrambled and unplayable outside the player- pirate-proof.

Compare that with the dozens of utilities that let anyone rip a DVD in a few clicks.

[Richard Alvarez]

From the MOD website -

"Of course, nothing is 100% hack-proof. But after the hours it would take to assemble the fragments of your content into anything resembling the original experience, they would quickly conclude it’s just not worth the trouble. It’s way easier to rip one of your competitor’s DVDs."

Uh.... yeah, that's what the studio's thought about encryption.

And as far as I can tell, you need to watch it on a laptop or computer. What, can't send it out to the big screen? Because if you can, you are back to the weak link in piracy.

DIVX already tried this, and failed. So did APPLE. What is MOD offering that is different?

[Robert Rogoz]

Josh, sorry, but your sources are kind of bunk. They don't provide any real numbers and are based up on 900 sample survey.... These are some hard facts: Total household units: 105,480,101. Total cable in 2008- 36,492,914 (net increase of 873,745 in 3Q 2008 vs 1,407,902 in 1Q 2006- see the number difference?). DSL in 2008- 30,168,880 (3Q 2008 increase 425,868 vs 1,658,139 in 1Q2006). Total broadband: 66,661,794. So as you see it's not 75% or 80 or 85 like you suggested, but the real number is hovering roughly about 60%.
DSL is not able to deliver smoothly HD content- only fiber optic cable can. The other issue is paying for bandwidth for HD delivery- your 1300 bucks fee for a title would be nothing compared to the cost of server and enough bandwidth. Typical server you have about 500-900MB space with monthly limit of 2 GB transfer for about $200-250/year. See the issue here? (if you know hosting sites let me know- please!)
Quoted HD content via internet (like "24") and films on BD is like comparing apples and oranges. First of all Hulu only shows 1280x720, don't have time to check at what resolution ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox show- I doubt it's 1920x1080p. I know what my eyes see- any newer film on BD looks far better then any TV show via cable or satellite, even in HD.
There is no such thing as pirate proof. These are codes, any code can be cracked, something any programer will tell you.