When I first started blogging, I had this idea that I was going to make a lot of predictions. You see, it seemed to me that I was particularly savvy at seeing that, for instance, push technology (as originally implemented) wasn’t going to take off, and that RDF (which evolved into RSS) had a bright future. But you know, I think most people think they’re above-average at that sort of thing. So I wanted some record of my successess and failures.
However, when the time came to actually boldly predict things, I kind of lost my nerve. My predictions ended up along the lines of “This won’t happen, at least in this timeframe, unless this other thing happens, but only if it happens in this way.” That’s actually probably the most reasonable way of framing things, but it’s no fun. So I’m going to go out on a limb instead.
Neither HD-DVD nor Blu-Ray are really going to take off. One or both will have a loyal following among home theater enthusiasts, something like Laserdiscs were before the DVD was introduced, but you won’t see either format becoming the most popular way to buy movies.
What’s going to happen instead is that one or both of them will slowly make incursions into market share for about five to ten years, but then digital delivery of high-definition video will suddenly take off and leave them both in the dust. The broadband and DRM issues will work out one way or another, pricing will become competitive, and while I think there will still be a market for people who want to put something on their shelves, most movies will make their way into homes over the wires.
And that’s my prediction. See you around 2017.
I’ll throw in my two cents and say broadband delivery of purchased movies won’t really take off until my generation dies. We’re used to having something tangible for the money we spend. I want my music and video on stable media where I don’t have to worry about losing it if a power surge takes out my hard drive.
Doesn’t mean that ripping the songs to mp3’s to put on my laptop isn’t the first thing I do when I buy a CD and that I wouldn’t like to have that same option for my DVD’s. But I want that non-electronic, time stable backup. I’ve still got VHS tapes I bought 20+ years ago. Heck, I’ve got vinyl albums that my parents bought 40+ years ago. I don’t have any magnetic based digital media that is more than about 5 years old that I can still read, either because I no longer have that type of drive available or because the disc flat won’t read anymore, and I have no digital content (programs I wrote, images I scanned, etc) that did not come on a shiny disc that is more than about 10 years old.
What I’d like to see is a box that I can plug into my home theatre system, with a multi-terabyte hard drive array, that I can stick a newly purchased DVD into and have it automatically copy an image of said DVD to the drive, enter it’s info into a menu driven searchable interface, maybe pulling cover-art etc off the web. The DVD would then be placed in storage somewhere while the contents of said DVD would be available to every TV in my home on demand.
My counter-prediction: I think that both will completely replace DVD. Within a year or two, there’ll be a universal Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player for like $299, and people with HDTVs will snap it up, and they’ll indiscriminately buy Blu-Ray/HD-DVD discs to play on it.
Also, I think the downloadable stuff — while inevitable in the long run — will take much longer to get mainstream than you’d think. I mean, it’s 2007, but most people still play their music on their stereos with CDs, not networked streamers. If it takes that long to get something obvious like digital music to the A/V center, getting actual video there will take even longer.
Although I agree in general with this in general, I think there is a factor that you are not considering. Computer use. I use dvds to back up and transfer stuff. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to fit 800 gigs (or whatever it is) on a single disk? Sure it would, how else are you going to store those pictures from your new 45 megapixel digicam?
Actually I recently read that the current growth of bandwidth usage because of video surpasses the growth of the internet’s capacity, and that the current physical limit of the internet’s capacity is about to be reached.
So I’m not so sure if high-def-via-broadband is going to work any time soon without massive investments (which in the end the consumers always pay for).
Actually, those who make qualified predictions are usually a lot better at it, overall.
http://media.longnow.org/seminars/salt-020070126-tetlock/salt-020070126-tetlock-web.mp3
Thank goodness. I can just ignore all that stuff then? Lore for President!
I was actually thinking about a similar topic. See, for the most part, I love MP3s. They’re very easy to manage and I don’t have to worry about them breaking. However, for some of my favorite bands (the bands I am obsessed with, the bands that have issued restraining orders against me) I like to own they’re stuff. I’m not a vinyl junkie or anything, I just like to have something on my shelves with their names on it. Do you think there are enough people like me to justify the existence of the physical hi-def movie units, or will we be viewed as pretentious plastic wasting Luddites with too much money to waste on pointless garbage and, for the most part, everything will be digital?
Cool! My first download will be the last film of the Pirates of the Caribbean prequels.
I’ve been following you for some time, but I’m having trouble recalling if you’ve made any solid predictions in the past (comedic entries aside). Do you know of any?
Yeah, it’s plausible. Another possibility is that high-density media will become so cheap and commonplace that the idea of having a dedicated format for video becomes silly, and we just buy our movies on whatever we buy our games/libraries/3D scans of celebrities on.
Oh God, not the milk jugs!
Just continuing the conversation: I think what tipped me over the edge on this one is that I have a library of maybe 50-100 DVDs. I bought them because, like Fuloydo, I like having the physical object. But I just got an HDTV, and I have a couple DVDs I haven’t pulled out of the shinkwrap yet, and I’m thinking I should sell them or return them, because I’m going to want to get HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies instead. But then I think about buying everything all over in High Def, I think “Well, why bother, if in another ten years there’s going to be Ultra High Mega Definition?” I’m just about ready to hand everything over to Netflix. And if instead of waiting three or five days to get a movie from Netflix, I could pick it and watch it right now, I think I’d have very little motivation to buy anything.
Which is why I used the phrasing “most movies will make their way into homes over the wires.” I think the hard-core collectors will still want an object, and I think many homes will still have a favorite movie or two in physical form, but I think there will be some sort of rent-and-maybe-keep system that will supplant the moving of little discs from place to place. What system that might be is another prediction entirely, but I would love to see a subscription service like Netflix, only online.
There are a lot of excellent reasons why this would never happen. When I sit down and try to logic out the actual likelihood, it just seems too different from the current system. But at the same time, my prediction just feels right to me. It’ll be interesting to see if logic or gut feelings win.
Fuloydo said:
“…I want my music and video on stable media where I don’t have to worry about losing it if a power surge takes out my hard drive.”
I think what will happen is that you won’t just be buying a download, you’ll buy the right to the content, so that if you lose the data to a fried hard drive, you’ll be able to download it again. You will probably also be able to download additional content (of the DVD “extras” variety) long after your initial purchase, for a small additional fee or as a condition of the initial purchase, much as developers release patches and add-on modules to software products today. Hell, I’d pay an extra few bucks for an updated commentary track or the like if it were a film I was really into.
There have recently been rumbles from music executives that they don’t particularly want DRM. The same rumblings can be heard by people like Apple. So there’s still hope that we’ll be able to get our media in whatever format we please, and watch it with our pet unicorn.
This is because people are slowly becoming innoculated to crap. We’re gradually being introduced to lower quality media for roughly the same price.
Of course, I think the biggest reason HD content won’t really take off is because there’s a bunch of people telling us HD and 780p and 1080p are all glorious without actually showing it.
Browsing the TV sections at Best Buy and Computer City and all sorts of places, they have a variety of high quality televisions hooked up to low quality sources. A lot of looks terrible, and not worth the upgrade of $1500 to enjoy what already looks fine on DVD played on a laptop.
So, I work for the Company Formerly Known as RCA Labs where, once upon a time, some of my current co-workers were actually involved in the Beta-VHS format wars. They are unshakably convinced that the reason that VHS won (which was good for RCA) was that the porn industry adopted it. They say “watch what the pornographers do, that’s the format to be on”. It could be a Maginot line theory, ready to fight the last format war, but it makes sense.
I’ve actually heard three theories about VHS versus Betamax. First, marketing. Second, porn. Third, and this is the one that appeals to me most, is that at the start a single Betamax tape couldn’t hold a full movie. But I never worked for RCA Labs, so I may have to bow to the professionals on this one.
Has anyone here read “The Innovator’s Dilemma”? The movies-through-a-wire system you’re describing is a disruptive technology – it’s going to initially be unable to compete with the quality and capacity of tangible discs, but will eventually reach a point where it meets or exceeds the demands of the mass-market. Lore, you’re right to think that’s logically too different to work out. Logic, as it turns out in the business world, is most often wrong. The technology for something along these lines already exists. Just consider things like TiVO, iTunes, BitTorrent. I have a PC that’s specially designed to be able to accept iTunes-type video feeds and, if I had some sort of tuner, broadcast downloaded video to a TV. I think that the XBox 360 is supposed to be capable of downloading and broadcasting video. It can also, with an overpriced attachment, play HD-DVDs. Compare the success of HD-DVDs (and even HD TVs, for that matter). Which market has a bigger draw – cheap, convenient downloads or a small variety of discs which may become obsolete if they lose the format war and that cost 20%-50% more than DVDs? Microsoft is selling a lot more XBox Live content than HD-DVD drives. There are plenty of other factors, and physical merchandise won’t be leaving store shelves too soon, but I would still predict an eventual triumph of downloadable media without a second of hesitation. Not that I’m happy about it. I still defiantly carry a portable CD player everywhere I go, and after we managed to squeeze, what, 25 years out of the VHS, I think the DVD deserves far more than 10 years. Seriously, I have, like, 15 DVDs. I’m not ready for a change. I hope these new formats demolish one another.
Oh, and one last thing – anyone else notice that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD descriptions still triumphantly boast Interactive menus? What a magnificant selling-point. Oh, and to answer a question posed in The Book of Ratings on the subject of DVD Features, I have a promotional DVD from Fox that, in what I can only assume is an attempt to woo potential customers who are less interested in quality movies then they are in quality DVD features, contains menus from other Fox DVDs. So when you select “Play Movie,” you see a bunch of swriling graphics and hear a thunderous whoosh, or whatever it is that DVDs do to create excitement and anticipation. I guess it’s the DVD equivalent of an opening band. Anyway, noninteractive menus. They exist.
I thought the problem with Betamax was that it was proprietary.
My coworkers are as prone to being wrong as anyone, but those could be related. The pornistas needed a really long format that could hold a full movie (more than 5 minutes?), so they went with VHS, which drove demand.
“Well, why bother, if in another ten years there’s going to be Ultra High Mega Definition?”
Just to address that comment in isolation: You know how people say that 1080p doesn’t matter, based on the resolving power of the human eye, the size of TVs, and the distance people sit from those TVs?
Well, they’re full of shit, because my TV is bigger and closer than they figure. But doing the same math makes 2160p or 4320p massively superfluous unless we all start watching 100″ screens in Tokyo apartments.
Anyone who remembers the “perfect sound forever” marketing of CDs will find it hard to take HD-DVD’s “The Look and Sound of Perfect” slogan seriously, but I have a hard time seeing where you go beyond artifact-free 1080p and lossless multi-channel audio, unless it’s… THE THIRD DIMENSION!
I read in the local paper that Netflix is starting a download version of its service. It’s “in beta” right now. I’m not one of the lucky chosen.
Funny, I was just reading Shelly Palmer’s Technophobe’s Guide to HDTV, and your prediction of 2017 was the same as his. He suggest just sticking with regular DVD players, which will be fine “for the next 10 years.”
We’ll see….
- Rachel
There’s also the theory that if there are competing formats, pick the one Sony isn’t backing.
Scarybug: I am one of the lucky chosen. Netflix’s Instant Viewing is insanely sexy. There aren’t as many movies available as one would like, of course, but there are more than one would think. My biggest complaint on that score would have to be that sometimes every season but one of a TV show will be available for no apparent reason. The video quality is technically rated as Good Enough For Any Sane Human, which is to say somewhere between high-quality VHS and low-quality DVD depending on your connection. (They automatically tweak the quality to adjust for changes in your broadband speed, which works really quite well.) And the policy itself is so reasonable it borders on madness – you get as many hours of video a month as the number of dollars you pay for your normal service (e.g. if you pay $18/mo you get 18 hours) at no additional charge. You can pause and rewind, and if you change your mind about a movie they only count the minutes you actually watched. And if your minutes run out partway through a movie, you still get to keep watching. I watched Dr Zhivago the other day with two and a half minutes remaining. All that, plus the bastards can’t throttle you!
So yeah, it’s pretty much exactly what it should be. And yet I still don’t think it’s the future – at least, not the only future. Myself, I hope more companies start seeing hard and soft media as complementary rather than conflicting.
DISCLAIMER: I am not in the pay of Netflix, but maybe I should be. Also, you might actually have the on-demand service without knowing it – they don’t make it particularly obvious. Keep an eye on the Your Account page, as that’s where they hide the little notice.
Scarybug: search netflix for “Watch Now” and you can become one of the lucky ones, if you’re running IE, WMP9, WinXP/Vista, and their proprietary code. So, I’m unlucky, sort of.
Am I the only person on the planet who really doesn’t care that much about High Def?
High quality standard DVD (think Pixar) is pretty damned good and I truely can’t see much difference between a good digital standard def feed and a high def feed. Certainly not enough to make me wet myself and pay extra for it.
I do have an HDTV. Two of them, actually. One’s a 65″ rear projection that I bought back in 2001 and the other is a 42″ plasma that I bought last year. I’ve got them both hooked up to an antenna, to get local HD signal off the air, and to a dish which gives me half-dozen or so HD channels.
The only real difference I see is with the off-air HD signals vs the off-air non-HD. Big, Big difference there. But the difference between a high quality digital standard def signal and HD? Meh. Not worth paying extra for. To me. I’m sure there will be those who feel differently just as there have been high end audio geeks around forever.
I like movies so I buy a lot of DVD’s. Got several hundred of them, ranging from the classics to stuff I’m ashamed to admit I own and there is definately a difference in quality from one DVD to the next. That’s why I was so careful to specify Pixar level quality above.
But I love’em all. :)
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