I love a good high-def movie, and Blu-ray players are sweet. Only they’re so feature rich, the discs themselves are an afterthought—DOA or relegated to a niche format reserved for the finest films.
AU: A bit of a US rant here, but there’s a chance this is where we could be in a few years as well, so worth a read…
Anth
Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 8:17 AMI’ve seen this coming since blue ray was released. Downloadable content is the future and not having to go to a store and buying a disc that has 101 things on it you probably won’t experience.
Blue Ray is not the death of itself, but the end of life of the DVD. Pretty much that terminator that shows us disc media is a dying breed.
I have one issue however with downloadable media and that is the range per service. If you want some shows or movies you need to select the right service that has that movie available, not a single service will have everything you want to watch.
In Australia we are limited to iTunes as the mainstream and there are many a time when even iTunes has nothing to watch.
I guess we are only at the precursor for future entertainment and it can only get better.
formulated
Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 9:59 AMwe’re so behind the time here in Australia I don’t think streaming HD media will be in higher demand than discs for a very very long time.
matt
Monday, May 18, 2009 at 10:55 AMactually its America whos “behind the times” for not charging based on internet usage. why shouldn’t you pay by the GB, you pay buy the litre and by the KWh, how is this different? you are also relying on the server to be up and running and your net connection to be up and running without interruption throughout the whole movie. but lets assume that the downloads are BD quality and you have a net connection that allows you to stream it reliably while doing other things on the net as well (mabey even streaming another movie to another room?) and it only costs $3 a view including bandwidth ect: fact of the matter is, we have had this service since vhs, its called a “video rental store” yet this hasn’t stopped us buying the movies to keep. the only difference is a 5 min drive down the road.
Dirk
Monday, May 18, 2009 at 12:44 PMWe’re utterly screwed in Australia with a lack of discounting on new blu-ray titles, and a limited number of releases compared to the US.
Though the studios would have you believe you can’t buy from Amazon becuase of region-locking, you can use quite a few US releases on your Australian blu-ray hardware (including PS3). Check here for the list of titles that work: http://bluray.liesinc.net/
I’ve bought most of my blu-ray titles from Amazon and have saved a fortune in the process. So long as people keep buying $40+ blu-ray titles, the studios won’t discount and will help kill blu-ray. The fact that we also put up with unreasonably low bandwidth caps will doom downloadable content too.
Bendable
Monday, May 18, 2009 at 1:55 PMAnd on the right we have an ad for an LG Blu Ray home theater system LMAO!!! (LG pay you for that?)