iTunes suffers from many of the same drawbacks -- files are lower quality than CDs, DRM restricts fair use and interoperability -- yet they are considered a success. At least there is the advantage of flexibility and choice, buying only a single track instead of the whole album. (Oh my. That sounds like the dreaded a la carte!)
The studios may be right. There is a sucker born every minute. If people will buy iTunes, they may buy downloaded movies too. People who think less is more.
Cog
· 3 years ago
Tim: Your post is spot-on in general, but one minor technical FYI: the codec used on DVDs is MPEG-2, which is technology that was stable (i.e., not even cutting-edge) in 1994. Furthermore, many (most?) DVDs do not use the full 4GB capacity of the disc for the main feature. Therefore, it's actually plausible that, with modern video codecs, you could pack a DVD-quality feature film into 1GB or less. MPEG-4 Part 10 (a.k.a. H.264), for example, is about twice as space-efficient as MPEG-2 at DVD quality.
Tim
· 3 years ago
Cog: Interesting. Thanks for pointing that out!
V
· 3 years ago
The pricing throws me. A DVD is a tangible thing that costs more to make and distribute, and comes in a box. What makes Hollywood think they can charge more?
Digital music is cheaper than CD's, ebooks are cheaper than paperbacks. This pricing scheme runs backwards to common sense.
eric
· 3 years ago
What Cog says is true -- mostly. Currently, most DVDs do use more than 4GB for the movie. When DVDs first came on the market, almost all were single layer DVDs, limited to a bit more than 4GB -- and the compression artifacts in long movies were easy to see. Curently the standard for new releases and remasters is double-layer DVD, with almost twice the data. An average 2 hr movie might use 5-6GB, with the rest of the disc being available for special features. I recently watched Spielberg's War of the Worlds (extra features were on a separate DVD), and that movie was probably about 7GB. (Spielberg likes a bit of film grain, which takes more data to encode.)
MPEG4 compression can be more efficient, and look quite nice, but it takes more postprocessing (i.e. more computer processing power) to remove obvious encoding artifacts in something as compressed as a theatrical feature squeezed down to 1GB at DVD resolution (720x480 pixels). There would still be a loss of quality evident to a videophile, but probably not to John Q. Public.
MBA boy
· 3 years ago
It seems to me that with current trends, the situation is anything but stable. Bandwidth is increasing in throughput and decreasing in price, storage prices are plummeting, devices are getting more transportable and better able to communicate directly with each other. Without mass surveillance and/or the elimination of local storage, and the implicit, potentially catastrophic threat to liberty that would bring, it seems to me that the ONLY solution - and I'm not looking forward to it at all - but the only solution for this is the embedding of advertising directly within the storyline/imagery such that the former is inseparable from the latter. Ultimately as real-time image processors improve, even that won't work.
marty
· 3 years ago
As someone on a bulletin board pointed out, this scheme seems designed to fail. And fail so well that the MPAA can point to it as why downloading movies "wasn't a viable business".
Pay extra for something of lower quality that is restricted to where I can watch it?? Or buy the DVD instead?
And of course, the claim that movie piracy is costing the industry money would actually have evidence for a change (Bad movies costing them money couldn't possibly be the reason...)
Daniel Benoy
· 3 years ago
I wonder why the movie industry would be so dead-set on physical media to orchestrate an intentional blunder like this? o.o
Isn't it possible they're just a bunch of retards?
All Comments
The studios may be right. There is a sucker born every minute. If people will buy iTunes, they may buy downloaded movies too. People who think less is more.
Digital music is cheaper than CD's, ebooks are cheaper than paperbacks. This pricing scheme runs backwards to common sense.
MPEG4 compression can be more efficient, and look quite nice, but it takes more postprocessing (i.e. more computer processing power) to remove obvious encoding artifacts in something as compressed as a theatrical feature squeezed down to 1GB at DVD resolution (720x480 pixels). There would still be a loss of quality evident to a videophile, but probably not to John Q. Public.
Pay extra for something of lower quality that is restricted to where I can watch it?? Or buy the DVD instead?
And of course, the claim that movie piracy is costing the industry money would actually have evidence for a change (Bad movies costing them money couldn't possibly be the reason...)
Isn't it possible they're just a bunch of retards?