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Monday, February 25, 2008

Blu-ray Won - What’s Next For…

OK - Blu-ray won. Now what? Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, etc.

THE SIZE PROBLEM

There’s plenty of folks that haven’t even made the leap to high def yet. Anecdotally, the family friends I was staying with in Los Angeles this week (retired folks in their 60s and 70s) still have a regular SDTV, no HDTV. The husband was reading about HD DVD’s demise, and asked what it was all about. He then asked if HD DVD discs would play in his existing uprezzing DVD player. Nope I said. What about Blu-ray? Nope as well. I then explained he’d have to buy a new TV set (HD of course), then a $300-$500 Blu-ray player, and THEN he could see something better than DVDs (he watches on a 32 or 36 inch set from about 12-15 feet away). Ex-military that he is, I shant print his response to that.

And I don’t think that is an unusual circumstance for a lot of people who aren’t techheads like you and me (and by any definition, you are a propeller beanie boy/girl if you’re reading this). First they have to know something is better, then they have to want it, then they have to be able to afford it. We (you and I) typically run that loop a lot faster than most.

But I don’t think high def content, delivered in ANY fashion, is going to really take off until BIG HDTVs get CHEAP. If you recall from this chart I posted with permission from Carlton Bale quite some time back, you can’t even eyeball the difference between 480p (DVDs) and 720p (the lesser HD resolution) from 12 feet away until you get a set over 50 inches.

Since most HDTVs presently in homes are 37 or fewer inches across, and if typical viewing distance is 8-10 feet at best...most folks won’t be able to tell the difference, or at least a meaningful difference. My prediction - not until 50+ inch sets of 720p or more get under $1000 will the curve start to move meaningfully for HD. And that will also require a cultural shift - look at your parents’ and older friends’ attitudes (your friends who aren’t movie fanatics - so let us presume that is your relatives in the Midwest). My parents, my parents’ friends, they all want the TV AWAY - it lives in a cabinet with the doors closed when not in use. HDTVs, by nature of their wide aspect, don’t live well in those environments unless you have a HUGE piece of furniture. Good, as in large, HDTVs want to sit out by themselves in the viewing room, with a heavy duty “Look at ME!” attitude. Patterns are changing rapidly, fortunately, but they are starting from a place that doesn’t lend itself to seeing the difference between SD and HD due to size and viewing distances.

By the time you get up to a 60” set (as I bought), you can REALLY see the difference between SD adn HD. SD DVDs look really good, high def looks fantastic. But as with many things economic, Good Enough is Good Enough. Until you have the disposable income and the desire, most won’t make the jump. And until a BIG set is CHEAP - say 50 inches for $600 - a lot of people aren’t going to invest in HD. So, I’d expect Blu-ray sales to remain non-spectacular until sets big sets get cheap - then wait for the perception-not-reality gap to catch up some months later when folks first realize big sets are actually cheap, then see the difference Blu-ray makes, then mull it over, THEN buy, perhaps waiting until the next big sales event.

MICROSOFT

Rumors are floating that Microsoft may have a Blu-ray add-on for Xbox360 as early has May or June. While I’m sure it smarts for them, as they helped develop the interactivity layer, HD DVD is, as the cops used to say upon arrival on particularly gruesome car crash, “DRT” - that’s short for Dead Right There, no need to check for vitals. So Microsoft has to face that reality (as well as Toshiba). And the reality is that their game system has no viable high def disc player. Two options there - they can either go with the winning format, or start to seriously push for skipping right past optical discs and going for downloadable movies (which still have to get stored SOMEWHERE, and portability and long term archival issues are still a pain). If they can get the Xbox360 movie download stuff working seamlessly and interchangeably with Windows PCs, then they have a fighting chance. Chance, not victory.

ADOBE

Adobe is sitting pretty right now - they decided long ago to offer Blu-ray authoring capabilities with their Creative Suites for video, and they are well positioned now that Blu-ray is the only high def optical disc format of note.

With tight integration between Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Flash, and Encore, and the super gravy bonus of being able to author to Flash as well as DVD or Blu-ray, the capability for businesses to author content once and deploy online, SD and HD discs is GREAT. Meanwhile....

Hardware •

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Hi Mike
Great article! Apple’s lack of action is pretty odd. If I add that together with other bits from the blog world, I get the sense that Apple is looking forward to download-over-the-net as their next platform. In other words, they are skipping the last optical drive stage and going (waiting is the better word) for the download model. Assuming this is at least partially true, how can they, and others, ignore the lack-of-bandwidth and congestion issues?

Also, wrt the HD format war, there was never much to be read about the 3rd party corp video people and their needs and contributions to the HD world. Are we really that small and insignificant? 

How can the Blu-ray camp ignore the shortcomings of BD-J interactivity? I don’t know any DVD authors that are also Java programmers, which is what you need to be do BD-J authoring. How come there is still not an available affordable tool to encode high definition video? How come there is not a solid workflow (with tools to match) that allow for the authoring/muxing/burning to take place? (by the way, in my opinion, Netblender is coming quite close to solving this problem.) For that matter why are blank media still so hard to find and still so expensive?

The big answer to all of the above is that this gig has ONLY JUST started. There is still a long ways to go.

In retrospect, having written all that, Apple’s hesitance to jump into the HD world makes more sense!
Jeff Bach

Posted by Jeff Bach  on  02/26  at  07:43 AM

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I agree wholeheartedly. There are a few other fringe players, like Toshiba’s HD on a standard (red) DVD, and the VMD standard pushed out of China, but they are irrelevant to the production community.

I noted as much on my very similarly themed article on this, written about the same time:
http://techthoughts.org/2008/02/27/hd-dvd-dead-lets-move-on/

Posted by Anthony Burokas  on  03/01  at  05:48 AM

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