1 - Dolby Vision (my second player will be paired with an 83" LG G3 in a 5.1.2 living room) so while I know it won't really help current projectors I would like to extend my content to OLEDs. And theater sized OLEDs are right around the corner in price accessibility and theatre sizes.
2 - Integrated small SSD drive allowing "seed-to-start" movies (so based on your historical download speeds you could purchase a movie, let it d/l the first couple gigabytes ... you watch almost instantly while it downloads the rest in the background, Not streaming, like I said, seed-to-start). That small amount of storage would be coupled/meshed with Compact Terra in the background for seamless environment (which I understand it already is today) but giving you all the performance of SSD speed downloads at a lower cost (than a Prime SSD) and offloading to Compact Terra disk for long term storage in the background.
3 - Improved UI especially when paired with Prime servers. I am new so might be mistaken, but does movie wall only show movies that are downloaded to your system? With the "seed-to-start" and fiber gigabit-plus Internet these days (Google Fiber offers 8Gb in my market now, AT&T 5Gb) all movies you own should be on the wall (if they aren't already) because with that solution they would effectively be immediately available.
If there is an embedded SSD drive I would hope they start moving towards 10GbE because as I mentioned, 2.5GbE will be quickly surpassed especially if file sizes grow because of DV content.
Interesting ideas. Here are my thoughts.
1- No arguments here. DV is surely nice to have. I am not sure how easy or difficult it would be to add DV to their entire catalog. Dolby will surely charge some licensing fees. Maybe the already high K pricing will absorb this or we will see pricing increase.
2- Having some server functionality on each player will tax the overall system performance once you go above 4 ”new SSD” player and servers in one system. This has been discussed recently. There would be way too much background processing which will likely bottleneck at the CPU before any benefits from the SSD. Technically, HDDs in the Terra servers are fast enough to “seed-to-start”. What happens if you lose internet connectivity during the download? I believe K takes reliability a lot more seriously than speed. I am not sure if they would go for “seed-to-start” because of this.
3- This is a great idea and a terrible idea depending on how much invested you are in the K systems. With a complete library on the GUI and the ability to watch movies immediately (or in minutes as currently in), who will buy the big servers? I am pretty sure K’s main revenue is the hardware sales, not the content (at least not yet) We have many users here with multiple Terra servers. How will they feel when their servers tank in value overnight?
Besides the above (ethical) issue, this also conflicts with K’s reliability statement. When I see a movie on my GUI, I know it is ready to play in seconds and it will not be interrupted during its entire playback. Betting on movies not downloaded on your server is a high risk. It may get stuck on updating the movie guide, or K servers are experiencing heavy downloads, or your ISP is having issues, can K guarantee you can watch your movies in minutes every time?
Currently, 10Gbe adapters are power hungry and generate a ton of heat. SATA SSDs in the Terra Prime SSD will saturate a 5Gbe adapter but barely. I mean while at it, they should go SFP28 or SFP100? I am kidding
Sure, I will take any hardware upgrade if it won’t cost me more than what I need in terms of $$$, heat and power consumption.