Wow... rough week. What's the future hold?

[ptrubey]

Yes, download seems to be the way to go. Companies like Vudu (which are now in the business of licensing their technology, HINT, HINT) have ever expanding SD and HD libraries. And frankly, the rental model works for me just fine. Only download to own would just restrict the size of the download library. And frankly a lot of movies aren't worth keeping. Finally, with something like Vudu that keeps a copy of the rental movie on the device hard drive, there isn't much of a difference between download to own and renting the cached copy of the movie every time you want to view it.

Given Blu-ray's managed copy idiocy, the market will move on. Internet based downloads (time to upgrade that Internet link!) or satellite based delivery will win out.

On satellite, by the way, imagine a system that broadcasts the entire library of movies 24x7 and the end user device stores these on a local hard drive array waiting to be unlocked with a purchase. Gets around bandwidth problems.

 

[Mr.Poindexter]

Thinking of the BluRay player, I imagine it would likely be software upgradeable when MC gets fully hashed out.

Think of the facts: it has the ability to read the disc and play back the stream and is still able to connect to the server. Only thing you need after that is software, which is upgradeable.

 

[cinelife]

That's the plan as I understand it (firmware upgradeable BR importing).

It also makes zero sense (IMO) to build a stand-alone BR player that would only add K's GUI to it's functionality. Considering the expected player costs (no, I do not have pricing I'm using "historical" data), and the number of alternative BR players already in the marketplace, it needs to be more.


Jim

 

[Mr.Poindexter]

I would expect the BR player would also function as a K-player for DVD content off the K system servers.

 

[brodricj]

Yes, download seems to be the way to go..

For the US market, maybe so. But what about the International market? Do you think I would be able to stream managed content through a K-system when it currently takes me about a minute, sometimes more, to download a 500kB size picture file? How much downloaded content would I get for my monthly 2GB download limit? Let's work the numbers, it would take me 1500 months to fill three 1TB discs in a fully loaded 1U K-server. That's 125 years!! I guess no need then to upgrade to the 2TB disc when it comes out, I don't think I'll be around for the 250 years it would take me to fill it up with downloaded content.

I hope K is mindful of many of their International customers before they abandon plans to keep doing things the way they presently do them, i.e. making a backup copy of content on an optical disc legally owned. Rather than take their system exclusely towards MC via download.

Or am I missing the point here? When you say downloaded content is the way to go, does that mean put an optical disc in a player, and use connection with the internet as a method of unlocking it. Or what?

For me download is definitely not the way to go.

 

[cinelife]

I would expect the BR player would also function as a K-player for DVD content off the K system servers.

Yes, it will.


Jim

 

[cinelife]

For the US market, maybe so. But what about the International market? Do you think I would be able to stream managed content through a K-system when it currently takes me about a minute, sometimes more, to download a 500kB size picture file? How much downloaded content would I get for my monthly 2GB download limit? Let's work the numbers, it would take me 1500 months to fill three 1TB discs in a fully loaded 1U K-server. That's 125 years!! I guess no need then to upgrade to the 2TB disc when it comes out, I don't think I'll be around for the 250 years it would take me to fill it up with downloaded content.

I hope K is mindful of many of their International customers before they abandon plans to keep doing things the way they presently do them, i.e. making a backup copy of content on an optical disc legally owned. Rather than take their system exclusely towards MC via download.

Or am I missing the point here? When you say downloaded content is the way to go, does that mean put an optical disc in a player, and use connection with the internet as a method of unlocking it. Or what?

For me download is definitely not the way to go.

I believe he is speaking of downloading a complete movie from an internet source, whether that be the studios directly, or some 3rd party licensed by the studios to do so.

You bring up a very good point regarding international K owners, and downloading in general. I still think it will happen eventually (downloading content as the norm), but we are still many years away from the infrastructure required for the studios to abandon disk based distribution, IMO.


Jim

 

[brodricj]

...and many more years away for International K-owners having the local broadband infrastructure available to get access to downloaded managed content. For now I'd settle on the K BR player just being able to down rez BR HD content to 480/576i SD and writing it to the server, along with a HD bit-for-bit copy of the soundtrack.

 

[cinelife]

Doubt you would ever see this, not even sure the BD spec would permit it.


Jim

 

[JerryL]

But the infrastructure for a relative few to adopt some kind of download setup? I think we're there for K clients. The data could download over night and perhaps K could setup multiple servers with a kind of bit torrent approach?

 

[Transepoch]

For now I'd settle on the K BR player just being able to down rez BR HD content to 480/576i SD and writing it to the server, along with a HD bit-for-bit copy of the soundtrack.

The only ways it could do this is to re-encode (ick) the film by claiming to be playing over a connection without HDCP, or break the encryption to pull out the SD copy for storage. We should be able to agree they will never take that latter route.

 

[JerryL]

...and many more years away for International K-owners having the local broadband infrastructure available to get access to downloaded managed content. For now I'd settle on the K BR player just being able to down rez BR HD content to 480/576i SD and writing it to the server, along with a HD bit-for-bit copy of the soundtrack.

You can do this now simply with DVD. I agree with the others, the BR consortium would not allow such a thing.

 

[rbienstock]

Just wait. Managed Copy won't be as bad as you think it is. Right not it isn't completely ready to implement, but it will be once it becomes mandatory in 2010. Just look at how long it took the rest of the Blu-Ray system to become stable. This will all turn out just fine. Actually the thing that worries me the most is that I am anticipating that the K Blu-Ray reader/player, when/if it is released, will simply be so expensive that no one will buy it. In the mean time, I have a fully loaded Sony ES Blu-Ray changer and another on order (yes, I have over 400 Blu-Ray movies).

 

[JerryL]

Can you provide some feedback on the blu ray changer please.

 

[rbienstock]

Can you provide some feedback on the blu ray changer please.

Well, they're changers and changers suck. They're slow to load and once they load, they just play the disk unlike the Kscape where playback is instant and you can bypass the BS on the disk and just play the movie. The user interface is also a mixed bag -- it is light years better than the interface on any previous Sony changer (all of which were completely useless), but it still isn't great. It is based on the PS3 vertical menu system and is quite hard to navigate and has no search function. So it is really a pain to use. On the other hand, for the first time Sony is using online lookup giving you cover art and data about the disk like actors, genre, etc. Maybe someday a company like Escient will build a better front-end for it. My other main complaint is no SACD support. I have another Sony changer dedicated to SACD playback that I would love to get rid of. I can't believe that Sony has so little regard for its own format. Still, both the PS3 and Oppo support SACD and BR, so you can still get that in a BR player. Also, other than no SACD support, the digital audio support on the Sony changer is great, and it plays back 192/24 LPCM at full resolution over HDMI so you can listen to the Neil Young box set with full quality (if your processor supports that).

I'm kind of weird about equipment in that I am completely willing to throw silly amounts of money at a system to get what I want, but I am also very reluctant to get something if I have a sense that it is not good value for money. So I had no problem spending nearly $30K to get my Kscape system in the first place, but I have resisted paying significantly less to upgrade my server from 5U to 3U even with the offer of free disks. But that's just me. So I was happy to spend $1,700 on this changer knowing that it had all the disadvantages that caused me to abandon changers in favor of the Kscape for DVD playback and also knowing that I might only use it for a limited period of time (because I do believe that Kscape support for Blu-Ray will happen someday). In part that was because I read here that at first the Kscape Blu-Ray unit would offer only playback, not ripping. I already have two stand-alone single disk Blu-Ray players (PS3 and Oppo) and would only consider the Kscape unit once ripping became available.