HomeWeekly News Roundup (4 January 2009)
Welcome to the first WNR of 2009. Hope your NTE celebrations were a riot, not literally like the house down the street from my place, but even so, I hope the police dogs didn’t bite too hard. I spent NYE being sick, probably the flu, and that totally ruined my evening of sitting on the couch and watching the fireworks on TV.
It’s still a relatively quiet week, although there are signs that the hangover is nearly over and that reporters are coming back to work. I might make some 2009 predictions/wishes if there’s not enough news.
Let’s start the new year with some copyright news. The MPAA’s attempt the “plug the analogue hole” has meant resistance from the general public (no surprise), but now also meets the disapproval of the FCC Chairman. The good old MPAA, making enemies everywhere in 2008 and now in 2009 too.
That’s it for copyright news though. Told you it was slow. As for a prediction, or perhaps more precisely, a wish for 2009: I wish that DRM will die a horrible death, just like it did with MP3s, but this time for video and gaming. But I think this will only happen when a legitimate online delivery system is in place so the content owners can be happy with the extra revenue to not worry so much about DRM. There are a couple of important court cases that may come to a conclusion this year too, and the verdicts will determine largely how the copyright industry proceeds from this point.
In High Definition news, The Dark Knight continues to be the week’s top seller, outselling the new release The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor by a 3 to 1 margin on Blu-ray. Warner’s catalogue title sale has meant that the top 20 titles by BD/DVD sales ratio has all been taken up by these titles. Could this be a sign of Blu-ray’s imminent conversion to a mainstream format? Or were these titles just really bad DVD sellers that have found some new life on Blu-ray?
Speaking of The Mummy movie, has anyone else noticed how too many of Brendan Fraser’s movies take place underground or involves being underground? “Encino Man” as frozen caveman buried in backyard; The Mummy movies of course; “Blast from the Past” buried in an underground bunker; “Journey to the Center of the Earth” obviously; “Bedazzled” where he makes a deal the Devil, who lives underground … there are also a few movies where he dies at the end, so technically, that’s going under ground too.
Blu-ray and DVD price breakdown
Anyway. A recent survey shows that Blu-ray buyers are still buying DVDs in droves, thanks to DVD’s lower pricing. There’s a nice graph in the article, where it shows that 66% of Blu-ray movies sold are over $20, whereas 83% of DVDs sold are under $20. If there’s any other way to show where the buying demographic for both formats differ, I would like to see it.
LG had spiced up its Blu-ray player lineup by adding CinemaNow and YouTube support. Not long ago, Samsung released a Blu-ray player with Netflix support as well. As I have mentioned many times before, but possibly on the forum, is that the processing power these Blu-ray players have, plus the Internet connection capability in Profile 2.0 players, means that these players are ideally suited for online movie streaming. Digital distribution is coming, and that’s a prediction for 2009 that I have confidence in. To further drive the point, Toshiba is backing distributing movies on memory cards, some of which have now exceeded the size of single layer Blu-ray, is re-writable and does not require special and expensive drives to read/copy discs. Downloads kiosks are being set up in stores where thousands of movies can be downloaded onto memory cards, like an alternative to iTunes or online downloading. While the movies are SD for now, Toshiba says HD is coming and so are set-top boxes to view them on. What chances that LG and Samsung will be one of the first to jump on the bandwagon and offer a Blu-ray player that also plays these types of movies?
NCR's DVD dispensing kiosk - USB memory drive version coming soon
I’m a big supporter of digital movie distribution, where the media is only important for holding the data, not as a format unto itself. Why does it matter if the movies comes on Blu-ray, or DVDs, or USB memory drives or even by carrier pigeons? It’s the digital data that’s important, and everything would be a lot easier if my movie collection was purely digital, and I can select and watch my movie collection without having to find the disc, pop it out, insert it into the player, wait for it to load, and then when I’m finished, put the disc back to where it belongs again. Then there’s the sorting, and possibly using software to categorize it, which is time consuming. With a digital library, I can do all of that at the click of a few buttons, and with an Internet connection, I have thousands of more movies available to buy instantly as opposed to shopping online or going to the shops and hoping they have the movie in stock. So I hope in 2009 we’ll see more movement towards this eventual goal. And despite what people are saying, Blu-ray is not under threat at all yet from this because HD movie delivery still requires more bandwidth being available, and a disc format will still be needed, just like USB memory drives (or carrier pigeons), in this digital future.
Asus HDAV 1.3 will support Dolby TrueHD bitstreaming
Another LG innovation is the 480 Hz TV. I don’t know what watching Blu-ray will be like on such a TV, and I would like to find out. As long as it doesn’t have TruMotion or whatever LG calls their in-between animation technology, because they make movies look freakishly smooth. Judder is natural to film content and it should be present. Telecine Judder (from 3:2 pulldown) due to uneven frame doubling is not natural though, and TVs that can refresh at 48, 72, 96, 120, 240 and now 480 Hz should eliminate one of the biggest problems with watching film content on HDTVs. Hopefully, Telecine Judder will be eliminated in 2009.
On the PC front, Asus has released the first sound card with Dolby TrueHD bitstreaming. ATI is doing good work with enabling HDMI on their graphics cards to also output digital audio, answering a question I posed many moons ago as to whether graphics card/chip manufacturers or sound card manufacturers will be responsible for the audio part of HDMI. Still, the progress has been slow and Blu-ray playback on PCs is still not the “must-have” feature that DVD playback was shortly after it came out. I expect more movement on this front in 2009, because the software players are already quite mature, and the emergence of a few free or open source tools for Blu-ray production, such as BD Rebuilder, could help to drive this segment of the market that I think the Blu-ray people have ignored against their own interests (just because all the PC companies supported HD DVD).
And finally in gaming, a new book reveals that the CPUs in the Xbox 360 and PS3 are actually cousins of sorts, and that Sony helped Microsoft develop the chip used in all Xbox 360’s, even if it wasn’t intentional.
The Xbox 360 has also been updated with a new 65nm GPU, as opposed to the hot 95nm GPU previously. The “Jasper” model of Xbox 360 is now available, and all Arcade models with built-in memory units are Jaspers. Pros/Premiums Jaspers are rare but they do exists, and even one of our forum members managed to get one without even deliberately trying. My prediction for 2009 is that I will get one of these, or whatever the next Xbox 360 model is, because an Xbox 360 without HDMI is just not right.
As for a larger picture prediction, it’s hard to see the PS3 not climbing in sales if the stories about it becoming cheaper to produce is true. Even a small price cut at this point will drive sales upwards by quite a bit, so if Sony can bite the bullet and compete on prices with the Xbox 360/Wii, then they can still win this generation’s console war. But there’s a little voice at the back of my head (and not just due to the fever I have) that reminds me of the story some time ago that said the PS3’s processor was great for a media player/hub, but not so much for a game console. Did Sony design the Cell intentionally for this, and are they paying the price for it now, along with the costly (in more than one sense of the word) Blu-ray drive?
Okay, that’s it for now. Back to bed for me for some much needed rest. See you next week.