DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

I’m nearly through with my annual The Wire re-up, so I haven’t been watching much Netflix recently (as my bandwidth usage graphs will attest to). If you haven’t watched the show, I highly recommend it (just don’t give up until you’ve finished the first season, but I suspect you’ll be hooked around episode 6 or so, or it’s not the show for you). I don’t want to be one of those people that annoy others by evangelizing The Wire, but the show is so good that you feel others are missing out (and most that have been told about it have been “converted”, after the obligatory “nothing happens” statement after watching the first couple of episodes).

Oh yes, the WNR. Here we go.

For those lucky enough to get a pair of Google Glasses, here’s a tip: don’t wear them to the cinema unless you want to get interrogated by Homeland Security. What started out like one of those Internet tales that eventually gets disproved on Snopes has been confirmed to be totally true (by the theater chain, the MPAA and ICE), a story in which an Ohio man (and his wife) were pulled midway out of a viewing session, detained and questioned for more than an hour on the suspicion that his (turned off) Google Glasses were being used to record the movie.

This is despite the man explaining from the offset that the device had been turned off, and gave permission (or rather, pleaded) with the federal agent to check the contents on the Google Glass device and confirm that nothing had been recorded. The ICE Homeland Security agent was apparently asked to intervene in the matter by a MPAA rep present that day to monitor the screening of the popular (and popular piracy target) ‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’.

Wearers beware: Don’t wear your Google Glasses to the movie cinema

Instead, the man was interrogated for an hour and asked who he worked for, and funnily (although probably not to the man at the time), whether Google was employing him to record the movie. I know the MPAA (and by extension, ICE Homeland Security) has no love for Google , but this was a bit of a stretch.

For his troubles, the man and his wife were offered two free movie tickets by the MPAA rep by the MPAA rep so the couple could finally finish watching Shadow Recruit. Amazingly, The MPAA rep’s name was Bob Hope, a distant relative of the more famous Bob Hope (again, just to reiterate, this story is true). When the frustrated cinema patron, who only wanted an genuine apology instead of an explanation as to why he was targeted (due to the movie’s popularity, and the theater’s recent problems with piracy), did not seem placated by the two free tickets, two more free tickets were offered. The man was now infuriated.

You can read the entire description of the ordeal on The Gadgeteer website, where the story was first published. Scroll down to read the updates too, which includes confirmations from ICE Homeland Security of the incident.

Incidentally, a cam’d copy of Shadow Recruit made its way onto the usual places roughly around the same time. Presumably one now recorded on a Google Glass device. So the record for Shadow Recruit goes Pirates 1, MPAA 0, Poor Google Glass Guy (and his wife) -999.

The BDA, that’s the Blu-ray Disc Association, has approved plans to expand the Blu-ray specifications to include support for 4K UltaHD content. A task force consisting of 17 members, including Technicolor, Dolby, Fox, Disney and Sony, has been asked to come up with the final specifications for Blu-ray 4K. The changes could include more than just a larger capacity disc and a new video codec, and other improvements such as support for higher framerates could be introduced (finally allowing The Hobbit films to be shown in HFR 3D at home).

One of the proposed changes could see the introduction of 10, 12 and 16-bit deep color encodings. One company working on this claims to have developed an algorithm that allows for deep color encodings without an increase in bandwidth, and the finished output would also be backwards compatible. Studios would need to update their encoding technology, and Blu-ray players will also need to be updated to take advantage, but with the 4K specifications meaning changes are coming anyway, it might be a case of killing two birds with the same stone.

Netflix within 6 months of breaking 50 million user barrier

A disc based approach to 4K is still the best way to go for now, in my opinion. That’s not to say that streaming based 4K, which was a highlight of CES, doesn’t have its place. It’s certainly where Netflix thinks subscriber growth will come from in the future, although they seem to be doing quite alright even without 4K. A new shareholder report revealed Netflix’s total subscriber figure rose by 10% in the last three months of 2013 alone, with the company now having 44 million subscribers. I would gather the attention that original programming has garnered, via award nominations and wins, has contributed heavily to the growth figures. Despite the high cost of production of these shows, the investment appears to be well worth it, with net profit for the company up dramatically as well during the last quarter.

Netflix also commented on the recent Net Neutrality ruling. Netflix probably has the most to lose from the ruling, and the company is calling on ISPs to act responsibility. Netflix says ISPs should adopt a voluntary code of conduct on the matter, although they also believe that no ISP is stupid enough (in my words, not theirs) to do anything too “draconian” (their words, not mine). If ISPs start to get too “aggressive”, Netflix still wants the government to intervene via new regulations. You can read the shareholder report here.

Shameless plug time: Click here to sign up to Netflix, get a month long free trial and help me make a few bucks!

As promised last week, we take a slightly more detailed look at the NPD results for December in this week’s WNR, now that more numbers have been made available. As mentioned in the last issue, the Xbox One was the best selling non-portable console for the month (the best selling console being the DS, which sold over a million units). The PS4 was not that far behind though.

The Xbox One was the most popular console in the US for December

With 908,000 units sold compared to the PS4’s 860,000, the Xbox One did well to follow up on November’s 909,000 units sold – that’s 1.8 million in about five or six weeks of sales, which is not bad at all. Globally, the PS4 still has a comfortable sales lead though.

If we count the Wii U as a next-gen console, then its 480,000 units sold means it is in a distant third place against the the two powerhouses from Microsoft and Sony. 480,000 is still the Wii U’s best month ever, but Nintendo would have expected more sales, particularly with the company’s consoles having a history of being a popular gift idea in holidays past.

Data provided by Microsoft also showed that the Xbox 360 sold 643,000 units, far ahead of the PS3’s 299,000. The PS3’s low number can be explained by the smaller difference in pricing between it and Sony’s next-gen offering compared to the Microsoft offerings (the Xbox 360 was available for cheaper than the PS3, and competes with Microsoft’s own Xbox One, which is $100 more expensive than the PS4). It seems PS4 sales may be cannibalizing PS3 sales in a more dramatic way than the Xbox One is doing to the Xbox 360.

Regardless, sales of both of the older consoles seems to have more than halved compared to just a year ago, which is making game publishers worried about the continued viability of both platforms, according to analyst Michael Pachter. This is why Wedbush Securities’s Pachter believes a price cut could be coming for both the Xbox 360 and PS3 in February, a move pushed through by publishers concerned that holidays 2014 could be one where the Xbox 360 and PS3 are no longer relevant.

The good news, Pachter says, is that both Microsoft and Sony can afford a price cut due to the ever decreasing cost of manufacturing.

I think a price cut could be a good thing, but I don’t know if publishers are so concerned as to start “threatening” Sony and Microsoft for a price cut. There are already a hundred something million PS3s and Xbox 360s being owned by people right now, and I don’t see how adding a couple of extra million via a price cut will help the situation all that much. Besides, if people are abandoning their PS3/360 for a PS4/XB1, then that’s a good thing isn’t it? PS4/XB1 games will be more expensive, and so publishers should be able to make more money (assuming production costs are similar).

Surprisingly, here in Australia, prices have already started dropping (I say surprisingly because we seem to overpay for everything here). The lowest Xbox 360 price I’ve seen is $USD 130, $USD 165 for the PS3. So there’s definitely room for US pricing to drop.

And while there’s plenty of room left to write, I think I’ll end the WNR right here for this week. Have a great one, and talk to you again soon.

How are you on this fine Sunday. Most of this WNR was written ahead of time as I went sand crab catching on Saturday. [INSERT UPDATE ON HOW MANY CRABS WERE CAUGHT OR INSERT SOMETHING FUNNY IF NO CRABS WERE CAUGHT]. It was a very enjoyable, “and very rewarding”/”but not very fruitful” [DELETE AS APPROPRIATE], trip. So a short WNR, but still with a few interesting tidbits to go through. Let’s get started.

Common sense tells us that graduated response, or three-four-or-however-many strikes, hasn’t really worked as a piracy deterrent. Or as a way to promote the purchase of legitimate content. It’s common sense because many countries, like France, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea, have had their own regimes for a while now, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of noise regarding their effectiveness, even from the most biased sources. It is also common sense to us because we’re not idiots.

At the same time, there has been many studies that point out the ineffectiveness of three-strikes. The latest one comes from Australia’s Monash University. A new paper by Dr Rebecca Giblin finds that graduated response has failed in the three key areas that it was designed to have an effect in. Namely, reduced infringement, to promote the purchase of legitimate content, and to promote the creation and distribution of new content. The study found little evidence, if any, that graduated response has had a positive effect in any of these three key areas.

Three, or however many, strikes doesn’t work to stop piracy, encourage legal purchases, or the creation of new content, a new study finds

It doesn’t reduce infringement because people can simply use another method to download their movies and TV shows, one that is not monitored by three-strikes. It doesn’t promote the purchase of legitimate content because of the previous point, and also because it doesn’t really solve any of the issues that encourages people to pirate (namely price, availability, usability). This is all fairly obvious to anyone who just thinks a little bit about the problem with piracy. In that piracy isn’t a problem of enforcement, it’s an issue of convenience and pricing. And effective enforcement was never really going to be possible anyway, not without a herculean effort that would fail even the most optimistic cost/benefit analysis, and at the same time, shred our privacy rights.

Simply stated, graduated response doesn’t work. It’s a waste of money, and it unnecessarily reduces our right to privacy and due process. But it’s considered a panacea among the pro-copyright lobby, so expect more countries to adopt this in the near future.

The only thing more pointless than graduated response, and more dangerous, may be search engine censorship. And in an effort to hold the fort against the mounting pressure from copyright holders to start messing around with search results, Google has released a report detailing the company’s anti-piracy principles and the successes in fighting the good fight.

Other than the usual self propelled back patting, the report does state quite clearly what methods the search engine giants thinks is most effective in reducing online piracy. It starts with the perfectly reasonable call for better legitimate alternative to piracy, more of your Netflixes and Spotifys, and in a somewhat transparent gesture of self promotion, Google Play and YouTube. The rest of the report simply states Google’s anti-piracy efforts, including the 4 million DMCA takedown requests the company has to deal with every week, as well as efforts in shutting down revenue sources for pirates.

An interesting read, no doubt. But will it placate the copyright lobby and their political servants? Probably not, but it was worth a shot anyway.

I mentioned a couple of months ago that the BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) has been investigating the potential for 4K movies to be distributed via Blu-ray discs. New rumors suggest that a positive announcement from the BDA on this is not too far away. Adding fuel to the fire is this story about a German Blu-ray disc manufacturer announcing a new line of triple-layer 100GB Blu-ray discs, and their press release specifically mentions 4K as one of the intended uses.

Could existing Blu-ray players be made capable of reading 100GB triple-layer discs containing 4K content? Does it even matter, as these players may not be powerful enough to decode 4K content anyway …

100GB should be more than enough for 4K movies, especially if it uses the new H.265/HEVC codec (but even with H.264/AVC, 100GB should be enough). The big question is whether these new discs would be compatible with existing Blu-ray players, perhaps after an obligatory firmware update. However, new players will probably have to be produced to support 4K output and support for H.265/HEVC, and older players may lack the processing grunt to handle the decoding anyway; so having these discs be readable by older Blu-ray players may be somewhat pointless (although being able to downscale Blu-ray 4K content to 1080p would be a very nice feature to have for existing Blu-ray owners, and will no doubt help push Blu-ray 4K sales at a time when 4K TVs are still too expensive).

The other main advantage of backwards compatibility is that with the PS4 and Xbox One both having Blu-ray drives, and both capable of outputting at 4K resolutions, these would instantly become the Blu-ray 4K players of choice in the same way the PS3 was the Blu-ray player of choice back when Blu-ray first launched. Stay tuned to this space.

If any of this is true, it would definitely keep Blu-ray relevant in the 4K era. I know Sony, of all people, are going down the disc-less route in terms of 4K, but discs are still the most efficient way to transmit the large amounts of data required by 4K right now. That will change with the increase penetration of fiber based broadband, but this could take years. And we’ll probably have the bandwidth hogging holographic TV to worry about by then!

The August NPD report has been released. The Xbox 360 was once again the most popular home based console for the month of August 2013 for the US market. This is the 32nd time in a row that Microsoft’s console has won the accolade.

GTA V will be occupying most of my free time over the next couple of weeks, I suspect

However, only 96,000 Xbox 360s were sold, only half of what it was a year ago. This is the first time in a long time that the Xbox 360 has sold less than 100,000 units in a given month, and the fact that it was still the best selling out of the other home based consoles, tells a rather unfortunate story. Still, with only months left before the Xbox One and PS4 are on the market, the low hardware sales are to be expected. GTA V’s release this month will boost hardware sales when the NPD releases its report this time next month though.

Speaking of GTA V, I’ve pre-ordered my copy (despite the fact that the pre-ordering phenomenon is directly incentivizing the video game industry’s many bad habits these days – but I just can’t say no to a GTA game). I doubt I’ll have time to play it until next weekend, so please do not expect a surprisingly wordly edition of the WNR next week. It ain’t gonna happen!

That’s it for the week. I’m off the enjoy a nice dinner that includes crabs/no crabs [DELETE AS APPROPRIATE]. See you next week.