DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Okay. So “weekly” news roundup has somehow turned into a “monthly” one, and that, I can assure you, is not a permanent change. However, this doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy making 4K trailers, some Star Wars stuff, and even this music video for ‘Joker’ (highly recommended). As always, check our Twitter feed for updates, happenings, and going-ons.

And yes, I promise I will start writing a bit more news (a bit more as in more than nothing), which is why I’m here today. But don’t get your hopes up, there’s only one thing to talk about this week.

After months of no news, we suddenly have lots of it about Sony’s next game console, unofficially dubbed the PS5.

First of all, it now has an official name: PS5. Not much of a surprise there. Slightly surprising, given the lack of it on any incarnations of the PS4, is the including of 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray playback. Finally, I hear you say. And you’d be right, because Sony gambled that 4K discs wouldn’t take off and they were wrong. While 4K UHD Blu-ray hasn’t replaced standard Blu-ray, but it’s built itself a nice niche and sales have been relatively strong for such a new format. 4K streaming has been doing well too, but it seems most people still prefer to get 4K from discs.

The problem is that high-quality 4K takes a long time to download, or a very fast connection to stream. And I’m not even counting Netflix 4K as high-quality 4K, because compared to 4K discs and on a large high-quality screen, you can easily see the difference (same with YouTube – the 4K trailers I upload are nowhere near as nice when played back there, compared to my original MKV versions – you can download some of these 4K trailers for yourself and compare). The same problem is happening with games that are getting bigger and bigger, which is why Sony has opted to include a BD-XL drive in the PS5 that will allow game developers to put more on a single disc (100GB vs 50GB). Gamers can still download games, but Sony is introducing a new feature where they only need to download a part of the game to get started, with other parts downloading when needed.

Also announced are some important changes to the new DualShock controller for the PS5 (DualShock 5?), including haptic feedback, haptic trigger buttons and, finally, a USB-C charging port.

Sony also confirmed that ray-tracing support will be in hardware form as opposed to software. Interesting ammunition for the next console wars (assuming the next Xbox doesn’t also do hardware ray-tracing), and for those that are completely invested in gaming graphics.

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And that’s it for the week. Hopefully, there will be more news next week. For Star Wars geeks like myself, you might be interested to know that there’s a good chance the new Rise of Skywalker trailer might be coming on Monday during Monday Night Football. If not this Monday, then the next one for sure. Excited!

And we’re back! Quite a few things have happened since the last WNR, and I know I promised to keep this thing regular, but sometimes everything else seems to just get in the way. No more promises though, but I will try my best in the future.

If you’re an Aussie and you like the sort of things I like, then you would have been ecstatic about the news of Disney+ coming down under, and for the really good price of $8.99 (that translates to less than the US pricing of $6.99).

What’s more, with Disney’s fan event, the D23 Expo, happening just a short while after the pricing announcement, Disney used the event to give fans even more information about the service.

We got trailers for the new Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian (and the trailer looked fantastic – if the show if half as good, it will be epic), original films Lady and the Tramp and Noelle. There was also a bunch of announcement for new Marvel shows, and a big one, Ewan McGregor coming back as Obi-Wan in a new TV series.

From a technical standpoint, there was also some exciting news that all Disney+ accounts will have access to 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. This makes Disney+ by far the cheapest streaming plan to included these advanced features, $9 per month cheaper than the Netflix plan with the equivalent feature.

Those in the U.S. can also bundle Disney+ with Hulu and ESPN+ for only $12.99 per month, saving almost $5.

With so much enticing content, a great price and unexpected feature-set, it looks like Disney is very very serious about going head to head with Netflix. All the talk about Disney+ not being a competitor for Netflix (and most of that talk is coming from Disney, which is telling) is technically correct, but with Hulu under its wings, there’s no reason, from a content point of view, that Disney can’t take on Netflix.

It will be good news for us consumers, not so much Netflix shareholders, I think.

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And in the near future, when you’re watching a 4K Disney+ stream on your new TV, you might notice that there might be a new mode on your TV called ‘Filmmaker Mode’. If you see it, you should enable it.

Announced this week by the UHD Alliance, along with CE partners Panasonic, LG and VIZIO and along with the Directors Guild of America and The Film Foundation, Filmmaker Mode will be a shortcut that turns off all the post-processing features on the TV that distracts from the film-watching experience. You know the ones – motion smoothing, the over-sharpening and unnatural colour corrections, and when combined, makes movies look more like daytime soap operas.

But now, with just one setting, you can watch the film as the filmmakers intended, with the right colour reproduction, and more importantly, the right framerate.

The new mode seems to be made for UHD Blu-ray discs, but there’s no reason why it can’t be used for streaming as well. So there won’t be any more excuses for films to be played back with the soap opera effect turned on. No excuses!!

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That’s it for the week. Back to making trailers for me. Until next time!

Welcome back to the WNR. Sorry for the long break, but we finally have some worthy news stories to talk about, and so here we are.

Regular readers will know how we big up streaming here, and not just because we also run an Australian news site that’s dedicated to the topic of streaming.

But you have to be living under a rock to not notice that streaming is taking over everything, but sometimes some solid stats go a long way to paint a full picture of what’s happening.

That data has been recently provided by analytics firm Conviva, and it shows that streaming media consumption has double over the last year in the United States.

The consumption was led by Roku users, who helped to drive up the adoption of Internet-connected TVs by 143% and accounted for 43% of all connected TV viewing measured by Conviva. Roku themselves are seeing a period of strong growth, with the service now having more than 30 million subscribers.

Adoption of Amazon Fire TV devices also growing strongly over the last year, up 145% and now accounting for 18% of connected viewing.

Here in Australia, our one and only cable TV operator has finally embraced streaming and have started to bundle Netflix with their subscriptions (despite the fact that it tried to launch its own streaming platform). And with broadband speeds increasing and bandwidth costs decreasing all the time, streaming just make more and more sense.

With that said, and this is from my first-hand experience with uploading 4K trailers, we are still dealing with huge files and that it’s going to take a while before we reach mainstream adoption. For one, YouTube’s bitrate of choice for 4K content is only around 13 Mbps (and that’s using the not so efficient VP9 codec, instead of HEVC), and that’s not really enough. But any higher, the number of people able to watch 4K quickly drops from an already small pool of users actively looking for 4K content. So until people can comfortably stream a 30+ Mbps stream and still be able to use their connections for other things, 4K adoption (despite the huge number of 4K or at least 1440p capable devices, including most phones and tablets and TVs sold these days) will be bottlenecked. Let’s not even think about 8K for now.

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Disney’s acquisition of Fox is a bold and potentially profitable move for the Mickey Mouse company. But not right now though, because Disney has been surprised at just how much Fox Studios is underperforming right now, with projected profits turning into losses for the last quarter.

The box office for Dark Phoenix was much less than expected, and none of Fox’s other movies also did well enough. The rest of 2019 looks a bit brighter with Ford v Ferrari and Ad Astra, but these are hardly locked in winners.

So if anything, the sale of Fox to Disney came at the right time for the former News Corp studio. Maybe at the right time for Disney as well. Not so much for Fox’s release slate, since Disney is already doing pretty well this year with over $8 billion in box office takings, but as a way to acquire a great back catalogue of titles to fill their Disney+ and Hulu content libraries.

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That’s all I have for you this week. Until next time!

Welcome back to another edition of the WNR. Hope you’ve been keeping busy? I’ve been busying myself with this and that, include a few more trailers since we last talked (Spies in Disguise, Mulan, Onward, Playing with Fire, the hugely popular Top Gun: Maverick, and the stuff nightmares are made of in the form of the new trailer for Cats).

Please, Hollywood, stop making human-animal CGI hybrids. Learn the lessons from the Sonic trailer, I beg of you!

Oh yes, the news.

Google’s DMCA take-down regime is in the news again, this time it has been co-opted by pirates and scammers to their own advantage. Apparently, people are pretending to be rights-holders and submitting fake take-down notices, to remove the URLs of competitor sites. One person recently pretended to be the MPAA to take down links from a Turkish piracy site.

It’s possible that it’s other piracy sites that are doing this, in order to knock off competitors and increase their own rankings. It could also be scammers trying to do the same thing.

And all of this is possible because Google often does not verify the identities of those submitting DMCA notices, and so anyone could pretend to be a rights-holder and get their submissions approved, as long as the sites they’re removing are genuine piracy sites.

Things are getting more difficult for Netflix. Not only is Disney+ on the way Warner Media has now also decided to launch their own streaming platform, combining HBO’s premium content with Warner’s vast library to form HBO Max.

Unlike the much cheaper Disney+, HBO Max goes for the other end of the market and will be priced higher than Netflix (and Disney+ combined). The premium-ness of HBO is the main reason for the higher price, although one could argue that shows like ‘Stranger Things’, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘When They See Us’ has the budget and quality to out-HBO HBO. It’s an interesting pricing strategy, but one that I’m not sure would work.

It’s also not great news for us consumers. HBO Max will increase fragmentation in a market that’s already becoming far too fragmented. With Disney (and Fox) pulling their stuff from Netflix, and now Warner possibly doing the same, it means you now have to subscribe to yet another service if you don’t want to miss out on some of the best content.

But it’s undoubtedly worse news for Netflix, and the most recent results for the company showed it actually went backward when it came to domestic (U.S.) subscriber numbers (our sister site Streambly will have more on this soon). This, coupled with ballooning content acquisition and production costs, means Netflix has some important decisions to make on what kind of service it wants to be.

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And that’s it for the week. Excuse me while I go and meditate to try and get the disturbing pictures of human-cat hybrids out of my mind. Until next time …

So Digital Digest turned 20 this week. Being a major milestone, I made extra effort to ensure that I won’t forget the anniversary like how I’ve forgotten virtually every single one before. And I didn’t forget it, having remembered two whole days before the auspicious date.

Which means that I didn’t really have enough time to plan anything, despite the fact that I had been thinking about doing something ever since I realised, last July 4th, that this year was going to be the 20th (I did have time to design a new logo though). And this is also why I’ve decided to celebrate our 20th not just on one day, but throughout the year. That should give me more time to get my sh*t together!

So we’ll have special articles, some prize giveaways, and whatever I can think of in between.

Oh yes, the news (as in the singular version of the word).

Over the years, especially the last decade or so, we’ve reported on a lot of copyright-related lawsuits, and so on the 20th anniversary, it seems appropriate to report on yet another one, this time against streaming operator SET TV.

Florida based SET TV offered for sale devices pre-loaded with apps that potentially allowed users to access pirated content, including via their own subscription service that promised hundreds of channels of content for a small fee. While SET TV marketed their device and service as legal, the fact that the fee was so small for so much content, meant that something wasn’t quite right.

And that something, according to Amazon, Netflix and several Hollywood studios, is piracy.

While SET TV was prepared to fight the case early on, it appears that money ran out, especially after the 90 million dollar judgement against them from a lawsuit brought forward by cable operator Dish, and now a new default judgement has been handed down against SET TV, despite the fact that the outfit no longer operating.

So it’s more money awarded to rights-holders and against SET TV that SET TV probably has no means to pay. But that was never the point – it was always about putting on a show of force, to scare others into line. It’s also to set an example so that their lobbying efforts in D.C. will have more teeth to it. Will it work? Well, the fact that I’ve probably written several dozen of these stories about “won lawsuits” over the last couple of years, and the amount of help the likes of the MPAA gets from the government, combined that with the fact that there have never been more piracy sites out there suggests that this strategy has some flaws.

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And on that rant, that’s the end of this pretty quiet week. Bound to be more next week, starting with a story that Netflix’s 4K encryption might have also have some flaws. Until then …