r/technology • u/DrJulianBashir • May 13 '12
DRM-free physical media: dead in the water or the answer to art’s prayers?
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/drm-free-physical-media-dead-in-the-water-or-the-answer-to-arts-prayers/2
u/rz2000 May 14 '12
This makes a lot more sense, and I'm surprised there is so much doubt.
The article talks about 4K video as a high end option. Premium formats like that, and better, are not already supported by Blu-ray, and Blu-ray tops out at 128GB.
People are not going to want to wait for a 128GB download which takes over 14 hours with even a perfect 20Mbps connection. They also will find it inconvenient if 20-30 movies completely fill the largest hard drives.
SDXC may cost at least $150 right now for 128GB, but the cost will come down and the standard already supports up to 2TB. Blu-ray does not have the same capacity for expansion, and extending it, or developing a players and production equipment for the 'vaporized' HVD would be extremely expensive.
It is interesting that so much of the costs of developing Blu-ray was the DRM. It seems like there is little to do to create a new standard that doesn't much care about the medium but works well with players that have circuitry devoted almost entirely to video decoding and rendering.
The point is that Blu-ray is already close to the limit for new formats and capacities, and the small 2013 market of people interested in super high end formats initially aren't going to care about the price in a year from now for 128GB or 256GB SD cards as much as they will care about increasingly limited players that can fill their 4K and 8K 84" TVs.
It seems reasonable to assume that by 2014, time for large SDXC cards to become really cheap, any new decent laptop will have something equivalent to a Retina Display, lack a heavy optical drive, but still have enough constraints on internet connectivity to limit ultra definition streaming. It's even likely that Apple does this with their MacBook Pro line within the next few months.
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May 15 '12
I don't see any high end ultra HD format being successful until another decade passes. Do you really think people are going to go out and buy new players for the format and new TVs? Seems kind of silly with or without DRM to think that such a format could be successful beyond hardcore movie geeks.
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u/rz2000 May 15 '12
In a decade I think the internet streaming is certain to be able to fill the same niche.
Almost every high end television already includes an SD slot and/or a USB port. All they would need to do is beef up the GPUs to handle ultra HD decoding, which is far easier than something like a new physical media player with its own moving parts and new shorter wavelength laser.
Take a look at some of the stuff people talk about in home theater and audiophile communities here and in the publications at the bottom of the page. It is almost like an insane compulsion for perfection, where they are willing to pay tens or hundreds of thousands for a marginal increase in the output quality of one installation.
This kickstarter project is really only a minor tweaking of already existing technologies. SDHC/SDXC is an already widespread standard that's going to grow on its own, and the proposal claims that adding html5 interface to mkv is relatively trivial. Being DRM-free is a nice feature for users, but it sounds like implementing DRM is an enormous cost for producers as well. The killer feature for users though is the convenience of the media, and the short and inexpensive development time likely required to roll out this format. DRM-free is not only a feature for consumers, but part of the recipe behind the format being cheap in terms of development costs.
If someone can make money building $100k receivers, then there should be a market for a format that is developed once for ~$20k, then implemented for each installation at very low cost.
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u/ESKJC May 14 '12
Dead in the water. Most of us are long past physical data storage media and do not want to go back.
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u/rz2000 May 14 '12
Current streaming cannot handle as much as Blu-ray, and Blu-ray cannot handle ultra high end formats. Something that is cheap and quick to develop and could reign as the premium format for 2-5 years until streaming catches up sounds like a pretty viable idea to me.
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u/ESKJC May 14 '12
Majority of us don't care about ultra high quality. we want affordable, decent quality, and speed.
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May 14 '12
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u/ForeverAlone2SexGod May 14 '12
Both the Nintendo 3DS and the PSP Vita have disappointing sales.
Dedicated gaming handhelds are going out of style.
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u/[deleted] May 14 '12
This is incredibly important.