Blu-Ray and Movie Downloads Can Co-Exist
With the recent demise of HD-DVD, the success of Blu-Ray as the next generation successor would seem assured, yet many pundits are wondering if the format has long term success. They quote recent reports that Blu-Ray will be superseded in the near term by high-def download services and that there isn’t really a future for the format. Yet despite these reports, Blu-Ray is starting to show significant traction. Samsung recently announced that they were significantly increasing their forecast for their Blu-Ray business. The argument against Blu-Ray is that with the music industry clearly going towards digital downloads the movie industry must surely follow suit. Yet there are some clear differences as to how both segments of the entertainment market work.
First of all there is the issue of DRM. The DRM on movie downloads is far stronger than that used on most music services. There is no way to burn your downloaded movie to a disk based format that you can easily play in a dvd or Blu-Ray player, in the same way as you can burn your downloaded music to a CD. When people purchase a dvd they often like to lend it to friends or family, but with downloaded movies this is out of the question. Even with Apple’s relatively liberal itunes downloads this is a big no. Generally people who purchase movies, buy them to keep, often getting collectors editions with extra features. These simply don’t exist yet on downloads, nor do the studios look set to include those in the future. Then there is the issue of storage. High-Def downloads take up a significant chunk of space. With Blu-Ray (or DVD) it’s simply a matter of taking it out of the player and putting it on a shelf. With downloads there are limited options available, especially if you want a large collection. You can back up to a hard drive, but how likely is it that the average consumer will an have external hard drive just for backing up, especially when they can just buy the movie on a disk which is, in a way self backed up. At the moment too, most high-def download services are locked into the box they download to, such as the xbox 360. Bandwidth is another major issue. Outside of the USA most broadband services have a monthly bandwidth allowance which at the moment averages around 30-40gb per month. A couple of high-def downloads and this is gone. Now with ISPs in the USA looking to introduce similar caps there the era of high-def downloads looks even further away.
The thing is, with music, downloading made it easier to listen to and collect music. Before the era of music downloading and the iTunes store, most people bough CDs and then copied then onto either cassettes or mini-disk to bring with them. Downloads made much more sense and work well for music. This is in stark contrast to DVD where the disk is still the primary playback mechanism. With Movies, owning and collecting is still easier with disks than downloading.
This isn’t to say that downloads don’t have a place. In fact Apple’s approach highlights the one area where digital downloads make perfect sense as a replacement for the current paradigm, that of rentals. With rentals you don’t care if you can not give the movie to friends to watch, or even if the DRM is so restrictive, because you generally watch it once and then delete it (or it deletes itself.) Online movie rentals remove the hassle of having to go to the store and then having your chosen movie be out. Once the movie studios accept the fact that this is the future it will take off and in a big way. Apple are certainly well poised to ride the wave providing the company and the studios can play nice, but they need to stop procrastinating and roll it out world wide.
As for Blu-Ray, it is already showing signs of success despite what the naysayers say. One of the biggest dvd sellers in Ireland, HMV, in their flagship store here in Dublin recently dedicated a whole aisle to Blu-Ray. If it is a success in a small country on the western border of Europe it can be a success anywhere. Despite initial concerns about Blu-Ray’s copy protection schemes (which has been greatly exaggerated by certain technology blogs) it is far less restrictive than any current download service. For someone who makes the conscious decision to buy a movie to own, not just to watch, having something physical to show for your hard earned cash is a far bigger pay off than some etherial collection of data you may accidentally erase. In fact the biggest competition to Blu-Ray at the moment is not Downloads but from DVD. The average consumer has trouble telling the difference. I strongly believe that this is why HD-DVD failed so miserably. Toshiba were selling the players to the lowest common demoting, the supermarket level consumer looking for a cheap player. An attempt to confuse people as to what they were buying might have worked well for player sales, but Joe Soap didn’t really understand what they were getting and ended up thinking of their HD-DVD players as just really good dvd players. Hence disk sales were abysmal.
While more and more high-def TV’s reach the hands of consumers and studios push more and more into the space, Blu-Ray will gain even greater traction in the market. The oft questioned decision by Sony to put a Blu-Ray drive into the PS3 now looks like a stroke of genius, with Blu-Ray driving sales of the PS3 and vice versa. Analysts who say Blu-Ray will fail because it’s dependent on the PS3, that the PS3 is somehow artificially propping up Blu-Ray sales are talking nonsense. Many people are buying the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player first and a games machine a distant second. Sony did such a good job of making the two aspects of the device seamless that it works perfectly to drive the format.
In the long run I see online rental services such as (primarily in fact) the Apple TV killing brick and mortar dvd rental stores, but disk based sales will be with us for some time to come. If the rumors of Apple adding Blu-Ray and DVR functionality to the Apple-TV ever come to fruition they could have a killer box on their hands. In the mean time, I’m more than happy with watching Blu-Ray movies on my PS3 and eagerly await the world wide roll out of online rentals for my Apple TV.
[tags] Apple, Sony, Blu-Ray, Technology, Downloads [/tags]
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