Ever since Steve Jobs launched the new Apple Laptops at a special event in Cupertino recently, one story has done the rounds with quite a degree of ferocity, and it has nothing to do with the Notebooks that were released. During the Q&A session afterwards, when asked why there were no Blu-Ray drives in the new notebooks Steve Jobs responded by saying that currently Blu-Ray was “a bag of hurt”. This comment has unsurprisingly been seized upon by many and twisted and contorted to mean a dozen different things. Once again, though, the dialog surrounding this has shown that there is quite a lot of misinformation floating around in cyberspace about Blu-Ray and this gave the format’s detractors another opportunity to jump on their collective soap boxes spread the myths about the format, most of which are simply not true. In light of this what follows is a look at some of the most common perceptions about Blu-Ray and why they’re wrong.
Myth 1: Blu-Ray is failure.
Despite what you may have read, Blu-Ray has already been a great success. The format is growing at 6 times the rate at which DVD grew when it entered the market a decade ago. Disk sales continue to show significant growth and Blu-Ray disks regularly enter Amazon’s top ten for sales of all formats. So why then are there so many stories out there telling of the imminent demise of an otherwise successful format? I suspect that the rise of blogs as the primary source of news in the technology sector has lead to a huge amount of FUD circulating as fact. People writing about the format wars, without any kind of accreditation or support for their theories, set arbitrary benchmarks for what they see as success and the rest of the news media picks up on it without questioning what are pretty flakey conclusions in the first part. People are claiming it is a failure because it is not outselling DVD. But DVD has a huge installed base and huge back catalogue. Someone, somewhere decided that in order for Blu-Ray to be considered successful it should have taken the lead in sales from DVD virtually overnight which is a ridiculous assumption, and yet it seems to have entered the consciousness of analysts, the mainstream media and the general public. If you consider that Blu-Ray has only had the support of all major studios for less than a year, then the growth it has achieved in that time is remarkable. Currently Blu-Ray stands at 12% of total disk sales and continues to grow. It really baffles me as to how people can consider Blu-Ray a failure at this point.
Myth 2: Blu-Ray has highly restrictive DRM.
When most people think of DRM they think of something like the iTunes store and the content that you buy from that. This kind of DRM limits the playback of content to a limited number of computers or devices and prevents you from transcoding to another format. With digital downloads, you can not lend your movies to a friend, or play back on anything other than your authorized devices, and you need to be connected to the internet to authorize a device in the first place. Blu-Ray has gotten a lot of bad press about what people call it’s highly restrictive DRM, but compared to the DRM on digital downloads this is complete nonsense. Blu-Ray’s DRM, unlike that of downloads is more concerned with copy protection rather than restricting playback. Much like your DVD player, Blu-Ray has encryption on the disk to prevent you from copying or ripping that disk.
Blu-Ray uses a more complex scheme to prevent copies being made and has some additional layers of copy protection. For example it will only play over HDMI to an authorized screen on the other end. This is basically to stop you recording the output from the HDMI. What you can do on Blu-Ray is take the disk and put it in any other Blu-Ray player and it will play. There’s no authorization, no limit on the number of players etc. So from this perspective it’s not nearly as restrictive as digital downloads. Unless you’re trying to copy disks, modify your player or do some other thing you’re not supposed to be doing, the DRM on Blu-Ray will never effect the normal user.
Myth 3: OS X Will need a deep system level re-write to support Blu-Ray.
I’ve seen this one pop up quite frequently in comments and stories ever since Steve made his now infamous “bag of hurt” comment. I really don’t know where this came from but unfortunately it seems to be gaining traction. This is complete and utter nonsense. Blu-Ray players have existed on many PC’s for quite some time now, and use independent player software that has no official support from vista or requires the OS to be specially written for it to work so why should OS X be any different? A player should work as Software on OS X just like it does on other platforms and shouldn’t be technically that big an issue.
Myth 4: Digital Downloads will kill Blu-Ray.
This is another one that prevails all of blog space. Unfortunately, just like the other myths I’ve mentioned here, it doesn’t hold much water. First of All, growth of Blu-Ray has far far outpaced digital downloads. Secondly, The number of people with access to Blu-Ray far outweighs the number of people with access to digital downloads. The quality of digital downloads is terrible compared to that of Blu-Ray and as I’ve already mentioned the DRM on digital downloads is far more restrictive. Couple that with the fact that most digital services are only offering HD Content for rental and even then the studios are heaping more restrictions on top of that such as the iTunes store’s month long delay before a movie can be rented. On top of that outside of the USA most broadband providers cap the monthly download allowance of their subscribers and even within the us some providers are starting to impose monthly limits. The broadband industry is moving in the opposite direction of the movie download industry, and the movie studios are using the burgeoning digital download market to impose some fairly strict restrictions on who can view what they perceive as “their” content. Combine all these factors and physical formats aren’t going any where any time soon.
There’s another way to look at this too. People keep making the comparison, naturally enough to music downloads, but the market for music and the market for movies is completely different. People like to collect movies. They want the special features. They want the collectors editions. True movie buffs often have several versions of a movie and cherish the rare special “directors arm chair special edition special cut forth take rewrite that was only released in japan for one month”. Even in the mainstream, downloads just don’t cut it. For casual viewing and rentals it makes sense. But how many people have bought DVDs and given them to a friend or family member to watch. For the average joe or josephine who isn’t a techno-geek the idea that you can’t do this is completely alien and shocking to them. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to explain to some, less than technology-savvy friends, that I’m afraid they can’t borrow the movie I just downloaded movies d from iTunes.
I think digital downloads have a place for TV shows and Rentals. But for buying and collecting there is a long way to go before Blu-Ray or even DVD is ever threatened by downloading.
Myth 5: Blu-Ray is a proprietary Sony format.
Blu-Ray was developed by Sony, Panasonic and Philips. It is an open format in that anyone can license it. Sony does not control the technology and the main group responsible for the promotion of the format is not Sony, but the Blu-Ray Disk Association (BDA), of which Apple is a member.
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Blu-Ray is a fantastic and rapidly growing format. The reason that Apple has chosen not to include Blu-Ray in their notebooks at this time is far more likely to do with economic reasons than anything to do with the future viability of the platform. Even job’s own comments about licensing are a little dubious. It seems to me that Apple are waiting till Blu-Ray burners reach a low enough price for them to include a Blu-Ray option across the range. I will guarantee you that you will see Blu-Ray on the mac some time next year and when it is launched Apple will no doubt tout it as “the best format ever”.
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