Blu-Ray's place in a movie download world

So Toshiba have announced they are going to terminate manufacture of HD DVD players. So the HD format war is pretty much over with Blu-Ray left standing. The future for digital downloads looks even more brighter and could even kill Blu-Ray, but not yet.

Our generation is now pretty much accustomed to downloading at the click of a mouse button.
This generation has nearly already abandoned CD’s, and physical media like DVDs and Blu-ray is inevitably next.

However, there are many people who buy DVDs by the millions and will likely buy Blu-Ray now that HD wars are over as generations before bought VHS. Substantial generations have grown up with physical media, and this isn’t about to change tomorrow.

Another aspect of why buying Blue-Ray won't disspear quickly is that many people do not want to watch movies on their computer and prefer to watch movies on their TV sets. I'm also in this way of thinking as my HD TV is a better experience that on my 17 inch Macbook Pro, although the TV set can't easily come to bed with me!

There are ways of brining digital downloads to TV sets, but none have anywhere near the penetration yet to offer a serious alternative to DVD and Blu-Ray. Apple is now offering HD movie downloads via their Apple TV box, but try and find more than a handful of people who own an Apple TV. Others offer a similar service such as Vudu, and there’s even Microsoft Media Center, and yet none are mainstream. Until such time net or network enabled devices become mainstream, TV and physical media will retain the upper hand.

There are also current Broadband limitations with many providers considering capping downloads on internet plans. The problem going forward is the days of cheap unlimited internet access may well be coming to an end as more and more download video and use P2P services.
The low cost of bandwidth itself was a historical quirk that came about due to the first dot com bubble. That extra remnant capacity is being used now, and the costs of increasing capacity will likely be passed on to consumers. If this means more capped internet plans that immediately puts a constraint on the amount of video that can be downloaded.

Outside of the United States this is already the case with capped plans in many countries, restraining potential growth in downloads (simply users will only be able to download so much content.)

Combine this with the need for high speed internet access that isn’t universally available.
Digital video will not become dominant where it takes hours, sometimes days to download, when users can simply rent or buy the title on physical media.

I’m all for the supremacy of digital downloads allowing streaming content from any computer in the house or NAS drive to main TV set or Apple TV. But people who have these gadgets in their home are in the vast minority. Blu-Ray will likely be the last big mainstream physical media technology ever and it will have a strong future. The various factors needed for mainstream digital downloading and viewing will eventually combine to finally kill Blu-Ray (and the domination of all physical media) sometime between 2010 and 2020.

Illegal downloaders 'face UK ban'

People in the UK who go online and illegally download music and films may have their internet access cut under plans the government is considering.

A draft consultation suggests internet service providers would be required to take action over users who access pirated material via their accounts.

But the government is stressing that plans are at an early stage and it is still working on final proposals.

Six million people a year are estimated to download files illegally in the UK.

Music and film companies say that the illegal downloads cost them millions of pounds in lost revenues.

The government proposals were first reported by the Times newspaper.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said that early drafts of the document had been circulated among stakeholders.

"The content and proposals for the strategy have been significantly developed since then and a comprehensive plan to bolster the UK's creative industries will be published shortly," it added.

"We will not comment on the content of the leaked document."

Voluntary scheme

The Times suggested that broadband firms which failed to enforce the rules could be prosecuted, and the details of customers suspected of making illegal downloads made available to the courts.

According to the Times, the draft paper states: "We will move to legislate to require internet service providers to take action on illegal file sharing."

Some of the UK's biggest internet providers, such as BT, Virgin and Tiscali have been in talks with the entertainment industry over introducing a voluntary scheme for policing pirate activity, but no agreement has been reached.

So far, they have failed to resolve how disputed allegations would be arbitrated - for example, when customers claim other people have been "piggybacking" on their internet service.

'No liability'

Technology that allows internet providers to monitor what content is being downloaded is becoming more effective, said James Bates, media director at consultants Deloitte.

"This is also likely to help accelerate the process of identifying pirates, and may lead to swifter disconnection, or prosecution," Mr Bates said.

However, the Internet Service Providers Association said data protection laws would prevent providers from looking at the content of information sent over their networks.

"ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope," the association said.

"ISPs bear no liability for illegal file sharing as the content is not hosted on their servers," it added.

The BPI, the trade body that represents the UK record industry, said internet providers had "done little or nothing to address illegal downloading via their networks".

"This is the number one issue for the creative industries in the digital age, and the government's willingness to tackle it should be applauded," said BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor.

"Now is not the time for ISPs to hide behind bogus privacy arguments, or claim the problem is too complicated or difficult to tackle."

Sourced from BBC

Blu-Ray wins Netflix vote

Netflix has announced today that it will exclusively stock Blu-ray high-definition DVDs after a decision by some the world's biggest movie studios in favour of the Sony developed format.

Netflix has stocked DVDs using both Blu-ray and the competing HD DVD format developed by Toshiba since they first came on the market in early 2006.

Four out of six major Hollywood studios have recently decided to publish high-definition DVDs only using Blu-ray. Netflix said that with such a clear signal from the industry, it will only buy Blu-ray discs going forward and will phase out stock of HD DVD by about the end of the year.

Can Lovefilm compete with downloads?

A British firm that rents out DVDs by post has just taken over internet giant Amazon’s service. But can it compete with downloads?

IF you have ever wondered which movies the former page three girl Melinda Messenger likes to curl up with, then Lovefilm.com is the place to find out.

She is one of several celebrities to list her favourite films on the site. The picks are there to provide a little bit of inspiration for customers of the site’s main business – film rental.

In four years Lovefilm has become the UK’s leader in the fast-growing online DVD rental market, and last week it grew by another 50% after announcing a deal to take over a similar service offered by Amazon, the internet retailer, taking the number of subscribers to 900,000. As part of the deal Amazon will take a stake, thought to be about 30%, in Lovefilm, making it the company’s biggest single investor. The deal is reported to value Lovefilm at about £200m.

The service is straightforward. Users create a list of DVDs they wish to rent from the 65,000 or so available (having recommendations on the site helps focus the mind, says the management). For a monthly charge, anywhere between £3.99 and £14.99, the company posts out the DVDs on the list, one or two at a time. Customers return them when they are finished in a prepaid envelope and the next disc on the list is sent out. There are no late fees, and its fans say it is easier and more convenient than going to a video shop. So far the group is in no more than 3% of UK households but it is confident this will grow.

Chief executive Simon Calver has been working on the Amazon deal for several months and believes it is crucial to have as big a customer base as possible because the competition comes not just from other online rental services but also other film sources – high-street stores and subscription-movie channels on satellite and cable television.

“With Amazon we have a better chance of being competitive in that market than as two independent companies,” he said, adding that Amazon’s experience of developing into an internet giant should benefit the company greatly. The US group will have a seat on the Lovefilm board, alongside representatives of the smaller company’s existing backers, who include Balder-ton Capital and Index Ventures, the tech investors.

Lovefilm, which had sales of £50m last year, has been steadily consolidating what is a relatively niche industry. The first site to launch in the UK was Video Island in 2003; Lovefilm followed about a year later and the two merged in April 2006, having between them swallowed a number of smaller rivals along the way. Before the Amazon deal, the business was estimated by Screen Digest, a consultancy, to have about 62% of the online rental market. That has now risen to almost 80%.

Despite this leading position, there is a concern in some quarters that technology could derail the business model. The prospect of internet users downloading movies directly could render the idea of an offline rental service obsolete. In the US last year DVD sales fell 4.5%, as downloading became more popular. Netflix, the US company on which Video Island and Lovefilm are modelled, has 6,000 films available for download. The British company offers just over 800 at present.

Calver believes that the threat should not be overplayed. “Because we are in this market, we can monitor it. Everyone is still learning, and most people are groping their way through digital distribution.

“We are experimenting with downloading, with different price points and business models. But there are still fundamental barriers to downloading, such as the choice of content, the time it takes to download a film, and how to get the product from the PC and onto the TV.”

He argues that there is a fundamental difference between paying to download a music track, which customers might listen to repeatedly, and a film, which may get watched just once. This is especially true in the UK.

Calver said: “People here are used to paying [for entertainment] on a subscription basis; the television licence fee, cable TV. Most digital services are pay-per-transaction. There’s inherent resistance to that in the UK. Digital downloading will be significantly smaller than DVDs for many years to come.”

Calver’s more immediate goal is to reach 1m subscribers and take the business into profitabil-ity, which should be achieved by the end of this year. Lovefilm has been paying special attention to its pricing, increasing the range of packages offered to attract wallets of all sizes.

Despite Calver’s views on subscriptions, he says a new pay-as-you-go service is beginning to attract people who watch films relatively infrequently.

If the group can extend its service further beyond movie buffs and enter the mainstream, it could provide a Hollywood-style happy ending for its backers.

Taken from Timesonline Website by Matthew Goodman

Pirates to outfox movie studios

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it," a famous person once said, though I forget who. Or from whom he probably stole the phrase. But it's a maxim Hollywood might do well to bear in mind as, to a karmic backdrop of Thomas Edison's hollow laughter echoing from beyond the grave, it continues to grapple with the seemingly intractable conundrum of movie piracy, and how to capitalise on the public's burgeoning demand for movie downloads.

But what specific history did I have in mind at the beginning of that paragraph, you might be asking? Well, let's go back to the early 1890s and things should become clearer. Not least, that piracy in the movie industry is hardly something new. In fact, it's something the studios have been profiting from for over a century.

Back in the 1890s, founded on Prohibitionist values, ironically enough, Hollywood was no more than a recently developed residential community. It boasted 320 days a year of sun, and by 1903 enough prosperity to become incorporated. However, thanks to all that sun, it couldn't boast nearly enough water, prompting it's annexation to Los Angeles in 1910. It certainly wasn't yet known for movies.

In fact, the origins of Hollywood as we know it today are actually to be found in the East of America: in New Jersey. It was there that, in Thomas Edison's labs, William Dickson invented the Kinetoscope; and where, in 1893, Edison set up Black Maria, the world's first film studio.

Now, all-round bright spark and seasoned inventor that he was, Edison of course patented his assistant's new moving-picture making device, and set about profiting from it by distributing short films to penny arcades, vaudeville theatres, and fairgrounds. But it was only after the Lumiere brothers' 1895 invention of the Cinematographe system, in France, that movies came to be projected on screens and viewable by more than one person at a time.

Realising the Cinamatographe's potential, Edison and others quickly came up with their own versions, and by 1908, the movie business was booming; mass-produced 15-minute shorts being shown in thousands of movie theatres all across America.

Edison, though, was having trouble enforcing his patents. Even as early as 1898, fearing that other people were profiting from "his" invention, he had begun issuing lawsuits to rival movie producers.

Following a series of fruitless legal battles against, among others, American Mutoscope and Biograph, actually co-founded by William Dickson, and by then a more successful company than Edison's own, Edison changed tactics. In late 1908, banding together with Biograph, and a selection of other patent holders and producers, Edison formed the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), a Trust issuing licenses for use of its members' technology, enforcing its members' patents, and generally attempting to regulate the still nascent motion picture industry. It worked well; at first. But there was still much resistance. Enter William Fox (of what would become 20th Century-Fox).

Hollywood's history has featured many a famous pirate: from Jack Sparrow, to the swashbuckling Errol Flynn, to, erm, whoever it was Geena Davis played in that film that killed her career. So it could perhaps be seen as fitting that Hollywood as we know it today was founded by pirates; independent filmmakers, operating outside the licenses of, and profiting from technology owned by the MPPC.

One of the best methods the independents found of escaping Edison's reaches was to relocate to the other side of the country, where, thanks to California's relaxed laws, and what was then still the necessity of shooting in daylight, Hollywood and its 320 days of sunshine proved the ideal movie-making location. Within two decades, Louis B Mayer, the Warner Family, Samuel Goldwyn, and William Fox had all arrived there.

In 1911, in an attempt to finally break the MPPC's hold over the industry, Fox took the Trust to court. While Fox, in fact, lost his lawsuit, the judge nonetheless found that the MPPC constituted an illegal monopoly in restraint of trade. Various cases and six years later, the MPPC was finally disbanded by order of the American Supreme Court. One band of innovators had given way to another.

Nearly a century later we come to today's pirates: they too may be determining the future of Hollywood; or at the very least forcing it to adapt to the 21st Century.

Granted, there is little doubt that offering copyrighted movies for download is illegal; but, in doing so, quite so successfully, today's movie pirates have pointed out an inefficiency in the market, a desire that is not being met. Undoubtedly some people will always want something for nothing, and will always find ways to get it, but what the public has responded to, primarily, is the convenience offered by pirate movie downloads. While Hollywood's moguls have been snoozing complacently, the market has been changing. The pirates have been responding to its customers' dissatisfactions.

Cinema-goers are fed up of over-inflated ticket prices. People hate waiting months to rent or buy the next big film, or to see it outside of America. Rental shops often don't have what you want, and aren't open 24-hours. Many people balk at spending £15 on a DVD that might not be that great (and let's face it, much that Hollywood has produced lately hasn't been). And what about all those brilliant obscure and back-catalogue films that are so hard to get your hands on? All these deficiencies in Hollywood's current distribution methods, the pirates have responded to: pretty much whatever you want, there's a stream or a torrent for it somewhere. Plus, you can watch it in your own home, at your own convenience.

On the other hand:

You never know for sure whether you'll get a good quality picture, or something grainy recorded from the middle row of a multiplex with people's heads in the way. Downloads can take forever, or never complete. Watching on a computer isn't always that great. And there's always the slight unease that goes hand-in-hand with illegality.

All of which, and more, is where Hollywood should be sensing opportunity. Provide a legal, practical, reliable, convenient alternative to what the pirates are offering - essentially just no-frills movie downloads, film downloads, video downloads, call them what you will - and the majority of people would be more than happy to use the service.

For the most part, of course, Hollywood has instead responded to piracy with all lawyers blazing. There are promising signs emerging, though, that it is at least beginning to adapt to the new competition: studio-backed film download sites, such as Vizumi, NetFlix, and Amazon Unbox, are on the increase. Heck, even BitTorrent offers legal movie downloads these days. The recent news of Apple’s plans for movie downloads will send shock waves across the industry. Can they repeat the same success of iTunes with iMovies only time will tell?

Now, if the studios could just sort out some Digital Rights Management technologies that don't treat it's download customers like criminals, they might actually be on to a winner.

HBO enters movie download war

Time Warner is planning to launch HBO on Broadband that will allow consumers to download movies and its pay-TV shows on the Web it has been report for free.

So another company jumps on the movie download bandwagon but what will it offer that other websites such as Vizumi, Jaman, Cinema Now currently do not?

HBO are a new entry in the 'what you want, when you want it' movie download race. The new service is called HBO on Broadband and while Comcast CEO Brian Roberts mesmerized a recent Consumer Electronics Show audience (BusinessWeek.com, 1/11/08) with visions of TV shows and movies capable of streaming lickety-split across his cable TV wires, the guys from Time Warner are offering what is clearly a work in progress.


First, the basics: You can watch the live HBO feed online, choose from more than 350 movies, and download and store such TV shows as Sex & the City, The Sopranos, and Entourage. It will set reminders for you when things are on, allow you to preset to record movies and TV shows when they air on the cable network, and suggest new stuff that maybe you would like to watch.

HBO describes HBO on Broadband as free. But to get the service, a cable subscriber will need to have already paid not only the $12 or so a month to get the pay channel, but also the $30 or $40 a month to get a cable operator's broadband service. That's right. The free HBO actually costs subscribers $52 or more per month because consumers will first have to dip into their pockets to buy HBO from their cable or satellite provider, and then add broadband service from the same provider. By contrast, a rival pay-TV network, Starz, offers a similar download service for $9.99 a month that doesn't require you to have a video subscription. (Starz says it will soon start offering an HBO on Broadband-like service called Starz Play that will be "free" if you already have a video and data subscription.)
Service Makes Debut in Wisconsin

Sounds great, doesn't it? And technologically, it is first-rate: Downloads are near instantaneous, thanks to buffer technology that allows you to start watching even while the show is being downloaded. Pictures are ultrasharp, even when they're blown up to a full screen from their three-inch by three-inch display box.

So when Time Warner starts to roll out the new service on Jan. 21, why are they only doing it in a single system in two areas—Green Bay, Wis., and Milwaukee—when Time Warner owns 23 systems from Hawaii to Portland, Me.? No, it's not a test, says HBO Co-President Eric Kessler, although he expects some fine-tuning. "We're involved with discussions with other service providers, and we expect to have some to announce down the road," he says.

In fact, Time Warner has been dabbling with HBO on Broadband for more than two years. According to sources, HBO had all but locked up the giant cable operator Comcast, which had been expected to have Roberts announce their agreement during his Jan. 9 speech to the crowds at CES. The deal, according to those sources, collapsed over how much of the operating costs—roughly 50¢ a subscriber—that Comcast was willing to absorb. Comcast was also being asked to front some of the costs to market the service. Comcast didn't respond to requests for comment. HBO declined to comment.

79% of Americans download movies illegally

79% of Americans who are downloading movies do so illegally despite access to subscription based services.

US consumers are still downloading movies illegally despite the growing availability of subscription based movie download services according to a study conducted by Advanis Inc. Subscription based movie downloads have grown in prevalence with companies like Apple Inc., CinemaNow, MovieLink and most recently Wal-Mart offering movie downloads for a fee.

Yet 79% of those downloading movies are still doing so illegally, according to the study and is estimated to be costing the industry $598 million.

"The industry can respond to this stubborn core of piracy in one of two ways," said Phil Dwyer, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Advanis. "It can spend its time and resources pursuing the pirates, and attempting to get them to change their ways, or it can put those same resources into accelerating the adoption of these services by the early mainstream consumers, who are more inclined to behave legally."

"The experience of the music industry, and the evidence of our research suggests there is a hardcore of illegal downloaders who are unlikely to change their behavior. The industry would be better advised to focus resources on migrating new, and legally inclined consumers on to these services."

Downloaders Look For Deals

Despite the convenience of the movie download services, consumers are unwilling to pay a premium for them. In fact, online movie addicts, on average, value downloads at $2.59, while they value a movie bought in a store at more than double that - $5.98.

About this study

Findings are based on a survey of 506 online Americans, fielded between February 5th and 6th, 2007. Estimates are accurate to within +/- 4.6%, 19 times out of 20.