Blockbuster ready to fail?

[Bonam]

Whether you download legally or illegally, the quality is crappy. (Illegal copies are really crappy; legal copies are just crappy. A typical Bluray movie has about 20 GB of data. The typical legal download is about 2 GB and illegal copies are around 0.5 GB. Do the math.)

1 word: compression. A bluray rip compressed in divx or xvid format is a few GB and retains most of the original quality and of course the resolution. I have ripped copies as well as original blurays of several effects-intensive movies and I have to play them side by side and really study them closely to notice the difference.

Anyway, people don't always need bluray quality. It is nice for movies with intense visual effects (and, of course, for porn). But for a lot of movies which mainly consist of people talking to each other, it's really not needed and I couldn't care less. When watching a drama or a comedy, I care about the plot and/or the humour, not about seeing the details of the pores on each actor's face.

I have many thoughts about this but I will mention one. When you have to buy or rent a physical object, the artistic creator receives something for their efforts, and other artists have an incentive to create more.

When there is no physical object involved, and unless DRM technology is sophisticated, all artists become buskers, dependant on shaming a passing audience.

Sorry but this is just incorrect. There are plenty of online business models that earn plenty of money. And that includes businesses that don't use DRM.

[bush_cheney2004]

...The US Netflix seems to work. The Canadian equivalent doesn't. (I suggest checking forum commenst about zip.ca or its competitors.)

Yup...Netflix is the cat's pajamas...works very well on many platforms. Just wish they had a bigger catalog.

Why not a single Netflix for the continent? Well, for the same reason that Canadians can't stream Comedy Central from the US. The CRTC protects a specific group of Canadians and forces all Canadians to buy from them. (The same logic applies when you buy milk and cheese.)

Does Canadian milk and cheese taste any different?

[M.Dancer]

Does Canadian milk and cheese taste any different?

]Yes.

I know a fellow, a CIA trained chef. I was visiting him and I asked, "What is American Cheese?"

He answered tersely, "Death"

If english cheddar tastes differnt than canadian, there's a good chance american will too.

[Guest American Woman]

This has been tried in Montreal but hasn't been successful. People seem to like to look at the back cover of the DVD, and maybe talk to staff. Dunno.

Yeah, I can understand that. I like Redbox when I know what I want and at odd hours and for new releases, because of the $1 price. Of course all of the other movies are that price at the video rentals anyway, so there's no price advantage to going to Redbox. But if I'm not sure what I'm in the mood for and want to spend some time browsing, I wouldn't go to Redbox either, so I can see that the concept would likely never replace video stores.

As for On Demand et al, it's the easiest option, but not the cheapest by any means.

[bloodyminded]

Whether you download legally or illegally, the quality is crappy.

Sometimes true, but not always. I'm telling you for a fact.

(Illegal copies are really crappy; legal copies are just crappy. A typical Bluray movie has about 20 GB of data. The typical legal download is about 2 GB and illegal copies are around 0.5 GB. Do the math.)

I have seen very, very few 0.5 GB copies. Actually, zero. (I'm not saying they don't exist; I AM saying this is not the norm.) Most seem to range anywhere between 0.75 and 1.5.

The quality is, more than half the time, equal to renting a DVD. And most of the others are close enough that you'd notice little difference.

And yes, some are bad, some outright terrible.

Edited May 7, 2010 by bloodyminded

[M.Dancer]

As for On Demand et al, it's the easiest option, but not the cheapest by any means.

Not the cheapest or the best selection...but the prices are the same as Blockbuster or Rogers Videa rental...and with no late fees.

I was in HMV yesterday buying a mother's day CD for my kids (to give) (jacksoul-soulmates) and though it was mid afternoon, the store was rather busy. I was wondering to myself how the forces that are affecting Blockbuster are affecting HMV?

[August1991]

1 word: compression. A bluray rip compressed in divx or xvid format is a few GB and retains most of the original quality and of course the resolution. I have ripped copies as well as original blurays of several effects-intensive movies and I have to play them side by side and really study them closely to notice the difference.

It depends what equipment and in particular what screen you use to view them. I see a big difference between Bluray and even a good DVD transfer with good upscaling.

Anyway, people don't always need bluray quality. It is nice for movies with intense visual effects (and, of course, for porn). But for a lot of movies which mainly consist of people talking to each other, it's really not needed and I couldn't care less. When watching a drama or a comedy, I care about the plot and/or the humour, not about seeing the details of the pores on each actor's face.

I disagree. I prefer clarity and I also like 5.1 sound.

Sorry but this is just incorrect. There are plenty of online business models that earn plenty of money. And that includes businesses that don't use DRM.

I was making a broad generalization about protecting intellectual property through the purchase of a physical object. If you look back in history and changes in technology, I think my point is justified.

Does Canadian milk and cheese taste any different?

No, we only get cheddar, cheddar and more cheddar. Sometimes there's mozzarella. BTW, about 50% of Canadian milk and milk products are made with Quebec milk. There are no imports to speak of. (The CRTC protects English Canadian culture producers and federal supply management protects Quebec dairy farmers. Go figure.)

As for On Demand et al, it's the easiest option, but not the cheapest by any means.

I have downloaded movies from iTunes. (This is problematic in Canada.) In general, I didn't like the quality as well as the lack of subtitles and extras. Connecting to the big home screen is another inconvenience.

I have seen very, very few 0.5 GB copies. Actually, zero. (I'm not saying they don't exist; I AM saying this is not the norm.) Most seem to range anywhere between 0.75 and 1.5.

It was once standard to rip and compress movies to about 0.6 (600MB) so that they would fit on a CD. Nowadays, 4.7GB blank DVDs are as cheap as CDs so the constraint is not the disc, it is download speeds. Keep in mind that much of this downloading of illegal copies occurs outside of North America where Internet connections are not good. To download a 2GB file through bittorrent takes a long time in China or Russia. Hence the prefence for 1Gb or less.

In any case, if I'm going to bother to watch a movie, I'm willing to pay a few bucks and get the 25GB version.

[August1991]

I was in HMV yesterday buying a mother's day CD for my kids (to give) (jacksoul-soulmates) and though it was mid afternoon, the store was rather busy. I was wondering to myself how the forces that are affecting Blockbuster are affecting HMV?

What I have learned over the past few years is that computers have had very different effects on audio and video.

In the case of audio, the data is much smaller. This means that audio files are smaller and compressed files are more likely to represent accurately the original source information. To be technical, a 24-bit 96 KHz sample of an original sound creates a digital file that is indistinguishable from the original sound. (24 bit means that there are 16 million possible numbers for each sample. 96 KHz means that there are 96,000 samples taken every second.) At such a rate, a stereo recording of one minute of music creates a 33 MB file. This is small and modern computers can easily edit, store or play such files. Compressed, such a file would be about 1 MB.

In teh case of video, it's a an entirely different story because the volume of data is much, much larger. Modern computers cannot cope with the file sizes and so extreme compression is required. All kinds of tricks are employed. Perhaps in 20 years or so, we will have computers that can deal with such volumes of data but for the moment, we don't.

As an aside, I can understand now why computer-generated music is the best way to create sound. It makes little sense to buy a piano. Most film scores are produced through computer programs. OTOH, computer generated movie visuals just don't work. They look fake. (As computers are faster and larger in the future, this fakeness will become more obvious.)

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Anyway, to respond to your point Morris, HMV sells mostly music and people nowadays download small mp3 files from the Internet (legally or illegally). An mp3 file is a very good compressed reproduction of the priginal recording.

Blockbuster rents videos and these files are large. The Internet and most computers can't handle them.

[Gawd, what a long post. It's an issue that concerns me.... ]