Home Media Part 2: Collectionism and the Digital Revolution
Given that my last article has received a fair amount of attention, I think i should first clarify my position regarding Blu-Ray. There is no doubt Blu-Ray is the ‘best’ format out there in terms of picture quality, that is obvious. However my point is that picture quality beyond DVD does’t really matter. Yes, we can all see the difference and say ‘’that looks better’’, but the added viewing value of Blu-Ray is small, while the cost is extremely high, at least for the foreseeable future. Why is the Wii outselling the PS3 two to one? Because in the gaming market as with movies, picture quality is way down on the list of priorities.
That’s why digital downloads/streaming are the future. They are cheaper, you don’t have to leave your house to get them, they don’t take up any room (except for a backup drive or two) and they’ll never get scratched. Just like MP3s.
This isn’t going to happen overnight; we’ve been trained to have consumerist, collectionist tendancies which won’t fade away until a whole new generation grows up without knowing DVDs (ask a kid today when was the last time he used a cd). A few people commented under my last piece about how they don’t want to switch away from DVD because they are too attached to their collection. For a long time I felt the same way, my 300 DVDs took pride of place on my shelves. But what use are they, really? The shiny boxes and colourful sleeves give us a sense of pride and contentedness, but they’re just pieces of paper. All we’re really looking at are discs, discs that play movies. All the rest doesn’t make sense, but I agree it’s hard to let go, i’m not immune to these irrational feelings. However I recently handbraked my entire collection and started selling off my dvds. It is so much more convienant, and if you make the files big enough (I go for about 2.5GBs per film) the quality loss is virtually unnoticeable. Suddenly, just like with my old CDs, my DVDs are just sitting on the shelf gathering dust, soon enough I won’t miss them at all.
Clearly DVD ripping isn’t for everyone though, it’s time consuming and complicated. Digital movies will only gather pace when it truly enters the average household. This is what companies should be focusing on if they want to be what iTunes is for music, but ten fold. Don’t bring the computer into the living room as the iTunes store has done, this will only get you so far. The Xbox team understands this, so do the Playstation people. Both are trying to bring movies straight to your TV just as with the Apple TV and Netflix’s Roku. Whoever wins this battle will become the next media heavyweight. At the moment these services are under marketed and too expensive.
The company who is prepared to gamble on the temporary monetary hit caused by heavily subsidizing their player will reap the rewards down the line. Forget download speeds and DRM, the future is a single box under your TV that streams or downloads your content. No more looking around for websites and URLs. The Apple TV does this but it remains a niche product. It's much too expensive and no-one out of the tech world knows what it does. It's seen as a relay from your computer to your TV, not as a standalone machine that lets you download and play content out of the box. Companies need to get behind these products in a big way, and DVD will soon become a thing of the past.
Regarding illegal downloads, forget about them. The cat is out of the bag and unless something changes radically in the way the entire internet is organised, this is not going to change. The people who want to download illegally will and you can't stop them. But most people don't want to use bittorent right now. The music industry didn't react quick enough to a changing market and lost an entire generation of consumers. The film business must embrace companies like Apple and Netflix Streaming, not shy away from them. Unfortunately Hollywood is probably the most conservative market place of them all, and will keep pushing for their out of date business model long into the future, while the rest of the world moves on.
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