Bahoot? Kersplat!

The question is how quickly Netflix ramps up content. The mac user base is tiny enough to be virtually irrelevant, especially as more and more of us go dual-platform.

$20 a month (PLUS any DVD you want) for a huge number of movies you can watch anytime vs. a rental service that costs money per movie. I think the former is more appealing.

I dunno. Been having the same debate w/re to music subscription services. I hate subscriptions, period. If I can borrow something for a fee or own it then I am in... but subscriptions suck. I think people have subscriptions only when there is no other viable choice.

Without statistics it's only a hunch but I suspect not that many mac users are x-platform.

Finally, it's not the Mac platform that's key here, it is the iPod platform. When presented with stuff like this though, the Mac platform simply goes away... and we know how well installing various bits of software goes in WIndows over the long haul.

rino:

You are making my eyes bleed dude! Those screens HURT, they are just so ugly, well the yahoo one is the least bad, but I suspect deeper in it has a screen with bullet points that include 1 Ghz Winders box with 1 GB of ram. Ugh! Madre Mio, WTF kind of processor does a damned DVD player have? And It sure as hell does not have more than a few KB of RAM. WHAT are these companies doing???

Watching movies should simply NOT require more computer age "horsepower" than a space ship! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Flight_systems

I think ALL these services will GO AWAY and be replaced by some combination of bundled high bandwidth connectivity, a box that is dedicated to the task with no "visible" OS (like TiVo that has its OS well hidden) and commitments from the studios to have the moves within about 90 days of theatrical release but keep expanding the library virtually forever with smart, but variable pricing.

I suspect that there are about half a dozen companies that could pull this off. I think Apple is one, but they are somewhat risk averse and there is A WHOLE LOT of risk in this area...

I hate the idea of more than one video or audio player. As do most of my friends, even if they're filthy WMP loyalists.

Unbox video player? Yahoo Music Jukebox? Whatever, no.

Quote
stan adams
but I suspect deeper in it has a screen with bullet points that include 1 Ghz Winders box with 1 GB of ram. Ugh! Madre Mio, WTF kind of processor does a damned DVD player have? And It sure as hell does not have more than a few KB of RAM. WHAT are these companies doing??

Actually, that's reasonable. It's the compression that's causing all this - and it keeps getting fancier. This is ok - MPEG-4 looks a lot better than MPEG-2 at the same bitrate but takes far more processing power. Dedicated chips for decompression/playback are the wrong way to go in PC's in my opinion (a support/driver nightmare. Anyone remember the dedicated chips not working for G3 Powerbooks and OSX? And some lame lawsuit?), or having software that requires that dedicated chip but not having it in your model of computer? For something that can be done on just about any PC or Mac these days? But they are the very reason your DVD or Blu-Ray player works.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/31/2007 08:02AM by Curtis.

And that's just a small collection of the screens I've seen...

At the very least, the ass-hattedness that is NBC for pulling their content out of iTunes, at the very least their new attempt Hulu uses a more ubiquitous platform in Flash.

The now is H.264 -- even Flash can stream it without conversion to .flv now. Last night at little party I went to YouTube with my iPhone and searched for a video my friend posted of his daughter playing a piano recital. Not exactly something you'd expect to see in H.264 but viola there it was available for the iPhone. So I guess YouTube encodes everything into H.264 now?

Yeah, so at the very least Yahoo and Amazon and others could go with something like MP3 for video (cough, H.264). We know the trouble behind all of this (DRM and dead business models) and it's going to get worse before it gets better IMO.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/31/2007 09:08AM by rino.

Quote
rino
So I guess YouTube encodes everything into H.264 now?

Yes. When the iPhone was first released with YouTube support, YouTube announced that they were in the process of re-encoding all of their videos into H.264 and that, eventually, all videos would be available in that format.

Really, if you try it out on a PC it is WAY simpler than you make it seem.

I'm just saying that there is no compelling reason for iTunes movie rentals at present. You're presenting the universal platform argument. Great, but the Mac virtually doesn't exist as a platform, so I don't buy that.

Anyway... more important is this...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/01/01/db.cooper.ap/index.html

Do you think they'll find Unca Wobert???

Quote
bahamut
I'm just saying that there is no compelling reason for iTunes movie rentals at present. You're presenting the universal platform argument. Great, but the Mac virtually doesn't exist as a platform, so I don't buy that.

Following that logic there was no business case for iTMS in the first place and it has been successful regardless.

This is old news but I just found out that Amazon Unbox is available through Tivo, which sidesteps all the compatibility issues and hides any DRM issues from users.

Quote
Simon
Following that logic there was no business case for iTMS in the first place and it has been successful regardless.

No, iTMS succeeded for a number of reasons…just about none of those had to do with iTMS being available for Mac and PC.

It had a successful hardware platform associated with it. hardware platform was successful because of a large amount of content already in user's hands (ripped CDs + napster mk 1). nobody else gave that much storage with a decent interface. iTMS emerged 2 years later, version 4 in fact and offered easy purchase through an interface that was free, the only thing that really worked with the hardware, and already in many people's hands. someone recently had a good story on this. will see if i can dig it up.

There is no comparable video device to the iPod, and watching a film on an iPod is not that immersive an experience. An iPhone/iPod touch is mildly better. iTV is low res and kludgey. Moreover iTunes does not already manage most of its user's video libraries. If it could rip your DVDs, well then, maybe yes.

If the telco/cable folks could figure it out and have big libraries, video on demand would be the way to go. Then again we tried in vain to find a decent movie on FiOS on demand the other day and could only come up with one we'd both seen. Hollywood's not there yet. This market is going to take longer to crack.

I have boxes for the people who requested things. I am waiting on static bags to ship them.

send me an e-mail to my username@my username.org with your address

Dual processor going to Bill

Jeff has a GeForce 2MX 32MB
NS has a GeForce 2MX 32MB

I have two other GeForce 2MX cards available if people want them.

http://www.spymac.com/

What happened!

http://www.spymac.com/bnready

LOL



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/05/2008 05:53AM by rino.

LOL!

So it's over. I have to decide when I should get a BLU-RAY player now.

You think Warner was bad? Today was the bomb: New Line Cinema on BLU-RAY exclusively.

I've said for a long time that when LOTR is out on one or the other, it's game over.

Well, they didn't announce it yet, but that makes it seem all but over.

I've found that on a 40 inch (way too big for my living room anyway) 720P tv a Samsung upscaling DVD player gives more than satisfying results. More than the price difference between a BR and a DVD disk can warrant anyway.

I'll wait until the disks are about the same price as DVDs are now. It took 3 years for DVDs to come to the price of VHS, I suspect once BR takes off it will take about the half the time judging the price drops that the players have gone through lately.

New Line was part of Warner, that was no big surprise. I like Blue-Ray because it has more storage, but count me in among the people that think digital downloads will eventually take over all once bandwidth is out there.

If HD cable channels are any indication, I don't like downloads. The HD broadcasts I've seen produce far worse images than SD analog PAL television. The cable companies choose volume over quality, at least a disk that provides ample storage space doesn't invite to turn up the compression. Digital downloads do, witness Apple's video downloads...



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2008 01:05AM by tliet.

I haven't seen HD in Europe, but in the US, it's night and day. And, yes, Apple's video downloads are a bad training ground for people since they are low quality. Frankly, I'd be much happier if the cable companies just figured out how to deliver enough hd over on demand to make HD DVDs and the Internet model go away. It makes more sense since they have so much more of the pipe available to them, but scaling is apparently a bitch.

I'm satisfied with any quality of media, frankly. But I do cringe when I see compression artifacts in DVD videos.

What a journey.

What is usually demoed in the stores overhere are slow moving pixel perfect full HD images. At the moment there's only a few HD channels, in Holland I'd say 3 or 4, satellite only. Analog was switched off a few years back, it's only SD DVB-T for now.

Slow moving video or any frozen image is brilliant, but wait until you see a shot of water, like this picture, it's horrible... I'd say that's the same in the US as I see it even in SD broadcasts on digital cable with the less popular stations.

Maybe on SD video, but certainly not on any HD I've seen... Planet Earth, for example, has plenty of water shots and nothing like that. My hunch is that in Europe they don't have as much bandwidth and compress the hell out of stuff.

I dunno -- for me, and I only have a 26" HD tele, the Apple downloaded movies are better than many DVDs where I've seen more artifacting and blurring. They aren't good HD though by any stretch. The HD channels I get with TimeWarner are pretty stellar looking.