One of my favorite Netflix features is that you can stream movies in your queue. Add this one to your queue so that you can start streaming it to your computer right now: Henry Poole Is Here. The trailer's vibe makes it seem wacky...but it's not. The music is all wrong, NOTHING like the music in the movie. But it might still give you some idea: it's slow, quiet, lyrical, a little sad, and very sweet, about what you might find at the end of your rope.
And you can start streaming it now.
I gotta tell you. We've really gotten into the two of us, watching movies gathered close around the laptop in bed. You can't do it ALL the time, but it's very intimate. This is the perfect movie for that.
While it's not streaming, this next one is a picture with a similar slow, sweet vibe. Again, the music is all wrong - the score is by Michael Penn, and gorgeous. So are the shots - gorgeous frame after gorgeous frame, which the trailer gives absolutely no sense of. But again, hopefully, a little sense that this reaches way past cliches, way past the pain, into building something new and real.
We watched this one on the big screen (REALLY big - a 100-inch front projection system), but still a very, very intimate picture.
(The big screen ain't just about me, btw. Every time we've moved, my wife wouldn't even consider a house that doesn't enough throw-room for a projector. She bought one of those laser measuring thingies to make it easier to figure out.)
That streaming Netflix thing really is off the hook. As you might guess from other of my entries, I'm not buying the Blu-ray hype...but the built-in Netflix streaming in many newer models is tempting enough that my wife said it's time for us to start looking around at our player options. (Ah, that's my girl!)
So anyway, two movies that will reaffirm your faith in life, in love, and in moviemaking.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Aug 30, 2009 at 8:54:51 am
As a guy who regularly talks about trends in media consumption and distribution, allow me to make the observation that people who talk about trends in in media consumption and distribution are idiots. Including me. We're hardly ever right about anything.
However, money talks. DVD buying peaked between somewhere around 2007, and has been trending downward since then. While Blu-ray buying is on the rise, it doesn't amount to much in the overall video buying world - certainly nowhere near enough to compensate for the decline in overall DVD sales. Says a senior analyst at Screen Digest, "We don't expect BD to be driving even minimal sector growth until 2010."
Now, it's easy to blame this on an economic downturn...which wasn't happening in 2007. It also doesn't take into account one of the most remarkable statistics I've come across in a long, long time:
47 percent of consumers now own a high-definition TV, up from 35 percent a year ago.
Read that again, slowly. HDTV ownership is up by nearly one third in the past year.
Nearly half of America owns an HD TV.
And yet, the number of people who say that they are likely to NOT buy a Blu-ray player in the past year is UP a little! 93% of people surveyed say that they are NOT likely to buy a Blu-ray player in the next year!
Read it again: HD television sales are UP nearly 30% this year over last year. People are LESS likely to buy a Blu-ray player this year than last year.
It's not the economy. Millions of people saw the value in buying an HDTV. They do NOT see the value in spending a fraction of that on a Blu-ray player.
It's not the cost of disks. You can rent a Blu-ray disk for hardly more than an SD DVD disk.
It's not any lack of confidence in the quality of Blu-ray. Anybody who bought an HD set saw Blu-ray aplenty in the store.
It's that they don't see the value in Blu-ray over the HD programming that they get from cable and satellite.
In other words, they could get a Blu-ray player for about the price of a month of cable with premium channels...but then they don't need the Blu-ray disks.
In my case, I watch TV around 5 hours a day, which puts me right in the middle of the pack for adult America. With the exception of an odd commercial here and there, 100% of what I watch is in HD. I watch a ton of movies in HD. This week, that includes "The Dark Knight," "Tropic Thunder," and "X-Files: I Want to Believe." I haven't watched them yet, because they're parked on my DVR. I'm also not in a hurry for the first two, because I saw them in HD on Demand BEFORE they were on Blu-ray. (I'm not in a hurry for X-Files because I'm not convinced it's good enough to spend my time on...but hey, it's there.)
I also watch quite a bit of TV (most of it network TV - woo-hoo!) and live sports (go Red Sox! - and for the record, my wife can be even more into sports TV than I am...but we both dig it.) No Blu-ray equivalent unless I'm willing to wait a looooong time.
I've talked about this often enough in other posts (follow the tags), but this is the first time that my instincts about the mainstream have been confirmed, as follows:
HD = good.
HDTV = will spend many hundreds, if not more, to buy one.
Blu-ray = yawn, even for $200-300, if not less
What do you think, kids? Given that I choose to write about this stuff on a regular-ish basis, and that EVERYONE who does so is mostly wrong...am I wrong this time? Why do YOU think that interest is Blu-ray is so low relative to HD TV buying, and waning?
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Jun 25, 2009 at 12:35:11 pm
When Steve Jobs called Blu-ray a big bag of hurt, he was being asked why the new MacBooks have no Blu-ray drives. His answer spoke to the cost of licensing the hardware. When his lieutenant Phil Schiller chimed in, HE was speaking about Blu-ray content when he said that the iTunes Store and Apple TV was the right way to deliver HD.
Steve knows how much a Blu-ray drive costs to license, so I'll take his word for it. I won't bust Phil too badly as an individual, because lordy knows he's not the only one to think that Blu-ray's launch will be impeded, if not altogether scrubbed, by digital downloads. I just think that downloads aren't the big story for HD delivery right now. I think the same thing that will prevent Blu-ray's speedy adoption is the same thing standing in the way of HD downloads catching on as quickly as they might.
Yes, I said "thing," not "things." There are plenty of market and technology forces standing in the way for the world at large worth talking about later, but for me, for now, there's only one obstacle standing in the way of me caring about Blu-ray or broadband delivery: my HD DVR.
Before the DVR, I was an early adopter of a whole lot of things. My first CD player cost $500 – a top loader! -- and that was one of the CHEAP ones. Like Blu-ray, the first sales were to "philes," in this case audiophiles. You could mostly only buy them in the kind of stores that sold receivers and amplifiers as separate components. Mine came from a store in Harvard Square, across from Needle in a Haystack, an entire store devoted to nothing buy phonograph needles. It wasn't a huge store, but I'm not kidding – NOTHING but needles. It was kind of eerie.
And back in 1983, $500 was real money.
I was also an early adopter of Laser Disk, which introduced a number of critical technologies to wide-ish scale (only 1% of the VHS market, but still) home use: widescreen aspect ratios, random access chapters, frame-by-frame viewing, surround-sound encoding including Dolby and THX, digital audio tracks that allowed things like commentaries and separate language tracks, director's cuts, significant bonus features, significant picture remastering, and of course, Disney picture disks.
(Without getting all dewy eyed about how much better a laserdisk in a good player looks and sounds than most DVDs, I'll simply observe that no DVD will ever be as neato as a Disney picture disk.)
There were related things I adopted early, including hand-made custom subwoofer cables, front-projection TV (had one of them big 3 CRT gun jobbies), and yep, DVR. That deserves a couple of blog entries by itself, and I'll get to 'em....but the bottom line very quickly became that there wasn't much point to watching TV without a DVR, and there was no way on green earth that we were even going to THINK about adopting HD until there was an HD DVD.
Fortunately, DirecTV came to the rescue with DirecTiVo, a co-branded box that did exactly what it sounds like it did: for $1000, plus $10/month for HD programming. Eek. A little painful, but hey, it was HD, the way we wanted, so we took a deep breath, did without heat that winter, and got what we wanted.
(I say "we" - my wife is every step along the way with all this. We loves us some HD.)
This means two things. One is that the absolutely very, very last thing that would keep my from adopting Blu-ray. I have the rest of my HD rig loaded for bear. I'm not holding my breath for players to drop below the "magical" $200 barrier.
More important for Blu-ray in our lives is that we've been watching HD movies since 2004. I'm getting more every week for the exact same price as SD cable, and using the DVR to watch when I want.
(Not at all a big deal, but something that I notice when I watch DVDs – I prefer the features and responsiveness of my DVR. I don't need chapter marks as much as I do to hop back a few seconds to hear something I missed. One button on the DVR, a pain on the DVD.)
I know there's going to be a lot more Blu-ray disks very quickly, but right now on my DVR, waiting for me to watch a couple more times before I move along are two of my favorites: Office Space and Lawrence of Arabia, neither of which is on Blu-ray. (If I was a better person, I might have put Lawrence of Arabia BEFORE Office Space. So I probably shouldn't mention South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut – should I?) I have no doubt they'll come to Blu-ray, but not before I'll have watched them a dozen times or more in HD.
The big Blu-ray news this month is James Bond. Well, I've seen all the ones I like – including my favorite, Casino Royale with Daniel Craig -- in HD plenty of times. (Daniel Craig is the best Bond by a longer distance than we have yet found a way to measure.) It's the highest-selling Blu-ray disk to date, although The Dark Knight debuts Tuesday and could easily surpass Casino Royale in its first week. I'll see it plenty of times, on my time, when it comes to my HD DVR for free in a few more months.
I've got precisely zero use for the Lord of the Rings books. I haven't gotten past the first dozen pages – sorry, I've tried, but I just can't. I laughed – hard – at anyone in my high school who read them. This put me off seeing the movies longer than I should have waited. My bad. As much as I came to love the movies in the theater (barring the multiple endings of the third), I place the deluxe editions of the DVDs – once you've included 3 commentaries and the two disks of documentaries) among the great achievements in the history of human artistic endeavor. I'm glad to be alive at the time they were released. (Yeah, really.) Not coming to Blu-ray before 2010 says Mr. Jackson. I'll have been seeing them in HD for maybe 5 years at that point. Will the extras that make the deluxe editions such a wonder all be remade as HD? Highly unlikely I think, and I watch those as often as I watch the movies.
Of course Peter will probably find enough extra goodies laying around to make the Blu-ray edition worth my while...but I'm having a hard time coming up with any reason to buy a Blu-ray player before then. Not that I'll necessarily do it then. But I'm waiting something to push me over the edge. Any suggestions? Because until you persuade me otherwise, I'm keeping Blu-ray in my big bag of ho-hum.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Nov 25, 2008 at 9:20:40 am
I'm working on a follow-up to my large-ish article on the landscape following the surrender of HD DVD. In the meantime, here are a few links to my favorite articles so far.
Reuters: Microsoft says no Blu-ray for Xbox 360. I wrote earlier that this was likely coming, but now that I think about it, MS never ever positioned Xbox as a video playback platform. It's a gaming platform whose media is irrelevant to the game buyer -- you get whatever format it comes on, end of story. I had a quote from MS to that effect in my earlier story, but I drew the wrong conclusion. It happens.
More fun to follow.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 14, 2008 at 3:50:38 am
...or so some observers believed in 2006! This was upon the news of the second laptop to include Blu-ray drives, this one from Dell. And why not? When Apple joined the Blu-ray Disc Association in 2005, they said they were committed to promoting the format. Seen anything to back that up since then? Anything?
I think Dell makes better computers than a lot of people think, and you certainly have them to thank for the idea of truly custom configurations and computer sales over the internet, both of which they practiced years before many others did. But their stuff is nothing next to Sony's. The VAIO line is pretty elegant, and introduced thin form factors, wide screens and 1920x1080 res back before the turn of the century.
Oh wait, Apple still doesn't support 1920x1080. In fact, the current fave res for PCs is 1980x1200, to allow player controls on a 1920x1080 movie. I love my MacBook Pro - I use it for 90% of my computing, 100% for the last few months, and I am of course typing on it now. But I've long ranted about how far behind the curve Apple's display technology is, and this is one of many examples of what I mean.
Anywayyyyyy.....
So back in MAY OF 2006, they introduced a laptop with these specs:
1920x1080 Blu-ray reading AND WRITING HDMI out, so you could play those Blu-ray disks out to your HDTV Built-in TV tuner 4 GB RAM standard GeForce 7800 with 256 MB VRAM Built-in camera
At least the 17" MBP has those last 2 now.
The price of that Sony laptop 2 years ago was $3500, very much in keeping with the $2500 price of the MBP plus 2 more gigs of RAM when you add back in the 2 years of price decline for today's MBP...which 2 years later has no TV tuner, no HDMI, no Blu-ray reading or writing, and no 1920 res.
Hmmmm....
And then just about a year ago, Sony introduced a later VAIO that unambiguously smacks on the MBP, with a few tweaks from the previous year's model to bring the base price under $2000.
15 in. screen (check - second lightest in the game after the MBP) Santa Rosa Intel (check...wait, a YEAR ago?!?) No longer standard 1920x1080 res, but you can upgrade to that! I HATE that MBP's video options aren't upgradeable HDMI 1.3 a YEAR ago Blu-ray burner/reader Upgradeable to 400 GB storage with 2 internal 200 GB hard drives a YEAR ago
Did I mention that the base price was under $2000?
Again, I love my MBP, and am using it now. I've never owned a VAIO. I'm just saying that Apple has a long way to go to catch up to the state of the art.
Oh, and lest anybody suggest that Sony brought these models out because they had such a large stake in Blu-ray's success, I say, not so fast. The exact numbers are hard to pin down, but most of the sources I've found place Sony's stake in the format at somewhere around 20%. (Look it up - plenty of references.) The job of the laptop team is NOT to support the Blu-ray team (Japanese companies don't work that way). Their job is to sell laptops, and with this kind of price-performance, they're keeping themselves at the top of the PC game.
Couple of other notes as I write this on Sunday March 2 aught 8, Acer has also announced Blu-ray enabled laptops in Q2, supporting 1080p in both 16 and 18 in configurations. (I have no idea what's up with those sizes.)
And in a "you had to see this coming" announcement from the week before, Toshiba has confirmed that it isn't ruling out Blu-ray drives on its laptops. I'm not sure what "confirmed" means in the context of "maybe," but there you go. The "see this coming" part is because Toshiba still has the biggest laptop market share...and see above re: Sony. These guys couldn't care one flip about the outcome of the format war. They have numbers to meet, and they'll do what it takes.
Now, to see why this would be cool, check out the specs on T's HD DVD laptop last summer. HD DVD-r of course, and the usual suspects (802.11n, webcam, bluetooth, etc.) but check out the rest:
Santa Rosa 2Ghz Core 2 Duo GeForce 8600 with 512 MB VRAM (!!!) included HD tuner fingerprint reader (a big deal for business computers, trust me) 2 160 GB drives 4 Harmon Kardon speakers
Early last summer, for $3199 stock. You might not care about some of these features, but the price-performance is once again, well ahead of the current generation of MBPs, and maybe the next.
The fact is that I DO own a Toshiba laptop from my PC days. After 4 years, I still love it, a true entertainment powerhouse -- cable tuner, built-in (and very good) DVR with one-click burning to DVD (from 4 years ago, so SD of course), and the best sound I've ever heard on a laptop...with only 2 Harmon Kardon speakers. You know they sound great since HK was the first, and still the best, mfr of matched external speakers for the Mac.
My point isn't to pee on my own MBP...ewwww....a computer that I truly adore. Just an addition to Walter's admonition to Apple, to shake a leg and add the features that have existed on PCs for years.
Later this month (3/08), Dell will ship a sub-$1000 Blu-ray enabled laptop. Wouldn't it be a kick to see this introduced in the MacBook, or even iMac, before the MBP? It's happened before. And btw, if it would work with the Pro Apps, I'd use a 13" MacBook in a heartbeat. Still the biggest bang for the buck in the Mac universe, and a great form factor.
The bulk of the article focuses on what an energy pig the Blu-ray drives are for laptops. The big thing is that Blu-rays decode is currently processor-intensive, but efforts are underway to move that to the GPU. I suspect that this is how Dell is pulling off the sub-$1000 price: a less expensive CPU, and as is ALWAYS the case (grrrr), a less expensive, higher-performing GPU than the MBP has.
So, to invoke the Prophet Biscardi again, Hello Apple! What about it?
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 2, 2008 at 7:52:18 am
(Howdy to everyone who came here from any links after April 2007. Rather than edit this to reflect how things have gone since then, I created a new blog entry that you can find here.
Other than this note, I've left the original entry unchanged when I wrote it. Interesting to see what I was right about, and what I was wrong about. One thing we were ALL wrong about, that the war would go on for another couple of years. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I've not seen one single prediction before January 2008 that Blu-ray, which has looked like the winner for a while, would win as quickly as it did.
With that, take a gander.)
I've heard people say that porn is going to decide who wins the DVD format wars, just like they did with videotape. Maybe it'll be PS3 or Xbox. Okay, worth talking about. But there's somebody out there who has a bigger influence on retail buying behavior than all of them combined, and they've got $100 million that says HD DVD is going to win. Anybody here want to argue merchandising with Wal-Mart?
Even if you do, Wal-Mart is the world's largest DVD retailer, so they get to win the argument.
The story being widely reported is that Wal-Mart is ordering up TWO MILLION HD DVD players from Taiwanese manufacturer Fuh Yuan for $50 apiece.
The source of all of these stories appears to be a post in the AV Science forum. And as we at The COW believe, forums are often the very, very best source for the straight dope. You'll find both the link to the original Chinese story, and a persuasive translation of it. (My Chinese isn't quite strong enough to evaluate it conclusively.) There's also a very lively discussion of what price Wal-Mart will sell them for. As the speculation rages, the price has gone from $299 down to $99. Whatever. We'll know when we know.
I'm thinking lower rather than higher. Wal-Mart has been using the weekly cycle of DVD releases as loss leaders to drive customers into their stores. They're especially fond of this strategy, because DVD buyers spend more per visit than non-DVD buyers.
If you start poking around, you'll find a heap o' articles (or, as our UK readers would say, "AN heap o' articles") about all this, but I say this is by far the best of them. (Trust me, I'm right.) (This time.) Here's the money quote:
Wal-Mart sees the new high definition formats as a way to bring in store traffic again but they realized that won't happen unless the players are affordable and there is only one standard. They recognized their own power in being king maker previously and are now using that power to drive the format that works best for them. They could care less about the technology as this is all about making money and they (like every other retailer in this space) know that two formats won't allow the market to move outside of the fringes and the dual-mode players are simply way too expensive.
So they need one standard and a lot of players in market before their DVD customers wander off to download land and stops coming to Wal-Mart for movies.
He's got a lot of other interesting arguments, but, more important, a whole lot of what appears to be actual facts. Imagine that!
Oh, and one interesting bit of speculation: that the real source of the whole $100 million story is...wait for it....Wal-Mart.
Quick closing notes for now:
I don't think porn had a darn thing to do with the success of VHS. Apparently didn't hurt it any, though..but porn's a non-factor this time for sure.
As much as the data folks like us think Blu-ray is a no-brainer, many in the home theater world hate it. Folks as old as me hold Joe Kane in the highest esteem. A former chair of SMPTE and a pioneer in video calibration, man oh man, he has nothing good to say about Blu-ray. Admittedly, some of this is ancient history (having been written in the practically medieval Summer of '06), but Joe's disdain endures the sands of time.
Using a conversation with Joe a few months later as a jumping off point, Ultimate AV concurs.
While not as virulent, Projector Central was unequivocal in declaring HD DVD the winner in an article called, "Blu-ray: Can it Survive?" Again, some of the information is dated , but still an example of how differently the world of HD disks looks from upstream (creation) and downstream (consumption).
More recently, Joe's putting his money where his mouth is. One of the reasons we geezers love him so is because of his Video Essentials. I used it daily as a systems installer (including home theater), and it's the cheapest way to make your home theater look beyond its best. It's out on a hybrid disk alright: HD DVD and standard DVD. No Blu-ray.
Even if you think he's nuts on Blu-ray, you really need to check out his disk.
I think both DVD formats are irrelevant. It's already all about the HD movie downloads. But that's for another blog entry.
Discuss.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Feb 20, 2008 at 6:11:54 am
I had a lot of fun writing the "The Big Dog Gets Off the Porch" article for the newsletter. (Check out my blog post on the topic too.) It took a TON of research, though, and I found a lot of things I just didn't have room to use. It also made me think about some things -- new stuff as well as stuff that's been kicking around forever. So here we go...
This was never about image quality. Sort of. There were many comparitive issues that factored into the victory, and they never had anything to do with which format looked better. As Joe Kane pointed out in the article, there was a time when Blu-ray was easily demonstrable as having much poorer quality, due largely to seriously nasty MPEG compression.
(Please note: the article I wrote for the main library had a TON of links, and took an acre of work, so I'm not going to repeat any of them here.)
I think it also pissed him off that Sony et al. simply refused to look at new, better compression technologies. There was much horror from EVERYONE (including me, not that it matters) about this, long before the format even launched. The 2005 reply from Sony absolutely did NOT help:
"Advanced (formats) don't necessarily improve picture quality," said Don Eklund, Sony Pictures' senior vice president of advanced technology. "Our goal is to present the best picture quality for Blu-ray. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that's with MPEG-2."
As the article mentions, the image quality was SO much poorer that the videophile community in particular felt that Blu-ray was DOA.
So what changed? I think Joe K is right: it was hammer and tongs competition. Blu-ray looks fantastic of course, and compeition from HD DVD chased it far faster than mere consumers ever would have.
Image quality: Microsoft fails to deliver the killing blow Anybody remember that head to head demonstration of VC-1 and H.264 at NAB? (Both of these are SMPTE names for Windows Media and QuickTime. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. There were some other formats too, but it was lights out: None of us had seen anything like VC-1. Even the hardest core Mac fanboys were blown away.
A bigwig in the Hollywood post community (ground zero for Mac fanboys, believe me) said, It's over. Microsoft won. Yeah, it's cross platform and everything, but QT is out of it.
Don't believe the hype about Avid, btw. It's the OTHER ground zero for Mac fanboys. It was started as a Mac-only company, and won 6 technical Emmys and an OSCAR for its products between 1989 and 1998, all with Mac-only products, long before Apple bought the Windows-originated Final Cut from Macromedia.
(The PC hype about Avid is another story. The short version is that the guy who said what he said, everyone he worked for, and everyone who worked for him, was fired in the next year. What he was said was never, ever true. End of story.)
So it was with no pleasure whatsoever that we went on the road with VC-1. We projected it on the top of the line Barco projectors. There were only 3 of them in the world, and we had two. (Barco themselves were stuck with only one.)
We projected VC-1 playing our 30 minute trailer reel and our 5 minute high-impact demo at 4 megaBITS per second playing off a hardrive on FORTY FOOT diagonal screens. A high quality projector showing a huge image exposed every single flaw...
...and there were none. We invited people to put their noses against the screen (rear-projected) and invited them to look for flaws. LA, NY, Chicago, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich -- nobody found any. One guy (ONE!) claimed to see some compression artifacts, but when it was pointed out that that was the texture of the screen fabric, he relented.
And that was pretty much the end of VC-1. I have no idea what happened. My guess is that Msoft both lost their will to fight in Hollywood (our contacts at MSFT disappeared), and they focused their efforts on Xbox and HD DVD.
The effect in all places was the same: they forced QT, Playstation, and Blu-ray to get much much prettier.
The OTHER result was largely the same: H.264 still has a much bigger footprint, Playstation still lacks basic features that Xbox has, as does Blu-ray re: HD DVD....but they all look fantastic.
This is why Joe Kane thinks the format war on DVD ended too soon, and why the industry as a whole is disappointed as Apple has fewer and fewer competitors -- the pace of innovation is one the verge of winding down to a crawl. Competition is GOOD.
May the best format LOSE Now, this all played out much, much differently for the TAPE format wars. People lament that Beta was the better format: ridiculously better quality, smaller form factor, more durable tape and shell, and on and on.
These are all exactly the reasons why VHS won. Betamax was too good for the studios to let it live.
In fact, they demanded that VHS image quality be reduced even further. VHS lived to see the light of day because the picture degraded so thoroughly when copied. No one of good intent would put up with it.
Which is why the Video Home Standard won. It's more complicated than that, of course, but it's why the studios backed it before the market did, even though Betamax came out earlier, and initial sales were much higher.
WHY this happened, and why it also happened in the DVD format wars in exactly the same way, is a conversation for another day. But it's interesting to note that Blu-ray won for many of the exact reasons that VHS won. Certainly following the same pattern. You think Sony might have been taking notes?
We know that Betamax's professional derivative became the professional standard, and the professional derivative of VHS, MKII, died without a trace...for many of the same reasons that VHS won in the home.
Here's a final word about competition: with Betamax, Sony was the first to introduce really high-quality audio on tape. (The professional derivative of "Beta Hi-Fii" was PCM.) VHS had nothing similar...until the year AFTER "Beta Hi-Fi."
Remember kids, competition, even in format wars -- ESPECIALLY in format wars -- is a good, good thing. The tape format wars went on just about the right amount of time. I agree with Joe Kane that the DVD format war probably ended a year early.
