Gizmodo
Blu-Ray will dominate the industry in three years. Or maybe it will be HD DVD. The general consensus is that whoever wins doesn't really get a lasting victory, since they're both in the last physical video format ever. That sentiment has largely been the consensus of the press and leaders in the tech industry.
The end of physical formats for movie and TV shows could be called digital convergence, a happy, wonderfully singular, unified digital world. Content moves seamlessly from your multifunction portable device to your TV, between your computers, and to every monitor and audio system and random networked appliance in between. To have that happen in a stream of bits floating effortlessly on radio waves, without physical discs or specially designated boxes, would be truly wonderful.
But an end to physical video formats doesn't mean an end to format wars. In fact, once film and television content are no longer bound by physical media, we're in for the mother of all format wars.
Don't be quick to leap over Blu-ray and HD DVD as the final hurtles before the end of the race; we're far worse off without those discs. After they are gone, there won't be just two, or three formats even. We're talking 10 or 20 disc-free formats at the minimum, all with their own subscriptions, fee rates, movie selections, file resolutions and formats, use restrictions, preferred content providers and sometimes even hardware. Without discs, we may very well be screwed.
Here are some of the players already making their way onto the field:
Amazon Unbox. Xbox 360 Marketplace. Amazon Unbox on TiVo. Wal-Mart. San Disk USB TV. Apple iTunes. Sony Internet Video Link. BitTorrent. Netflix. Slingbox. Vudu. Joost.
All have incomplete catalogs. All are restricted in where, how, and on what you can play their content. None play together well, if at all. iTunes content plays on an iPod, on Apple TV, and on your computer, but not on your Creative Zen. Your Wal-Mart wares won't play on your iPod. Good luck getting it on your plasma TV easily, or to another computer in your house. God forbid each service offers its own set-top box, like Apple TV and Amazon Unbox's TiVo setup. Can you imagine them all stacked up next to your TV?
We've got a name for this all-singing, all-dancing, all-digital melee: the N-format war, N being an unknown number of formats between 2 and infinity—since anyone and everyone can enter the game, and pretty much anyone and everyone is.
Convergence is the consumer's dream: one system that supports all. But companies are mostly thinking about their own "ecosystems"—vertically integrated offerings like Apple's iTunes, iPod, and Apple TV. Within these ecosystems, there is limited convergence: It's fairly easy to move stuff around within the Apple ecosystem, and it's not too difficult to move content around the Vista Media Center/Xbox 360/Zune ecosystem either. As time goes by, these ecosystems will only add new options, such as Windows Home Server, and hopefully build smoother systems for juggling media.
Microsoft and Apple obviously have advantages in the N-format war that the others don't, because they control entire platforms of hardware and software, and for the most part all levels of digital content playback, movement and distribution.
Apple, which develops both hardware and software, always starts with the premise that the customer will only buy Apple-branded products. Microsoft, having its origin as a software maker that supplies billion-dollar hardware partners, has traditionally focused more on developing "standards" that others will adopt.
On the one hand, this might be a good defense: Amazon, Wal-Mart and BitTorrent's stores license WMV and its accompanying DRM scheme. It's likely that Microsoft is offering its tech for rock-bottom prices to encourage adoption. And the upcoming IPTV capabilities of the Xbox 360 are just an extension of its larger IPTV platform licensing. AT&T and a growing number of other IPTV providers around the world already use Microsoft's IPTV platform.
On the front end, every decent version of Windows Vista comes stacked with Windows Media Center, which streams to the Xbox 360, itself already a VOD box—and will become even more so once the IPTV rollout begins.
On the other hand, Microsoft has lately been following Apple's lead, and spending a lot of time working on its own hardware, and not all of it plays well with Microsoft partners. At the same time, some of its DRM arrangements, particularly in audio, have atrophied for lack of support in times of crisis. (Can you say "PlaysForSure"?)
For the time being, neither Microsoft's nor Apple's ecosystems play nice with each other. They can be coerced into sharing the playground with smaller ecosystems like TiVo, but usually only with a third-party workaround, and even then they tend to be messy. They are neither integrated nor seamless. Think of, for instance, Apple TV over Slingbox or Netgear's Digital Entertainer HD.
The one thing every service has in common, the Tootsie roll at the center of the Tootsie pop if you will, is a computer. With a computer, you can run multiple applications. It might be a giant pain to launch one program to see your favorite TV show, then launch another to catch a newly released film, but it's plausible.
The trouble is, we don't like to watch movies at our computers, and computers have failed to colonize the living room.
On the Windows side, we've seen countless iterations of the Media Center PC, many very good-looking component-styled PCs, complete with HDMI and optical audio outputs. But those don't sell. The gigantic sales figures of Windows XP MCE were most often chalked up to the fact that the software came free with most PCs; people didn't even know they had a so-called "media center."
The Mac mini seemed like a primo candidate to lead the computer's charge to the TV. Small, attractive, not a speed demon, but solid enough to serve as a media center for recording shows and serving up media to and fro. Instead of pushing it for that purpose, Apple brings us Apple TV. For some reason the current state of the industry favors set-top boxes to full-fledged thinking machines. We rent them from the cable company. We buy them from game console makers or Internet movie distributors.
So we're stuck with half-assed solutions—be they Apple TV, Sony Internet Video Link, Netgear Digital Entertainer HD or Xbox 360, all under the control of format owners hell-bent on keeping out any format that might make a competitor rich. Add to that the content delivery of cable, satellite and IPTV boxes, already featuring their own set of content-access rules and regulations.
It would seem that the solution would be to choose a single distributor. But licensing on the content side makes this impossible. Frightened by iTunes' hegemony and concerned with a shrinking physical-media market, Hollywood is not licensing full catalogs to Apple, or anyone else, be it Netflix or Wal-Mart, because digital distribution puts an unprecedented amount of control into the hands of the distributors themselves. So every distributor gets a chunk of the content pie, but no distributor gets to offer the whole thing. We have 20 distributors, 20 formats.
So you're forced to subscribe to two, three, maybe even five of those. How will you know, after spending $300 on a set-top box, whether your particular movie of choice on a Friday night will even be on it? The studios one day must all appear in the same box, better still, all together in multiple competing boxes from Microsoft, Apple and Wal-Mart. That way, the differentiating factors become the user experience and the price.
Currently there is no magical box that will deliver everything. You'll definitely need a hardcore PC or Mac Pro to handle new video content, not to mention multiple client applications and some ingenious and possibly unlawful way of getting the stuff to your TV. Your best efforts will produce one jerry-rigged system handling 20 disparate services and formats, and content providers will view you as the crook, and the openness of the PC as a threat. Dedicated boxes, maddeningly piled up by your plasma, will continue to be the preferred distribution for those worried about content "security".
Welcome to the N-format war. The online distribution landscape is messy, uncoordinated and fragmented, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. It almost makes us nostalgic for the days of Blu-Ray and HD DVD yore that are yet to come.
Comments
Enter the media portal. Agnostic to the N-format war, it will be the one stop shop where, by proxy, all of your subscriptions and delivery systems will be channeled for convenience.
Of course, you will then have the N-mediaportal wars. Followed by the N-RIAA law suits.
8mm projection FTW!!
I think they just added a couple formats in the time it took me to read this post.
"iTunes content plays on an iPod, on Apple TV, and on your computer, but not on your Creative Zen. Your Wal-Mart wares won't play on your iPod."
Maybe not by default, but it can be done with some tinkering, especially with the alternative firmwares being offered out there.
gotta go, playing Doom on my sansa.
Hard media won't be going anywhere for a long long time. Hard drives crash, computers burn, batteries bust and wires fray, but a disc can last through the ages (if cared for properly).
For now, I choose the unlawful means of getting my digital content to my television, so I choose the format I want, while the corporations wage war.
Good write up.
Not sure how this other article gets a digg button, but something interesting like the above is left alone.
You could have said the same about music, but it seems to be leveling out with DRM-free offerings from Apple and Amazon. Don't you think that the same will come to pass with video?
yeah well everyones gonna be screwed for choosing the wrong format, execpt for the pirates who get something that works on everything. im not saying become a pirate. but it seems its the best way to aquire digital files these days (other than the occasional lawsuit). and free!
but i dont and nor do you.
DEUS EX MACHINA
Studios will always fear what the God can do with the machine.
Shouldn't Apple's ship be white?
XBMC is the best solution to most of those problems i've found. the web based video part has to be fined tuned, but if i have it somewhere in my house my xbox with xbmc plays it {unless it is blue ray {which my ps3 takes care of} or hd encoded files {luckily i don't have too much to worry about that right now}}
I disagree with most of this post, though I can see how others would agree. For me, the recent decisions by major record labels to approve DRM-free songs indicates the way the wind is blowing. Once content providers realise that they can make *more* money by providing it unemcumbered, hardware manufacturers too will realise that they can attract the greatest # of users by making their devices play the greatest number of formats. See Sony's gradual embrace of MP3 for this phenomena on the hardware side.
Individual DRM-protected episode downloads on the model of iTMS is unsustainable as a primary mode of receiving video content -- while it's great for subscribing to 1 or 2 shows, or for catching an episode you've missed, the costs of watching what you would watch from a 60+ channel cable package would be exorbitant. Cable TV providers in conjunction with broadcast networks could completely wipe out Apple's business model by offering a Tivo2Go-like system.
So long as content providers (broadcasters) can find a means to integrate advertising into the actual content of their shows, they will have every incentive to distribute those shows as widely as possible, which means making them DRM free. If they can do that, or create a program with "unfastfowardable" advertisments either at the beginning or during the program itself, the market pressures will be to create those programs DRM free and hope they spread as widely as possible.
Right now we are stuck in a gray zone, where content providers are dealing with a huge shift in how content is monetized. DRM and pay-per-episode in a closed system is only a stop-gap measure until content providers come up with a better way of monetizing content through advertising. Once that method is established and proven effective, all the incentives for DRM and limited distribution fall by the wayside. Once that falls by the wayside, the incentive for closed systems falls.
It's what is happening RIGHT NOW with music, and I have every confidence that, given time, it too will happen with video.
Civil War, I'm with Sandisk. If I can't store it on a SDcard, then I'm not interested. Hard storage should never, ever, go away. Only shrunk down and easy to read by various machines.
we're talking video anfield. There's no equivalent to the unprotected, high quality, omnipresent CD competing iwth the online stuff.
I'm still going to do whatever I want with anything that comes in to my home. Laws or not.
No I am not a pirate. I don't steal. But if it is in my house, or displayed in my house, I'm going to display it however I want.
If a format stops me from doing that, I either don't buy it, or I don't see it.
Corporations can stick their forced ecosystem, well you know where.
Sorry to be a little militant about this, but damn, these corporations are hypocrites. They actually made more money before the invention of DRM, you'd think it would occur to them to continue to go back to the old ways. But no, they persist in this stupidity.
That's actually quite a well done photoshop job on that picture.
The only problem is that, if everything were 'scale', The USS Apple seen ramming the USS Microsoft, would be the size of an inflatable row boat, and the USS Microsoft would be the size of the current USS Nimitz.
@axiomatic:
Hear hear!
Couldn't have said it better myself!
---
And the pic for this post? AWESOME
Again, well done Gizzy ol' kid.
Brian,
The presence of the CD has not been the determinative factor in the pushback against DRM, nor in the record labels belated shift towards DRM-free music.
All parties concerned are operating under the ultimate market pressure -- the profit motive.
Where opportunity exists for a company to make money, they will take it. The predictions of n-formats simply do not bare out historical reality -- if multiple formats proliferate, there will be a tremendous market advantage to those who either a) create hardware that can play all those formats or b) create content that is playable on open standards.
In an open market, the problem of multiple standards is almost always self-correcting (see VHS v Beta).
Under your logic, radio manufacturers never would have added the capability to radios to play not just am, but fm, and then tapes, and then cds, and then mp3s, and then satellite radio...
Great article (screed?). I'm thinking on-demand subscription will be big. lots 'o piratey goodness on ye horizon! arrrrr....
All I want to know is where the pic of the ships came from???
For anyone who isn't already there, I'd like to reinforce a couple of the posts above... an Xbox costs $60, Xbox Media Center is free, and it will play every format there is. A cheap computer with TV out costs more and isn't as convenient, but will do the same thing. You can rip your own CDs/DVDs easily or BitTorrent is free. There is no need to be at the mercy of corporate foolishness.
I know Giz has addressed XBMC fanboys before, but it really should be trumpeted so that everyone may benefit.
"The only problem is that, if everything were 'scale', The USS Apple seen ramming the USS Microsoft, would be the size of an inflatable row boat, and the USS Microsoft would be the size of the current USS Nimitz."
If you're referring to the computing marketshare percentages, sure. But if you're talking about the formats adopted and occupancy in the music distribution ring, Apple is pretty big.
anfield, we're still not talking about audio here. So I'm not goign to agree or disagree with you on that point. Stay on topic. Video ecosystems online will be considerably more complicated than the physical ones.
Brian,
I am aware we are talking about video -- I am only using music as an analogy. In my view, the logic of free markets means that video ecosystems, complicated as they may are now, will ultimatley succumb to the same market pressures that every other attempt to create a closed system has. So I would have to disagree with you on the idea that video will inherently be a different kettle of fish than all that has come before.
First off, very well written article, thanks (personally I'd like to see more of these editorial-esque tech blog entries)
To me it seems like the "digital convergence," while agreeably inevitable, feels like it's a long, long way off. Both high-capacity disc formats are in their infancy, and the average consumer's desire to actually own physical media is a huge paradigm to shift.
That said, I agree that once it does come about fully, the "N-format war" (nice label) is going to be a monster. Hopefully by the time there is an HDTV and decent broadband speed for content delivery (e.g. FIOS) in every home, the competition will have been narrowed down to just a handfull of distributors.
Sadly, the set-top box approach would be the logical path for distributors concerned with DRM.
Who knows, maybe by then we'll be living totally DRM-free, a sort of digital nirvana, where all content everywhere is as free as the air we breathe. Kind of like the pirate bay, only, you know, not illegal.
And while I'm dreaming, I'll take my flying car too please.
I just don't know how anyone who puts more than a couple minutes of thought into it can be gullible enough to buy the currently hip idea that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are going to be the last physical formats ever.
Yes, I know it is a popular talking point, but it also happens to be an insane, and rather idiotic one. Downloadable content has its uses, and its place, but it is never going to completely replace physical media. People like having something to hold and take home when they spend their money. They like having a shelf full of titles to show off and thumb through. People want that physical media, and no amount of hip Business 2.0 techno-utopianism is going to change that.
Just look at the publishing world for proof of this. People could spend the rest of their lives reading nothing but web pages, but they still go to the store and buy physical books. They could buy e-texts that they read on their phone or PDA, that has been an option for years now, but most of them go and buy the actual book, because they want to hold the physical product in their hands, and put it up on the shelf when they are done so that people can see they read it.
Hell, people still buy vinyl records! The physical format isn't going anywhere. There is a reason that Apple, Microsoft, Unbox, and all the others are still trailing Netflix, and that is because everyone but the hardcore geeks would rather slip a disk in a player and watch it, than wait for a title to download to their computer, then share it over their network, then stream it to a set top box, then watch it on their TV before it times out. If you like a physical disk, you can take it over to a friend's house and watch it with them, you can loan it to someone who wants to see it, you can watch it again two days later with the whole family without worrying about it expiring, and you can stick it on a shelf and forget about it for years then come back to it without wondering if you properly backed it up when you bought your new computer.
No, there will be plenty of other formats after Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Eventually online distribution will find its niche, and the "everything has to be online and downloadable" fad will die down, and people will just feel silly for ever thinking that downloadable content would kill off physical media.
I always wondered what happened at the Tower of Babel... why people who had the technical skill to build a tower could suddenly lose the ability to communicate with their co-workers...
Gizmodo, you done good with this post.
I now forgive you for your flamewar-inducing linux-fanboy expletive-laced post from a while back.
Say "format war" and we still think "Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD." But we've been hoodwinked, ladies and gentlemen, into thinking that physical formats matter most, when they're already verging on technical obsolescence. No. The real war will be fought between file formats, not disk formats.
Why is google in the picture?
Physical formats will disappear the day paper and coin currency is no longer minted.
@Yeebles - video.google.com
How this for a bit of reality: DVDs aren't going ANYWHERE for quite some time. And as for the notion that we might be nearing an end to physical media? Baloney.
People like to "hold" things, and have "stuff". A computer file doesn't fill that need, and won't ever replace a solid bit of plastic that can be put on a shelf. It will just NEVER happen, except for a small-ish percentage of the population.
Yeah thats a half truth in my opinion HowCron. I've been a Steam user for a while now and at least for PC games, I'm happier without the shelf loads of boxes I never touch, unless I have to get the CD/DVD to start the game. And if the game developer did put that stupid feature of needing the CD/DVD to start the game (yeah ubisoft I'm talkin' bout you!) I'll rip the game with Virtual CD or DAEMON tools or something like that just so I don't have to go dig that install cd/DVD out to play my game.
I'm not hung up on having physical media per se. I'm just against anything that is inconvenient to the consumer.
I think I would apply this mentality to Music or Video as well. In fact I kind of am already. I do have a Snapstream server with plenty of my favorite movies recorded from HBO/SHOWTIME/etc. that I do not own the DVD's for, and I like it. My house does not look like a Best Buy display case, which is good.
Ha Ha, "final hurtle"
You know, as opposed to hurdle..
Anyway, beautiful piece. I love seeing original work
This is very good post, in my opinion all good points.
@Jesus Diaz dude keep the photochops coming, they are great. I get a laugh almost every time.
hard media will never die. i would still rather have a dvd than a movie stuck on a hard drive. i'm not foolish enough to think that it won't crash on me. i've crashed two over the past two years and lost a shitton of pictures, music, and movies. and as long as movie companies know people will come and buy something tangible as opposed to something online, there's no motive to deliver content directly to the home. the bandwidth still isn't great enough for large files that will literally be dozens of GBs.
Prediction: Everyone's screwed except the:
pirates
_and_
those who buy a movie then download it in theora off the pirate bay.
Physical media will be around for the foreseeable future, if for no other reason than it takes the majority of the people in the Red states (read flyover country) from five to ten years to catch up to the latest technology (I recently moved from California to a Red town and was shocked to see how old the TVs that people are still watching are...and I was even more shocked to see the local video store stocking a majority of the titles in Full Screen versions!! How 1989!!!).
Beyond that issues, convergence is not something we should wish for. As a born-again Luddite, I have come to realize that convergence means one thing...the corporation gets to control the content and the medium. You hate DRM now, wait until their is nothing left to copy unless you videotape it off your computer screen. Oh and their is the little issue of cost - digital convergence will end up costing you big as the fees nickel and dime you into a lower class (right where they want you); your cell phone is a perfect microcosm for this, the more you do with it,the more content you use it for, the more it costs you in small little increments that add up to a paycheck at a time.
I love HD and am waiting for HD DVD to win, but that is where it should stop for awhile. And, lets face it...if you opt for digital, the quality is likely to be no better than watching a plain old DVD anyway.
Newer isn't always better.
Wow I wish they had never made both Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Personally, I think that HD-DVD sounds better but further than that I don't know anything about either format.
It just makes a huge mess for consumers and retailers...
I agree with those who say people want something to buy that is physical. Isn't that why Madonna called our planet a "material world"?
As for the war approaching, I'm going to put on my pirate hat and man the torrent ship Bitlord. Anyone want to be my seedy buccaneer? Arrr!
I think we've got a bunch of 70 year old men in discussion apparently.
"Ain't nobody gonter take my physical media, consarnit!"
Give it a break. Physical media is absolutely moving toward the precipice. It remains to be seen of course, but I don't believe for a minute that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD *together* will ever acheive the market penetration that VHS or DVD did.
Why would they?
I can have a giant hard drive filled with iTunes shows or movies (or "other stuff" if I want to be a bit tricksy with the DRM) and have thousands of movies and shows at my disposal without filling my house with jewelcases.
Why on Earth would I do anything else?
I have all my stuff on a 500GB drive and use a Mac Mini to serve all of it to anywhere in my house. I have another 500 GB drive that serves as a backup. As HD storage drops I go bigger and rip my stuff to better resolutions. I'll probably go to 1 GB drives in the next few months when those drives drop to 200 or so.
Yes, hard drives sizes need to increase and drop in price (and they always do), and Apple needs to serve up HD formats (which they will) but the end of physical media is absolutely at hand within ten years or so at the most.
Music can be found in many different formats but there are really only 3 major formats
Mp3, WMA, and whatever you mac weirdos use.
Wouldn't you think that only a couple video formats would rise as the best?
I'm not a 70-year-old man! I just happen to have a kinda conservative outlook on life.
and i'm a cynical youth who knows that whatever happens, it's regular joes like you and me(for whatever value of regular you assume from starbux coffee bitch to *nix ultra-nerd code ninja) that are going to get screwed.
and that my friends, is why i enjoy the world of barely legal(wink wink) downloading
I'll probably go to 1 GB drives in the next few months when those drives drop to 200 or so.
*frantically searches for thrown away 1gb drives*
here you go buddy, a perfectly usable 1gb drive. 200? you can have it for 150! how about 2 then? i'll combine shipping!!
I'm going to throw my typical sarcasm to the wind, and compliment Brian and the Gizmodo team for a fantastic article. Gizmodo has been on my "Google Home Page" for a couple years now, and before that, it was my browser home page. I initially started reading the posts because they had such a marvelous blend of sarcasm, irony, and useful information. It almost seemed like a bunch of geeks in their mom's basement learned how to socialize and communicate their vast knowledge in a way the rest of us could understand. Many Kudos.
Then something happened: Apple. I'm not going to go into some huge tyrade about whether or not Giz succomed to blog-pressure and put too much emphasis on Apple products. No, I'm simply using Apple as the metaphor that when something mediocre came in a shiny package, the site jumped all over it. Around the same time, there seemed to be a lot more "Digg Emphasizing" posts, and a lot less "screw the view count" articles written over the past year or so. These posts were unfortunate in the way that, while a minority, they over-shadowed the great reviews and articles that built Gizmodo in the first place.
Gizmodo is one of my first stops in the morning web commute; and since the office IT guys haven't blocked the site, it will continue to be a big part of my web environment. Heck... I've even tipped the Gizmodo guys a couple times. (Starbucks+iTunes=caffeinated CD creation) So, I can honestly say I'm not going anywhere for a while.
I'm an avid fan of what you guys do, and most of the time