Kamal.O.Rowe
Assignment One
This data shows an interesting trend that many manufacturers are starting to notice, the casual audience dominates the buying market, it isn’t audio piles, it isn’t video piles, it isn’t hardcore techies. Its soccer mom Jill, Dan the accountant, Sarah the co ed and grandma Marcy. Technology that is fairly easy to use and more importantly easy to brand to a mass market will always dominant, regardless of if its a utilitarian product or not. It also shows how popular digital media, and more importantly portable digital media has become. Once upon a time to watch a 1080p movie you had to build a pc powerful enough to play it without a falter, set up a decoder box, correctly wire the speakers, the list goes on. Now its as simple as downloading it through your apple TV , video game console, or turning on your cable box.
The same can be said for content delivery; people want it, and they want it now. Once upon a time Friday night was movie night, you drove to blockbuster or the local cinema and sat through that annoying pack of people behind you talking through the entire flick. However now with advances in home theater technologies and distribution mediums a lot more people are *waiting until it comes onto DVD*, or more recently..*waiting until it hits live or psn,* ~Xbox Live & Play Station Network~ or simply just downloading it directly to a pc or laptop connected to a TV. On more than one occasion I’ve spoken to friends that were *watching TV on You tube*. So now the big fight is between traditional media, in this case a 50GB or 50 000 Megabyte aprox, optical disk or a 20Mb high speed fiber optic connection. It’s gotten to the point where the hardware required to access multi-media content from both these mediums is identical and in the case of the Play Station 3 both built into a single device. Now this is fine and dandy for gamer Stan, with his 1000 watt sound system, 42 inch lcd and shelf upon shelf of content at his finger tips; but what happens now to accountant Dan that visited Stan’s house and decided he wanted get in on this, but didn’t want to drop 5 or maybe even 6 grand. This is where the true battle lines are drawn to decide what will become the dominant content delivery medium and more importantly who will come to dominate that market. Markets run by terms like plug and play, accessibility, usability, personalization and now more so than ever affordability.
For my analysis I chose to take a look at BRDVD or BluRay Digital Versatile Disk .Versatile because you can store more than video on it, along with its pros and cons. BR is a next generation storage medium, offering all the convenience of a physical, light weight disk, combined with ludicrous storage capability. How ludicrous? Lets make a little comparison; the average DVD stores 4.7 Gigabytes of information, the average hard disk stores 250 Gigabytes of information though HDD are being made in platter sets equal to a terabyte 1000 Gigabytes. A BR disk on the other hand can hold up to 50 Gigs in dual layer format; immediately you can see why this is beneficial. Now before you say,well there you go one hard disk can hold 5 or more BR disks; consider the following. A HDD requires a power source, generates heat; needs drivers, and most IT professionals wouldn't recommend carrying one around and certainly not shipping one with data on it to your local store for a stock boy to chuck around and then selling it. Basically as a quick and dirty storage medium, the HDD is no good; this is where BR comes into play, and all you need is a drive at home that can read a BR disk. Games, movies, RAW images, uncompressed video, uncompressed audio; they all instantly become portable without fear of losing critical information because of an accidental drop.
Of course, there is nothing good on this earth, which in too great amount can not harm. The same goes for BR, the most prominent con being its cost. To be frank BR is bloody expensive; on both a manufacturing and commercial level. The diodes that create the light which reads BR disks is very difficult to create and any device that promises to play back 1080 P content in 7.1 must have the processing power to do so. Lets take a look at some prices; the average BR PC drive is 300$ U.S, the average BR certified H.T.P.C or home theater PC is 1000$, the average stand alone BR player including the Sony PS3 is an astonishing 900$. This is before you throw in movies that cost Aprox 50$ a piece, and what ever else Best buy wants to con you into buying. It seems the old mantra of Live Long And Purchase is alive and well; however with all emerging technologies prices at first are slightly inflated , or as I like to call it *early adopters tax*. The competitions on the other hand, in the form of downloadable content and High Definition cable are all much cheaper and some argue much more practical, a one Terabyte hard disk is three to four times cheaper than the average blue ray player making storage for downloaded content less of a concern that it used to be; with the introduction of PVRs, IP TV and the evolution of gaming systems and pc' into more powerful multimedia devices than ever before, there’s no doubt that the cheapest and most practical devices will win. At the moment Sony has a good footing with the PS3, it’s been estimated that 4.48 million PS3’s have been sold thus far; however the number of machines bought purely as BR players is unknown. In the
So what exactly do these numbers mean for BR? Sony needs to keep in mind that only 30% of Americans have a high definition television set so their market for BRDVD as a source for HD content is limited to say the least and currently there here in the US there is no way to commercially obtain a BR RW drive and blank BR disks, so its usability as a storage medium is also limited. To be blunt BR has a serious fight on its hands if it wishes to dominate anything other than the $5.99 bin currently occupied by HD-DVD movies and old black and white movies.
Sources:
http://www.physorg.com/news96628138.html
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=867358
http://www.kotaku.com
Http://www.engadget.com
http://www.tiger.com
http://www.newegg.com
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