Toshiba tight-lipped on Blu-ray player plan Toshiba has poured cold water on claims that it's preparing to produce a Blu-ray Disc player this year. Well, sort of. The one-time HD DVD cheerleader this week formally said that it was not able to comment on stories that it plans to release the BD player by the end of the year. No great surprise, that - no one expected it …
In our current market place, even though the size of the pipe is getting larger, there continues to be a tight reign on bandwidth consumed. Even the iPlayer brought BT to a fit of the screaming abdabs.
On demand downloads of the size required for HD is not something I would consider realistic in the current market climate. There is also no end in sight for the data caps. Mine is around 25gig a month; one fully packed Blu-Ray abomination would take two months to download without costing me extra. OK, compression can chunk this down a bit, but even with this there would be no way I could consume a movie every week without getting hit hard on the credit card.
I'll stick with physical media please.
. . . price ? Assuming the same level of content and quality as BD (or even the ill fated HD DVD), then we need at least a 32GB SDHC card, blank ones of which cost more than a new release BD.
If they atart talking about re-using the cards, then thats a rental model.
Or am I being thick ?
A concept might just work. Blu-Ray discs have the same problems that DVDs have, especially from rental companies, in that they scratch and become unplayable far too easily. Ever hired a film, got home and found the disc looked like the previous renter's kids had strapped it to their feet and gone ice skating on concrete?
I'd envisage someone like blockbuster having all recent releases stored in house so we're only talking copy time if they didn't use exchangeable SD cards (kind of like BBQ gas bottles) preloaded with films.
What's the deal with the SD card slot on Blu-Ray players? What can be played from it? H.264?
All the download limit/throttling bollocks is due to the cost of bandwidth at the national and international level, not the "last mile" of the local loop.
Why not sort out a deal that gives ISPs a few bob for HD content distribution servers at the local exchange?
(Tux, because everyone knows he's totally pwn4g3-proof and would never let anyone poison the cached movie data with porno clips, à la Tyler Durden...)
my current BD collection, whist modest is still 20 disks... thats a fair investment...
using SD cards and transfering them to a larger storage medium is inherently risky, the cards themselves are prone to corruption as would be a central home repository... while CD/DVD/BD can all be revived with some careful cleaning...
If my downloaded collection dies, can I re download them? a-la PS3 store style, or will i be buggered - much like my lost itunes purchases??
Disks and pretty blue boxes are the way forward!!
Actually the bandwidth issue is not a real concern, most, if not all of the Content Delivery Networks have their own networks that only pop out on to the internet proper at local peering points. Also, I don't see them delivering HD on SDHC, more likely will be delivering just the actual movie in SD quality and with a 2G SD card being practically free....
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