Blockbuster to shutter up to 960 stores

In the continuing move away from brick and mortar video rentals, Blockbuster is planning to close as many as 22 percent of their current locations.

It’s pretty clear that services like Netflix, video on demand, and Internet based delivery are the preferred delivery methods going forward.

How Netflix Does Encoding

If you are using Netflix’s “Watch Instatntly” streaming service, you may be interested to know some of the technical details about their encoding processes.

Internet downloads could see the end of television by 2012

Vince Cerf, the “father” of the Internet, thinks “the world wide web will spell the end of television in the coming years.“

He claims that since we only watch 15 percent of programming in real-time, it would be easy to download programs over the Internet in the background and watch them at our leisure.

I’m sure at some point in the future this will happen, but I seriously doubt it will be by 2012.  Broadband penetration rates in this country are sill embarrassingly low.  No one is going to download a season of Lost over a 768k DSL connection.  When we all have a 100 Megabit fiber connection and a multi-terabyte media server in the basement, then we can see things like this happening.  Until then people will be happy with cable TV, DVRs and DVDs.

Dell offers up Qflix drives to burn CinemaNow movies to DVD

In case you are one of the six people who wants to burn downloaded content from CinemaNow to DVD, DELL has a drive for you.

This is a perfect example of how NOT to do electronic distribution.  They have created a system that requires special hardware and is even more restrictive than current DVDs.

Content creators should be able to protect their work and be properly compensated for their efforts, but if you make a system that is more restrictive, more expensive and less convenient, people are never going to use it.

New DVD Format Coming?

According to TG Daily:

A new DVD logo released by the DVD Forum has added to the speculation surrounding Toshiba’s HD-enabled DVD player that is expected to become available later this year. The organization chaired by Toshiba approved the “DVD Download/DL” logo during its most recent Steering Committee meeting.

Toshiba has publicly stated that they have no intention of supporting Blu-Ray, and with HD-DVD out of the picture this seems to point to some type of upscaling standard definition DVD player.  Perhaps it will be Internet connected for content updates and additional features.

Wirewize

If you need help setting up your home theater game console or other electronics check out Wirewize.

They have helpful guides for many consumer electronics that can show you which cables go where and how to connect it all together.

(Not that our readers would need any help, you’re all smart enough to figure it out )

The MPAA Doesn’t Want You Recording That Movie

The MPAA is at it again.  Now they want to prevent consumers from recording HD movies during the time period between when a movie is released in the theaters and it is available on disc.  They are petitioning the FCC to change the current restrictions on the use of technologies that restrict home recording.

In a very real sense, it is the studios’ content and they can do with it as they please.  As consumers we are also free to not purchase their product.  But in this case their ideas seem to do nothing except annoy people.  According to the article, they only want to block the recordings during the roughly 2 month period between when a program begins to be available in these other mediums and when it is available on disc.

This is a case where the MPAA is going to generate a huge amount of consumer ire for very little actual benefit.

Metered Pricing

Like it or not, metered Internet access pricing is coming your way (if you don’t already have it where you are). The days of downloading torrents all day long for $30/month are going to be over soon.

Like many other ISPs, Comcast is experimenting with traffic shaping/bandwidth caps or whatever you want to call it.

ISPs have allowed their infrastructure to lag and now with HD video, VOIP and other bandwidth hungry applications, their networks can’t provide the speeds and services people want. They tried to get the content providers to pay for needed upgrades, but the whole net neutrality issue nixed that idea. The only other person they could get to pay for it is the consumer (they’re certainly NOT going to pay for it out of their profits).

ISP often quote a figure that about 5% of their users consume 80% of the bandwidth.  These are the people who download music, movies, and other large files all day long.  They do a lot of file sharing so there is constantly data moving over their part of the network.  Contrast this with someone who checks their email a few times a week and goes to Yahoo.com for some news and you can see that it really isn’t fair for both users to be paying the same monthly fee.  The heavy users consume more resources and require the ISP to spend money to upgrade the network to provide a stated level of service for everyone.  All your other utilities are billed in a “pay for what you use” manner so why not Internet access?

By setting the limits high enough where only those 5% of the users will be affected, they can provide good service for everyone while inconveniencing only a small number of people.

However, all this only delays the inevitable.  If you want to deliver high-bandwidth, low latency services over your network, you need to spend the money on upgrades and infrastructure improvements.  At some point in the future those people who were just checking their email a few times a week are going to be streaming music and movies all day long.  The switch to IPv6 and even more connected devices will only place greater demand on networks and ISPs.

So what does all this have to do with video and DVDs?  Well, some people who are delivering content on physical media are looking to electronic delivery to save money and time in distribution.  For now, that might work since I can download your content basically for free as part of my $30/month ISP charge.  But when metered pricing kicks in and I have to “pay” for each bit and consider the value of your content compared to other content, I may think twice about whether I really want to view your content.  The cost of consuming the content has been pushed from the seller to the consumer.  A physical disc returns the economic cost to the seller.

I have no doubt that in the LONG run electronic distribution will be the norm.  Network infrastructure improvements will be made, storage will get cheaper and bandwidth caps and traffic shaping will affect only a small percentage of heavy users.  It’s hard to say when that will be, but until that all happens, there is going to be some pain for both content providers and consumers.

What were they thinking?

JVC has just released a combination VHS/DVD/Hard Drive player/recorder.  Yes, you read that right, VHS.  Hard to imagine what they were thinking or who would buy such a device.

Our video recorders are equipped with HDD (500GB or 250GB), a VHS player, DVD player/burner,a digital/analog TV tuner, HDMI, D4, S-Video, and composite outputs. They both support Dolby Digital and DTS format.

Physical Media Isn’t Dead Yet

According to Disney, they have sold 4 million movies and 40-50 million videos through iTunes, resulting in $123 million in revenue.

That sounds like a lot until you consider than Disney has $35 billion in yearly sales and hopes to make $1 billion from digital services this year.

Clearly physical media and other distribution methods still hold a lot of interest for consumers.

(Perhaps the more interesting part of this is the estimate that Disney makes $14.50 from every movie they sell at iTunes.  I wonder how much they make from selling physical discs at retailers and to rental chains.  If it’s significantly less than the iTunes amount, you can bet that they are going to be pushing hard for electronic distribution simply as a way to grow revenue.)