Blu-ray has 'five years left' says Samsung

Holographic storage solutions have been in development for a while. Last I checked, several terabytes (terrorbytes?) could be crammed into a little cube. The write speed was insanely slow though.

I wouldn't count optical media out just yet, especially with broadband penetration (Ha ha!) in the U.S. still having a long way to go and OLEDs and holographic storage being VERY expensive.

And that doesn't even begin on how restrictive digital distribution is. Let me buy a movie and convert it to any format I want and play it on any device I want as many times as I want and I'll ditch discs forever.

Sony is gonna introduce a $2,000 player for Christmas that's not even a 2.0 player! Woohoo! Go Blu-Ray!!

i have digital cable with onDemand and it's great. i like cable because it's always on with no player or moving parts. but i rarely order events or pay for movies. i subscribe to premium channels and can order movies from there. i stick to the free stuff. i f i like a movie i'll get the dvd. if i really like it i'll get the bluray.

I personally love the idea of digital services or subscriptions to access the entertainment medium. What is the purpose of holding the physical disc? Said peice of media will always exist, atleast so long as there is memory of it. I keep the physical storage to precious data, things that need tangible copy because they are unique. Documents, essays, pictures, home videos, etc etc, those are the sorts of things I keep on physical hand and I have so many of them I would love to clean up the rest of my senseless clutter and skip the middle man in the entertainment industry that makes his money off of mindless license fees, shipping costs and clutter.

Fucking awesome Arnon


HVD will probably be for the 9th generation of gaming. 8th seems to early. And wouldn't it take game developers forever to make a LONG QUALITY game on that HVD disc?

I think a fact often left out is that in order to ISP's and the internet as a whole to change, movies, TV and everything else has to become downloadable. The first major spike in broadband and high speed internet wasn't because I could load a website 120% faster (shockingly) it was because I could download anything I wanted which back then was pictures via email and music (legally and illegally). After that ISP's had to scramble to upgrade equipment to handle this, but they were also racking in the money. The second jump has to do with youtube and other video services. But getting high quality videos and such is something that ISP's can't just upgrade a few boxes and go. The whole network has to be rebuilt. So in areas where people are willing to pay (or have to) and areas where new homes are going up fast (current market = no where) is the places where verizon and others are at play. Once prices fall and they come up with a plan that can increase speeds but not bankrupt ISP's other area's will start to see higher speeds, but considering as of right now nobody is really pushing them yet, doing a half ass job and providing just good enough service is fine by them...........Just my 2 cents.

As a person who owns the original Star Wars trilogy in every format imaginable (including Laser Disk) I'll be the first to say it: constantly updating your media and forcing the consumer to repurchase the movie over and over and over again seems pointless. The jump from VHS to dvd was a welcome one: VHS were notoriously delicate and cumbersome to use. The switch from DVD to BR however isn't that imposing... and the prospect of paying a premium for that jump is even less tantalizing.
On the flipside digital media can be backed up easily, transfered easily (via network, disk, usb HDD or usb key) and can be modified at whim (for example by upscaling it or resizing it to fit the desired resolution). Distribution is easy, cheap and effective and storage is a snap (compare the size of a 1TB drive to however many DVDs this takes).
Ultimately is more a flexible format while optical media simply isn't. I think it's the ease of use and flexibility that will eventually win the day and although some people enjoy having a phisical copy of things I imagine that sort of perspective will become antiquated or even quaint. Some people still use records but most of us have moved on to mp3s. Same thing.

Perhaps he means that Blu-Ray has 'five years' of PROFITS left for Samsung. Even if Blu-Ray grows strong as a format, it will be dead as a money-maker. Within five years Blu-Ray players will be rebranded Chinese ODM machines that sell at commodity pricing, just like Samsung's current DVD players!

OLED will be profitable for many more years than Blu-Ray. The investment in manufacturing will keep Chinese ODMs away from OLED for longer. That puts Samsung in an oligopoly that will allow them to control the retail prices and profit margin of OLED displays for years to come!

The big question is will BR even replace DVD? I don't think many people care that much about BR even if they have hdtvs especially if BR discs are more expensive.

I could care less if I have the physical item because I have so much stuff as it is. Less clutter the better for us and the environment. You know most of us would care that the hd stream we are getting is not as high as blu ray disc, but to the mass majority out there people could care less.

I currently buy all of my cd's from Amazon because of no drm and its quick and easy without waiting for it in the mail. Steam made gaming very convenient, no more scratch disk, lost of cd key, or going to the store buying the disk. Anyways, blu ray will be around for quite sometime because the players will drop and more people will buy them. And I believe the majority of average Americans here don't know what digital distribution even is or blu ray for that matter...

Blu-ray is "nice" but its not nearly worth the extra cost of the hardware or the discs, which are criminally overpriced.

Bandwidth is rising?

Not according to Comcast. -_-

The digital download future, for dummies:

Pal: Hey buddy, can you lend me that new film you got?
You: ...? Come on, you know thats impossible.

All hail DRM!

Here in the UK, BBC have just upped the quality of their on demand application iPlayer. You can watch the last 7 days of any BBC program online for free.

It's now not that far behind that of a SD broadcast. I'm finding i'm watching 70% of prgrams through the iPlayer now. Still doesn't take that much bandwidth up, and the broadband speeds here are in the dark ages. I can easily see this doubling in quality in each year, an in 5 years time I can see it being of a similar quality to broadcast 1080i.

Yes, but what would you put on an HVD that a bluray can't handle?

I don't see HVD as a great video format. It would be overkill for video, much like DVD-audio.

The only way HVD would be good for movies is for archiving, or if some new video format comes out that requires a magnitude more space and bandwidth that neither bluray nor cable can provide. The only thing I see that would require that would be 3D, which is farther off than HVD.

Wow lots of highly informed, very technical arguments for both sides. But to put it simply, I buy in stores. With a physical copy I own the hell outta that movie. I can do whatever I want with it and watch it as often as i like, wherever I like. Then, just for shits and giggles I can rip it to my hdd as well! You just can't do that as freely when u buy a digital movie.

Yup, physical media FTW !!

The reason why blu-ray won over HD-DVD wasnt quality of picture. It uses the same damned compression. The reason Blu-Ray won and probably has a good long time on its hands is that as the High Def Resolutions go up, blu-ray has much more disc space to increase to than HD did. That means instead of having to upgrade again when they come out with 1580p or 2160p, you can still use the same format of disc because the current size of most movies on HD dont come close to utilizing the full storage abilities of Blu-Ray. Not to mention when you can fit 50 GB of information on a dual layered single side disc, it also make for great computer storage media when blu-ray burners actually become affordable for majority of people. Blu- could last for quite a while considering how strong DVDs are still going.

Well I wouldn't put much stock in what a competing company says about another company's product. Maybe Samsung has something they want to bring into market in the next 5 years!

But I would rather own an physical copy of a movie or TV series I like rather then store it on my hard drive. So I'm either going to have a collection of burned backups or official retail packages. Either way its going to be clutter.

Blueray will clear 10 years no problem, there will be no resolution increase, no need to new codecs (264 is perfect) and the disc has plenty of room, gobs of room for regular movies. Sure we have people flaunting around saying "but we can produce a bigger disc!"..fine.. come back in 10 years or make it easily backward compatible with blueray players (either readable via blue lasers or cheap dual reading assemblys).

And currently online media is NO THREAT to blue ray. Speeds are NOT increasing all that much (and for most people in the US, not at all) and some notably large high speed providers have scaled back and implemented download caps. Eitherway it will be a long time before online speeds meet that of blueray movies speed requirements.

Uh I don't get it... If it's only going to last 5 more years.. what will replace it? Will media be exclusively streaming? I mean blu-ray can do 1080P and though I don't have the figures on that, That market cannot be near saturated yet and we haven't even heard the rumblings of any new consumer level tech for resolutions beyond that. To be honest, it would probably be tough to even notice a difference at resolutions beyond 1080P unless you have some super mega size tv, maybe 60 inches and beyond.

I agree I want physical media to clutter my living room, I like having a physical copy of it. I am not a fan of downloading, music from itunes yes, I don't care about HD sound, the sound quality download produce is good enough for me when it comes to music, i have not bought a CD in ages. But movies are another story, I am not a download whore, I cant stand downloading a movie. I want to go to a store, brows through the movies and buy one, thats half the fun, you might find something you didn't know was out. I don't want to stair a computer screen to pick a movie to down load, I want to go out to a store and buy one. Sadly all you downloaders are wrong, there will still be other physical media formats after Blu-ray but not many more, I think "they" will skip holographic discs because not many of us want another spinning optical format and instead skip right to holographic cards, which you simply slide in like a flash card and has no moving parts....music to my ears! A physical format with NO moving parts and NO downloads, again I say, music to my ears.