Stupid is as stupid says.....

Pookie

Pookie

Veteran
From the Washington Post:

"DVDs are wasteful. … It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices. I think that we’re not there yet, but we’re moving that direction. Twentieth Century Fox has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by the end of 2010. Because of some of these practices that can’t be changed, the only way to do that is to buy carbon offsets. You know, which again, these are interim solutions. But at least it shows that there’s a consciousness that we have to be dealing with carbon pollution and sustainability. …
These are things the studios need to be thinking about. When I do my next film, we’re going to go much farther than we did in terms of running a green set. You know, look at a typical film set. There’s thousands of plastic water bottles that are used in a given week and that all needs to be revisited. Honestly, the truth is, we have to revisit almost every part of our lives and our existence over the next few years. Energy consumption, I think, being the biggest one. Energy and global warming are interlinked issues obviously, and global warming is going to take us out long before plastic pollution. Don’t get me started on that. I just got back from a two-day renewable energy conference in Aspen and it’s grim trying to get the needle of policy to move. You’re there in D.C. You see what goes on there. You see the paralysis of our leaders, even when there’s a Democratic majority. It’s still paralyzed."

"He’s the guy behind the three separate Avatar DVD releases.
There was one released on Earth Day, there’s another coming out for Christmas (in his words, “the all-singing, all-dancing, all-bells-and-whistles DVD”), and the 3D version set for release next year to give people enough time to get rid of their rinky-dink hamster-powered televisions and upgrade to an energy-sucking 3D-enabled plasma screen and the accompanying 3D Blu-Ray DVD player."

Yep, wasteful...:grin:

Someone. Make him stop.
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As it stands, Digital Downloads are a downgrade from physical mediums in terms of quality. Say what you want about valuing the movie itself over the visual and audio quality, but you cannot deny the technical prowess of a proper Blu-ray disc, or even some DVDs. Streaming video is one thing, where the bandwidth of the provider is obviously limited, often times simultaneous, taxing, etc; it makes sense to reduce quality here, and a lot of streamed videos are indeed free to view (and free to host). That's not the problem though.

Take iTunes for example, there's a very successful digital distribution model, but as far as video is concerned, it just doesn't hold a candle to anything you'd get in a current physical format. The encoding is severely reduced in bitrate (it also doesn't help that Quicktime has terrible H.264 support, not covering many of the codec's features), of course to be reasonable in bandwidth and hard drive space for the end user. Bottom line is, we won't see increases in quality until broadband speeds are increased. Storage space is already here in all honesty - large hard drives are dirt cheap, but the quality is not here. Even in the audio domain, Apple previously relegated its encoding to 128kbps, and thankfully this was bumped up to 256kbps. Audiophiles will STILL not be pleased by this, but it's a significant difference, and we're just not capable of deploying higher bitrate video yet.

Take last year's Beatles Remastered CD releases: following the release, many suspected that the remaster implied a possible iTunes debut for the catalogue (as many of you know, they're one of the few big names left who have not put their music on iTunes), but I believe it was an interview with McCartney or one of the Abbey Road engineers soon after the release that stated something along the lines of "I'm not sure if people will even appreciate the work put into the remaster, and so many can't even tell the difference between the CD and digital download." That's the sad reality of the matter.

Will content providers even increase quality if people can't tell the difference? Look at the mess that is HDTV. That crap is so poorly encoded (on most US providers anyway), that I'd say even most regular consumers can tell, but that's the extreme example. Cable providers in particular are shoving more and more data down the same pipes - Comcast being notoriously bad with this.

I'm all for straight digital downloads, though I prefer a more flexible system like Steam than I do iTunes. Unlimited copies as long as you approve through the client sounds like a fair DRM solution, plus great sales versus the physical copies of those games. My final words are that digital downloads will either not truly take off for a while, or they will take off quite soon, but in a terrible, premature state.
 
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