One other aspect is bonus material, sure it doesn't appeal to some but for others it does. So you could in theory make a digital download availble but only of the film/tv episode and for your BR/DVD release you make that the only way to get the bonus material.
I buy audio CDs too. I rip the songs then to MP3 for casual listening (at work for example), but the CD is there as a physical backup I can always go back to. And it looks nice on the shelve.
This shows the major studios are struggling to shift physical product. Many average punters can't tell the difference between DVD and Blu-ray and will have no idea they're paying for a substandard copy of what they've downloaded, something SKY will be well aware of. Meanwhile, the studios get to sell Rupert a job lot of DVDs they can't shift through conventional channels. Alternatively, I just carry on going to the Pirate Bay where everything is free, and I get far superior HD copies of films I want to watch, which I can watch on whatever device I want. It's almost like SKY are pushing people to the Pirate Bay. I dread to think what the file size is on one of SKY's downloaded "HD" 2 hour movies. Probably about 1.5GB if that.
Which is of course illegal, though I assume "you" in this context is a hypothetical someone, however I don't disagree with... The obsession with DRM is totally f*cking the film industry, just like the early days of music downloads. Just as itunes, amazon etc scrapping DRM killed the CD, when the movie studios pull their fingers out of their asses and just offer and HD movie that plays anywhere for sale, they will kill the DVD and Blu.
Aren't iTunes film/TV show downloads DRM-free? I'm pretty sure that's where most "WEB-DL" releases come from. In any case, it's not just the lack of DRM. HD downloads tend to have poor bit rates, even lower than HDTV. Hopefully a switch to HEVC will change that for the better but I doubt that'll be offered for a few years because they need to wait for GPUs with hardware HEVC decoding to become more commonplace.
I'll be surprised if they are, but it would be a pleasant one. I have a feeling that will fix itself with time, currently they have to be sensitive to the "average" bandwidth user. I've been pleasantly surprised by the streaming quality of Netflix and Amazon Prime at times though.
I have the 16:9 releases of Buffy and didn't notice any "errors". I've read that there are a few things in edge of shot that shouldn't be there, but never noticed them. I guess I was too busy watching the show. As for reframing, AFAIK there was none, it was just the whole frame without 4:3 matting. I was very glad of the 16:9 versions, because the way the show was shot (typical of Whedon's approach) the image was so tightly cropped that in 4:3 it was like watching the show down the end of a long narrow tube. (Possibly this was to compensate for the low resolution of NTSC format.)
More like 2017, if the schedule's similar to that of the TNG releases. Also, new DVDs are still being released and that format has been around for 17 years already. Why is it unreasonable to expect new Blu-rays to still be released three or four years from now? ---------------
DS9 requires far more work from the 4th season onwards due to the majority of the visual effects needing to be redone from scratch in HD. There are rumours that the original CGI effects from season 4 and later still exist on hard drives somewhere, and they could be re rendered in HD, thus saving much time and money, but this is only rumour. If it were done at all, I'd expect the first two seasons in year one of the release schedule, season 3 during the first 6 months of year 2, and then probably one season per year thereafter depending on the amount of work that's having to be put in to the CGI. If all the CGI can be recovered and fairly easily rendered in HD, CBS could probably stick to a TNG-esque release timetable for the entire series, but even bothering to countenance any of this happening at all seems pretty pointless.
I'll never understand the decline of physical media for movies and music. Not when we all see, plain as day, how easy it is for such to suddenly become "unavailable" due to legal or monetary nonsense w/the services in question. I've got Netflix; I like it. But if I love a film or show? I buy it. On DVD, on blu-ray. Whichever. Because that way I'll always have it. This last month, Netflix removed "Battlestar Galactica" and I saw so many people lament such. Meanwhile, I sat there and looked happily at my blu-ray box set because I've still got it and always will. Yes, streaming and digital this and that are convenient. I use such services for such reasons. But anything important to me? I want a damned hard copy of. And I think there'll always be a niche audience who does. But I don't understand why that niche isn't bigger. Was browing Comcast's on-demand, which I enjoy for not having to bother with tv schedules anymore - 99% of shows are on that, so screw tuning it at 8pm on a tuesday if I don't want. Anyway, while browsing they where advertising buying some lame Jonah Hill movie on their digital service for $19.99 so you'd "always" own it. And I just rolled my eyes. Because it's a lie. If you switch services, you stop owning it. If some legal nonsense happened, you'd stop owning it. The only way to "own" it is to have it on a disc or a drive. To have a copy separated from the web and what not. As to DS9 and blu-ray... I think if not done now, it will be eventually. Right now it's expensive. But with everything, it becomes cheaper. And with everything, eventually for even syndication rights, it will have to be converted upward. Maybe they'll convert it digitally first for the new CBS subscription thing. Maybe letting it be "exclusive" to such for a year or two before a disc release would mitigate the costs? No matter what, it's Trek and there will always be an audience for it at better visual quality, and so even if it takes 5-10 years, we'll eventually see it and Voyager in HD.
Sure you understand, you just typed it. We sci-fi fans love our shows and therefore owning them is close to our hearts. The general consumer doesn't "care" about their content, hence the value of streaming. Like you say, the niche will exist for a while, but how small does ti have to get before keeping factories open becomes uneconomical. Besides, oil - anything plastic that can be phased out as easily as physical media can is likely to be pressured.
I work in a library, and the change to electronic format which is so popular with management (because it's "new") is obviously shortsighted. Soon we will be hostage to the publishers, who can jack up prices or withdraw product at their prerogative.
Exactly. Like myself, you are speculating on what could happen. CBS could (in a perfect world) proceed with parallel restoration teams and get all seven seasons out the same year. ---------------
This is true. It makes it all the more of a hassle to screencap my credits when I buy digital copies of shows I work on because in order to do so, I have to download them to my iPhone or iPad to circumvent the "grey screencap of death." #firstworldproblems #douchebagproblems
I doubt having seven teams doing everything in parallel would be a good idea. We already saw what happened with TNG series 2 where they paid a separate company to do the work. IIRC series 4 had some issues too, and thus series 6 was re-scheduled to be done in-house by CBS Digital. Ideally there would be a service where you could stream-download a film/episode, in a similar way to Sky's "progressive download" system, where you can start watching it almost immediately but it's also still on your device when you're done. However, unlike Sky's system, the file would be DRM-free and always playable regardless of what subscription you had, and it'd be BD-esque quality. This would be enough for me to no longer need hard copies and if there was an easy way to burn files to BD-R(E) and copy files to backup drives, that'd be great too. I think UltraViolet is similar to this but, alas, it uses DRM. Thus, it adds convenience and cheaper re-purchases (e.g. for upgrading SD to HD) but doesn't add much freedom. Right now all of my videos are on my file server, which has a form of software RAID 4 (i.e. one-disk redundancy). I grab the DVD/BD of what I want and rip it losslessly, usually use MakeMKV, and then make sure all the forced subtitles and aspect ratios are correct before adding it to my archive for anytime viewing. If what I want isn't on DVD/BD I'll just find it elsewhere...if only there were more legitimate ways to do so. I can watch stuff on my phone (with my server encoding on the fly) but rarely do because I don't commute or anything.
They removed Groundhog Day the day before Groundhog Day. I was furious! But that's a temporary problem to do with studios not getting it. It's still relatively early days for streaming services, and every content owner wants their own streaming service. It's fair enough, if I'm a movie distributor, I wouldn't want to hand over everything to Amazon or Netflix. But as a consumer, I'm not going to sign up to half a dozen different services just to see all the shows I want. I might as well buy them physically. Or if I'm unscrupulous, or don't want to wait for the DVD, I might just download it. For example, I'm signed up with Netflix, but I wanted to watch Game of Thrones, and I can't wait the ridiculous length of time for the physical release, so I bought it on Google Play. It's great, it's good quality, I can watch it on my tablet or I can Chromecast it to my TV and watch it in lovely HD. But part of me wishes I had a hard copy too. I'm pretty sure a combination of streaming and downloading will be ubiquitous in five to ten years, but it's not quite right yet.
^that highlights another issue with streaming service, different providers having exclusives. With a physical copy you can just buy what you want instead of having to subscribe to different providers to get everything you want.