I certainly agree on Jobs’ points. To quote Larry Ellison in an interview from the 1996 Cringely film “Triumph of the nerds”, ‘I’ve got to get into my car drive down to a store buy a cardboard box full of bits you know encoded on a piece of plastic CDROM and you bring it home and read a manual install this thing – you must be kidding you know, put the stuff on the net – it’s bits, don’t put bits in cardboard, cardboard in trucks, trucks to stores, me go to the store, you know, pick the stuff out, it’s insane. OK I love the Internet – I want information you know it flows across the wire.’. That essentially sums it all up.

The problem I have with Apple’s attitude is two-fold:

1. I just don’t see the streaming / download movie quality being even close to what you can get with a cheap Blu-Ray player or Ps3. I’m not an over the top audiophile (I think I 320kpbs .mp3 or .aac is more or less as good as lossless CD) but, I have yet to see a downloaded / streamed (legally!) movie get close to a Blu Ray (even on a 720p TV). Frankly every iTunes movie I have seen, including HD ones, looks crappy.

2. Convenience. Music is naturally more convenient and passive – I love listening to tunes whilst commuting. On a decent enough portable the quality can be good enough to make me feel that it’s pretty much as good as listening at home and I can fully ‘enjoy’ the music whilst doing something else.

But, I’ve never once enjoyed watching a movie outside of a theatre or at home on a TV.

So, for me movies are just not enjoyable unless on a fairly big screen and unless they get your full attention, whilst will mean quality always wins out.

I can kinda see where Steve is coming from but he is right and wrong at the same time… I do think that bluray is going to have a shorter lifespan than DVD and I haven’t seen the popularity of DVDs going down.
I love watching movies at home and have set up a home theatre to suit my needs… the thing is that bluray is a superior format for now and the most practical way to watch a movie of that quality is from a disc, whether watching straight from the disc or ripping/converting it to a drive. It would be impractical to download/stream movies in that quality and there IS a HUGE difference… the average bluray movie is around 30Gb so downloading 2 of them would nearly blow my whole months bandwidth! Even when you convert them down to a more usable size while keeping high quality audio is still quite large.
Anyway, I jumped the gun… I already have a bluray drive in my macpro that I use to rip discs with, it’s the only thing I can really do with it… wish I could use it to play discs!

COME ON STEVE!

So is he telling us that itunes has movies at high quality 1080p movies with 7.1 lossless sound?
WTF is sufficient quality

One other thing. When people refer to Blu-Ray, they often mean HD movies. And therein lies the difference: I was able to use my Mac optical drive to rip all the music I had into iTunes. Until I can do that with my movies, I’ll continue using my DVD/Blu-Ray player to watch my movies. And I won’t see the benefit of streaming movies.

Are you SERIOUSLY telling me that Steve doesn’t watch blu-ray at home now? Yeah right, I’m sure his Pixar buddies would have a different tune since their product ROCKS on blu-ray; the is no compromise!!

I don’t think Steve is “write” on this either. There should be at least an option for Blu-ray.

“Blu-ray is not for movies only. If i have important files, i might save them on a hard-drive but I also want to save another backup on Bluray. Buying a bluray disc is much cheaper than a new hard-drive.” king, on July 1st, 2010 at 4:55 am”

Exactly! Blu-ray is also an incredible storage medium. It’s true, a majority of people who think Blu-ray just think HD movies, however storage is big too, albeit a bit expensive at the moment (not horrific, but not cheap). While Jobs does have a point about the instant access (I have Netflix, etc..) is that people want to have a certain item. People like the “hard copy” version, per se. Especially when they want to watch a certain movie. If you wanted to watch Blade Runner in full HD, what if Netflix wasn’t offering it? What if iTunes did not have it, or they only had the theatrical version instead of Directors Cut? For movie fanatics like myself, these are important considerations. Additionally, the “Special Features” options are usually reserved for the DVD or Blu-Ray. While they are on some movies, it’s not always practical to have “everything” when streaming, right? It would have to be arranged precisely. How would you include all of the features of “The Return of the King” (LOTR) in streaming format? Now, Netflix, iTunes, etc. needs to think about additional storage for multiple “formats” per se.

I certainly don’t disagree that streaming is popular. It’s incredible, and I wouldn’t give up my Netflix streaming at all! However, I love having the actual movies to watch when I want, and not wait for a particular vendor to have them on their list of options. I know for sure that Netflix adds and removes movies at certain dates to make room. What’s going to have to happen, is we’re going to need such an incredible storage medium for these parties to store all of these movies, likely for an indefinite period of time. There is research being done on bacteria storage types that can store inordinate amounts of data, but housing all that data to a point where just buying the movie is becoming a dying form, is going to take some swiftness and innovation on their behalf. Or, I’d even be all for purchasing a movie, and downloading it onto my hard drive. Yes, I know this already exists. However, if they could induce an industry standard, then that would be immensely easier. I could download a movie, burn it and go to my house and could watch on said player; not having to worry about if their “X” player supports certain file types. The system we have is good, but as we know there’s tremendous room for improvement.

P.S. I hate to “gripe,” and while I’m not an English Scholar, it’s “right” John Brownlee, not “write.”

“I think Jobs is RIGHT that Blu-Ray..” Unless he was trying to make a joke, and again he still isn’t funny.

The current iTunes model of rent or purchase digital downloads is very compelling and nearly frictionless especially for movies.

However, this model can only expand into those homes with 20 Mbps broadband internet connections. Even when that happens, movies that are kept as archived copies (purchased) depend on large amounts of storage. Currently the least expensive storage option for instant access is the spinning platter of a harddrive. Although these drives are reasonably priced, they are totally inadequate to support the storage of the number of purchases required to replace all TV content (especially when episodic TV programs are considered).

I think high bitrate streaming of video content over fiber optics is the only way for Steve’s vision to succeed. Pay for access to 1080p streaming and local caching of video with the option to purchase and burn on BlueRay or have purchase or rental of the prepackaged disc shipped ala Netflix or Redbox.

To be able to say that, Steve Jobs:

- never watches other movies than the ones of iTunes,
- has the means to afford a 100$/month internet connection,
- lives in a city or at Cuppertino,
- never does his own backups himself (otherwise he would be able to understand),
- and to end, he can’t imagine or realize that other people can have a different life/means/needs than him. He is truely living on his own Apple planet.

Steve just doesn’t want to say that he wants you to buy a computer full price with a past technology. SD card reader arrived on Macmini minimum 5 years late, and for the BluRay now, we can say he is 3 years late now.
But it is so good for him to see that his computers are expensive “as if fully equiped” but in saving on all these BR player and other HD capacities, and so on…

If I have to switch to Microsoft, I don’t care having aluminium, if at least I can have the power, the capacity, the versatility without wondering about the price. I will miss the Apple softs for sure, but apparently Windows 7 seems
to have good reputation. And if I can watch my BR on it, that will be perfect.
I have an Asus A7j laptop which is 4 years old and is still doing a good work: it has a basic international warranty of 2 years, a mouse, a bag and an integrated TV tuner which works perfectly. These are things that Apple is still not able to provide for free 4 years after I bought it…

While I completely agree that physical formats like BluRay and DVDs will be a thing of the past, Apple would make a lot of money if they included this option for the time being.

The problem with DVDs is that it takes space to store them and that is asking too much because your tendency is to watch a movie once only. I just do not have the patience to watch a movie twice over. It is just not worth my time. Unlike music that you can listen over and over without any problem. Blue ray won’t take off because most people started their collection on DVDs first and it is asking too much to restart another collection with essentially a media which is dying. It has been a while since I bought a DVD movie and that is when I realized that the beginning of the end has sounded.

“Apple needs a competitively priced and featured set-top box to really get their video strategy into play.”

Job’s explained why this is much easier than it sounds toward the end of his D8 interview: http://d8.allthingsd.com/speakers/steve-jobs/full-session-video/

Apple just got a serverfarm in North Carolina for a reason ….

Great God! Where to begin?
1. I suggest you change your name to W. Steven Jobs. The ‘W’ is for Wannabe.
What landmark creations have you thrown into the pot of human achievement in the last, what, 3 decades?
2. Where did you study English? In America by any chance. There are villagers from Bihar to Zanzibar who are more articulate than you:
… ‘Writing a disappointed Blu-Ray fan’? How do you write a fan? I can buy a fan. I can use a fan. I can even draw a fan. I can write a cheque (check in simple US English), I can write a book. But if I had a fan I would write TO them. Duh! Execrable American perversions of someone else’s language be cause they don’t have one of their own. Double duh!
3. ‘I think Jobs is write’ Two misstatements here.
a) RIGHT! Triple duh!
b) You say ‘I think.. That’s a damn lie Sir!
Have a nice day.

What S.Jobs really means, is that to have Blu-Ray, Apple would have to pay Sony royalties and obey someone elses strict manufaturers guidlines. Apple is so used to being in control they pretty much are refusing to let Sony be in control of this, and also pay for it.

Jobs is just to proud and big-headed to admit Blu-Ray is the future. I don’t know about you guys in the US, but here in the UK, blu-ray has literally exploded. Its Everywhere, in every store, for almost every movie. Blu-Ray dead? Apple iTunes for movies? In the UK at least, you’ve got to be absolutely joking.

In my opinion Bluray will still be the dominant force in 7-8 years time. The key word is quality. bluray is capable of great quality ,downloads are not in my opinion.