Streaming Catching Up To DVDs, Blu-ray Rentals?

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Streaming video accounts for 38% of all movie rentals compared to 62% for DVD and Blu-ray rentals. According to the article, physical disc rentals are actually down by 17% compared to the same period last year. :eek:

People renting DVDs and Blu-ray discs through retail stores, kiosks, and Netflix's mail service totaled more than 62 percent of all movie rentals in the first half of the year, according to NPD Group. In contrast, those renting digital movies via subscription streaming, pay TV video on demand, and Internet VOD added up to only 38 percent. Though physical discs still lead the rental landscape, their popularity has been waning. Rentals of DVDs and Blu-ray discs dropped by 17 percent over the past year.
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Blah blah blah. Blu-ray, DVD and streaming co-exist just fine without the need for one to win competition against the other. I love me some Blu-ray movies, but streaming is fine for instant gratification only. DVD is only if Blu-ray isn't available, which is rare anymore.
 
The bigger the streaming share gets the tighter the internet companies will get. Streaming could replace DVD in all this; however,

Wake me up when I can stream true bluray quality... not going to happen anytime soon.
 
Yep. People want cheap and quick over quality. I think that most people would be surprised how good that a blu-ray can look on a good TV. It's kind of like HDTV on cable or over the air. Yeah it's got a 720 or 1080 resolution but it's soo compressed that it looks like a upscaled DVD.

BP
 
Too bad quality isn't catching up.. 3Mbps max bitrate from Netflix anyone?
 
XvMMvX said:
The bigger the streaming share gets the tighter the internet companies will get. Streaming could replace DVD in all this; however,

Wake me up when I can stream true bluray quality... not going to happen anytime soon.
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Google already supplies more than enough bandwidth to stream BluRay junk to the Kansas City area.
 
Stream video looks and sounds like ass.

I rather walk down and get the fucking bluray.
 
ButtonPuncher said:
Yep. People want cheap and quick over quality. I think that most people would be surprised how good that a blu-ray can look on a good TV. It's kind of like HDTV on cable or over the air. Yeah it's got a 720 or 1080 resolution but it's soo compressed that it looks like a upscaled DVD.

BP
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+1 to that...I was surprised at the positive difference when I watched HD cable programming for the first time (I was very excited with my HDMI cable and whatnot :p) but then I popped in a BR and was like :eek: . The sound improvement also threw me for a loop. no going back to DVD for me now and Netflix's cruddy streaming jsut made me angry due to the quality.
 
Ill take the cheap and quick. When me and the wife wanna kick back and rent a movie, I'd rather get one off Dish Network's on demand or streaming. Yeah Blu-Ray quality would be nice but it's not worth the drive cause on demand movies in HD look pretty good to me.
 
Streaming might be good enough for network programming, but the quality gap versus BD movies is just too huge to even consider.

Guess some do, meh... If you don't know what you lose, it's all good.
 
ButtonPuncher said:
Yep. People want cheap and quick over quality. I think that most people would be surprised how good that a blu-ray can look on a good TV. It's kind of like HDTV on cable or over the air. Yeah it's got a 720 or 1080 resolution but it's soo compressed that it looks like a upscaled DVD.

BP
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Hold it there. "Over-the-air signals are uncompressed." http://www.hd-report.com/2008/10/05/getting-hd-channels-over-the-air-what-you-need-to-know/

Just another reason I dumped my Comcast TV cable. I was sick of the crappy picture compared to my antenna.
 
I'll take mine:

Cheap
Quick
Easy

Fug it! Good enough for me.
 
For some, I'll Netflix it no problem. Especially on iPad or laptop. If I want to watch it on the big screen home theater, it's Blu or GTFO. Netflix streaming looks like ass (not even DVD quality) and sounds like farts. Not good. I am a video quality guy, though. I like the whole experience. Loud and precise sound, big and clear video.

There is zero comparison between the two when it comes to quality. VHS vs. Blu, basically.
 
weebling1 said:
Hold it there. "Over-the-air signals are uncompressed." http://www.hd-report.com/2008/10/05/getting-hd-channels-over-the-air-what-you-need-to-know/

Just another reason I dumped my Comcast TV cable. I was sick of the crappy picture compared to my antenna.
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WOW, that article is flat out wrong. Just like one of the commenters says. Over-the-air signals are compressed to the ATSC standard of 19.4Mbps. Over-the-air signals used to be better than cable but that's when they didn't multiplex subchannels on to their signal. Whenever a TV station adds a subchannel, it subtracts from the main channel's bandwidth. So if you have 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3, they all must add up to 19.4Mbps. For instance the ABC affiliate in Milwaukee has no subchannels just 12.1, so it's signal is as good as you are going to get. (Until they give in to the lure of more ad revenue by adding subchannels.)

Now cable companies are even worse because they take the 8VSB signal and re-compress it and throw away even more data to cram as many channels on their cable system. That is why Dish is the best way to go is you want HD. They aren't restrained to 19.4Mbps. They have the most bandwidth and can give each channel more bandwidth. Heck, they could send down a raw Blu-ray stream at 36Mbps. Dish also isn't restrained to a specific standard. For instance, they upgraded from a MPEG-2 stream to a MPEG-4 stream.

The only uncompressed HD signals are the 3Gbps 3G-SDI signals coming right of the TV studio's video camera. As soon as it gets recorded, it is compressed in some way. The station has an encoder that crushes that 3Gbps signal down to 19.4Mbps in order to transmit it. A 155:1 reduction. If that isn't compressed, I don't know what is.

Now blu-ray has a bitrate of 36Mbps. BUT along with the higher bitrate, because it's not comressed on the fly, it can have multiple passes through the encoder making it as good as you can get. Cramming ever single bit full of useful data.

Sorry for the rant but I'm a former broadcast engineer. I know what the F I'm taking about.

BP
 
Maybe the numbers would be higher if Netflix hadn't fucked it's several million subscribers ;-)
 
This makes sense. Alot of people complain that it is not good enough but ask yourself this how many people actually have a TV of high enough quality that they sit close enough to and pay close enough attention to, to care? How about audio? Most people just have TV speakers the garbage that comes in there and is at most 2.0 so what do they care if streaming does not support 5.1? Then you have to take into account what the movie is about. really I love a great high definition movie at 5.1 if it is some action movie but what do I care if some comedy is like that?
 
I purchased a HDTV with the embedded web streaming feature. So I went ahead and got NetFlix streaming again. I was very surprised to find that streaming WORKS MUCH BETTER on a streaming read TV than with a PC. The video was HD (well close enough) and there was never a burp, stall or hiccup of any kind. I streamed the entire first season of The Walking Dead the first night I set it up and the hours of video played flawlessly. It never went that will from PC or laptop.
NOW, if we can just get better content. :)
 
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