大象传媒

As you say Maggie, these are still early days. As such it's no surprise that the services are both extremely limited and overpriced.

With geeks, (the traditional early adopters), happy to use other solutions to get our high def content from their Mac or PC to their big screen TV, it's hard to see who's going to take the plunge and invest in these boxes.

Blu-ray anyone?
What I think is also extremely interesting here, is that an article, all about watching hi def movies and TV, never mentioned blu-ray once!

Has the format victory come too late for Sony?


Jim Connolly

Have you never heard of EZTV, mininova, u-torrent and xbox media centre?

The technology has been around for years, for some reason the media isn't doing enough to push the content owners to get off their backsides and start delivering this content to us.

The only ones who can take advantage of these services are the ones who are tech savy enough to install it and don;t mind the fact that it is illegal.

Give me a legal version any day and I will start paying.

Sorry Jim but the only refference made to HD in this article was the HD in HDTV.

Funny you should mention Blu-ray though as some people are under the impression that Microsoft backed HD-DVD over Blu-ray just to stur up the format war and make people more relutant to pick either format.

Why would MS want both formats to fail you ask? Because they want a hand into the film industry cash pot via digital downloads.

It's just a conspiracy theory, but you have to admit it sounds plausable.

Oh and Maggie, you forgot three big factors in the digital download world: Wii, 360 and PS3.

Hello Tiger (I've never said that before)!

I too have heard the conspiracy rumours about the format war and certainly, after the event it does sound possible. I can't see it though!

Why? Because Microsoft's track record for getting things right over the past few years is terrible. That kind of planning would have required foresight of almost Google-like proportions. :)

I agree 100% about the game systems - they already live in our living rooms and are capable of delivering great content. Why buy yet another box?


Jim Connolly

Already on the market for a few months, are the Archos TV+ with it's own portal of online/downloadable films, with Archos having just signed a global relationship with Paramount Digital Entertainment that brings hundreds of Paramount movies to ARCHOS Portable Media Players.

Slightly off topic, but I just wanted to say how much I enjoy Maggie's style of writing.

Thanks Maggie!

Jim Connolly

A lot of well informed comments on this blog. Right now the tv and film companies seem very cautious of selling Video on Demand. Unfortunately most of the services are very much limited to the North American market.

At the moment every one of these devices is inferior to a good home theatre pc or xbox 360 streaming. A decent htpc doesnt cost a lot more than some of the devices mentioned and a htpc can be fitted with a blu ray drive, bigger hard drive, high definition graphics card as you need it.

We shouldn't miss the point here that Netflix among others are beginning to look to the next generation business model for media distribution. This "all you can eat" model is ultimately what should fix the problem of so-called pirate downloading by consumers.

Initially services-in-a-box like Netflix will be criticized by their inability to sign big blockbusters.

However, there are signs that governments are getting fed-up with the whole debate about downloading. Once Governments decide that consumers should not and cannot be criminalized, they will effectively be telling the media industry to "take it or leave it". At which point industry copyright holders will be forced to sign up and take the royalties on the table.

What i see happening in the UK, is ISPs having to take the lead on this. The boxes essentially are a service add-value.

The emerging new business model in its most fundamental form involves taking a fixed percentage of ISP profits and slicing this up among copyright holders.We have the tech know-how to do this. However, the media industry cannot possibly negotiate the terms of such a deal, being so embroiled with lawyers and middle-men and so many parties. It will require regulation coming from hard-nosed politicians, come next April.

The revolution is coming.

Funny enough I think ISPs are going to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for this. At the moment I have a 20meg Virgin Media connection, but if I download more than 2GB a week then apparently I am a greedy user and Virgin limit my speed back to about 1.5meg. It's absolutely silly. Because they have oversubscribed and their network cannot handle it they are basically saying you can have a fast connection but you can't use it. They've also been hitting peer-to-peer hard which is understandable but not all peer-to-peer is illegal downloads.

"Frankly for my money, the piddly computer screen really can't compete with a lovely 56-inch flat screen HDTV."

I can't be the only one who sees this statement as absurd... Why not just connect your PC to your TV as opposed to the piddly monitor? and if your computer can't cope, get a new graphics card for 拢20

@Miles_hayler
i agree. My pc is connected to a 50" hd tv via hdmi. Anything i can watch on my pc can be displayed on the tv.

The problem at the moment is that no web based tv services offer equivalent quality to blu ray or even dvd. iPlayer, joost, itv, 4od are all inferior to the quality of even freeview

@miles_hayler
@kingsimmy

Yep - Me too! My PC, Mac and Linux boxes are all hooked up to large screen monitors and my TV.


Jim Connolly