Feeling Blu

And so the interwebs explode with the news that Time Warner has gone Blu Ray. This is no idle move. With this latest acquisition, the Blu Ray camp gains ubiquity with every consistent money making franchises, and the only two currently active moneymakers on the big screen (Harry Potter and James Bond).

Now it would be enough for me to say it's quits and done for the competition, and that this format war is over. And that would be enough to flame me incessantly.

But this article is not about how the Playstation 3 was a Blu Ray player 1st and a gaming system 2nd.

This is about change. No one, including myself, could ever posit that Sony was a kind, consumer-oriented company. But I do believe that they have made decisions that have made digital entertainment all the more accessible in ways that HD DVD never could. They have literally saved us from themselves.

The going consensus in the industry is that downloads are the future of entertainment, and for the large part, they are exactly correct.

There are benefits to digital downloads for us and for the media creators (let us call them MC's)

- The Consumer doesn't have to pay as much overhead costs for the content
- The Consumer doesn't have to drive to get the content
- The Consumer is fairly competent at downloading.
- The Consumer is paying for content, and has done so for the past 5 years with no hint of trepidation.

- The MC's don't have to pay large factories to churn out discs. The licensing rights (admittedly pennies) are nonexistent.
- The MC's, beyond the cost of a powerful server, do not pay much for doling out their media.
- The MC's get to set regional prices, eliminate disc-based copying, and effectively suffocate piracy by making access to a computer AND to content far easier than a DVD player and a "friend of a friend who knows computers".

And this, I believe, is where we are headed. But by the next round being Blu Ray, we delay the onset of pure digital downloads to answer some very fundamental questions, which MC's have unanimously failed to answer.

And moreso than the DVD player, I believe the flaws in their approach stem from looking at the iPod the wrong way.

When someone downloads a song from iTunes, it cannot be copied as easily as an mp3, or a DVD. Can it be done? Certainly. Is it as easy as copying a CD, or an mp3. For the population at large, that answer is no.

So we create content that we can sell a la carte, a la iTunes. If it sounds brilliant, it is, and it is going on right now, from Redmond to Tokyo and everywhere in between.

But the iPod is awesome because it is small, tiny, versatile, and portable. The problem with MC's is that they think you only wear earbuds.

- The iPod can be a DJ. Plugged into via a composite cable adapter, a special plug, or a compatible dock and the iPod is no longer a portable music player, it is THE music player. You can entertain 1 to 1,000,000 with a single iPod and a length of cable.

- The iPod can show movies. Not at a great resolution, but they go.

-Can go in the car. The sheer ubiquity of "iPod ready" stereo receivers should be a warning sign.

- You can take thousands of bits of entertainment with you.

The problem with digital downloads is that you cannot do any of those things that the iPod (or even DVD's, for that matter) do so well that no one even notices it.

Here are the questions without answers...

-How in the hell are millions of terabytes going to flow on a network that's tapped out as is? and more importantly...
-Who the hell is going to pay for the network upgrade?
- can you entertain an entire crowd?
- Can you take it in the car to entertain your kids? Yourself?
- is there a hard drive on this planet that could hold a decent high definition movie collection?
- Is your content goign to be restored by the MC's even if your hard drive breaks???

Whether it is Xbox Live, Valve, Virtual Channel, anything but iTunes... the answer is no. You cannot take it with you. It is not portable. Your ownership is not forever. It is ours and you rent it.

Until content providers can answer those questions, digital downloads are impossible at best, useless and constrictive at worst. And the signs are negative to the MC's realizing this.

Enter Sony.

Blu Ray can change the game because they are so damn big. The content on the disc is so great, so demanding, that if this standard does usurp DVD's it sets a very large (and largely unattainable) benchmark for downloads. The sheer gluttonous size, the excellent picture quality, the promise of a theatre master audio track... no cable company, satellite, or MC has had the madness to say they can approach it.

HD-DVD's... they simply set the bar lower. The transition would be a bit more seamless from discs to downloads. They also lacked region locks, which ensured that consumers would lap it up not knowing that in the minds of the MC's, this was a delay in exection, not a full pardon.

HD DVD was a technology that had reached its limit early. Transformers on HD DVD is a beautiul disc, but the video data was so huge that they had to compress away any next-gen audio track, settling for the same track as the regular DVD.

That is not to say Blu Ray is perfect, but it provides unreasonably high expectations for consumers with the benchmark in content, and provides MC's the thing they covet most: DRM, region locks, and money.

If you can imagine what the world will be like with current digital plans, you need only plug in the headphones on your mp3 player and say to yourself "this is all I can do".

Feel a disc in your hands. It is scarcely no more real than a file, except for the mass of trillions of atoms. But so long as the disc is in your hands, what you do with it is your choice. And that will make all the difference.