AlexHopmann.com

David Pogue wrote a good article in the NY Times today on why the world
doesn’t really need high-definition DVDs. He goes into why this is a cynical
attempt by the consumer electronics and movie industries to get you into another
round of buying all new equipment and re-buying all those movies that you
already bought once on VHS and again on DVD.

The one thing that the article doesn’t go into is how these guys are missing
the thing that I think consumers actually DO care about. I agree with his
review that the new movies do look somewhat better than existing DVD on a great
large screen (I got a chance to check this stuff out at the CES 2006
conference). However I would trade that in a minute for a truly convenient movie
watching experience. I personally hate dealing with the masses of physical DVDs
(or music CDs for that matter) and rip everything onto a server. In doing so I’m
giving up some quality, but the overall experience is way better and the number
of difference devices that I need to get it all to work is greatly reduced.

So where is the industry then when it comes to providing the really
convenient integrated experience without lots of physical media? One could
presume that the issue is that this is a disruptive technology (see the book
“The Innovator’s Dilemma”). The existing industry is used to making money by
coming up with a new generation of hardware and using that to resell both the
player and all the content again. To them they don’t see any upside in providing
consumers what they really want.

The problem with creating the disruption is that the 5 main studio’s control
all the content and as far as I can tell they don’t want this model to change at
all either. So you can’t just bypass the consumer electronics industry right now
and provide the true “buy a movie, have it on your local server, watch from any
media device in your house anytime” experience with the existing movie studios.
However another lesson from The Innovator’s Dilemma is that the disruption
usually starts outside of the existing structure. The best example I’d point to
right now is youtube.com which is
increasingly providing some really interesting content that you can just watch
on any computer in the house. This last week for example I was able to watch two
really good pilots for TV shows that never got picked up and another interesting
short movie. All of my TVs are attached to computers so that connection already
works for me, but it doesn’t for most people, and youtube also needs to be
hooked up so its easier to add “content” from youtube into my own library. It
would also be nice to be able to get somewhat higher quality content- DVD
quality can be done for about 600MB/hour and I often don’t mind setting
something to download and watching it later.

A lot of attention has been paid to the XBox 360 with a HD-DVD player and the
PS3 with Blue-ray. For me these are both very important devices but their
ability to play high quality video off a server of via the Media Center Extender
support is much more important to me.

Of course I’m usually wrong about what consumers really like. I hate
ring-tones and can’t believe that the industry makes billions (really) selling
stupid little song loops for $3-4 each (especially given that the songs
themselves sell for $1). Maybe consumers will flock to the stores buying Hidef
equipment and content, but I’m hoping the disruption grows somewhere and that
the studios realize pretty quickly they need to jump on board.

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