Jobs: Blu-ray Will Be Beaten By Downloads
Blu-ray may be just a temporary fix until everyone goes all digital.
Apple consumers may never see a Blu-ray drive on their device. Steve Jobs is no stranger when it comes to voicing his opinion about the technology, calling it a "bag of hurt" thanks to Blu-ray licensing. Still, it hasn't stopped consumers from complaining about the lack of support, especially with the new Mac mini refresh.
In an email from Macrumors regarding the lack of Blu-ray in the new Mac minis, Steve Jobs responded by saying that the format is looking more and more like one of the high-end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD. He then indicated that Blu-ray will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats.
The conversation didn't stop there. Macrumors argued that Blu-ray brought high density backups and high quality video. The site also said that high-end video formats had a "much higher uptake." The email even argued that DRM was what propelled the MP3 format.
"No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off," Steve Jobs replied. "And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes), so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue. I think you may be wrong--we may see a fast broad move to streamed free and rental content at sufficient quality (at least 720p) to win almost everyone over."
Will Blu-ray be a short-term storage medium? Will consumers eventually move away from physical storage, relying on virtual, cloud storage? One thing is for certain: Blu-ray may not come to Apple products for a long while.
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Praise Brother/Prophet Jobs! So it is written, so it shall be done...! He shall tell us how to think and dictates how the future of media formats shall be and we shall blindly follow.
/sarcasm
BluRay as a distribution of content .. possibly - its rare that I even buy a BluRay or DVD ( leave alone a CD ) these days .. HOWEVER as a backup medium for all your harddrive and redundant removable/external harddrives ... BDRom is the way to go and when the XL standard becomes finalized, it will be something I will be acquiring - Download or not .. I HAVE to have it on some form of physical media ...
Not everyone can be connected to the interwebs at fast enough speed for even 720p, Mr. Jobs. I still have friends with 1.5mnps down/256k upload DSL. they complain that netflix looks crappy at standard res. I can't see that being fixed any time soon, so until then, I'll keep my blurays.
Keep speaking Jobs as if the entire world believes and follows the ideals of a mad man. You fail to see how nothing will go all digital until Broadband becomes not just a luxury for some Americans, but the STANDARD. Also it will take the ISP's to finally give up this ficticious crap about the Exaflood and either sell their service for a unlimited amount with lower speed or make it truly unlimited how it is now.
Caps are no good for anybody whether DSL, Cable, or Wireless and with HD taking off people are either going to suffer from a crippled Internet or insane overage charges.
I've done the math, the old 1.5Mbps cap we used to have for download 10 years ago was truly unlimited where I was at least and downloaded up to 400GB a month (no comment). Now speeds are 12Mbps but capped at 250GB with content weighing in at 5-10x the size they once were thanks to things like HD. Average out the two and you will see you really only have 768Kbps unlimited with a burst of 12Mbps in theoretical context. Oh how we are going back in time.
/rant
I'm not sure about everyone else, but my internet is WAYYY to slow to stream Blueray-quality movies here. So, IMO, until teh internets get a speed boost, I don't see this happening.
And Steve Jobs is wack.
He's obviously never been to my country then... (New Zealand)
Blu-Ray will survive, But probably by taking the current place held by DVD's, DVD's will move back to take the place of CD's, Etc.
Up to the moment I read this article, I was thinking Blue ray was a big fat joke. Now that jobs thinks its a joke, I'm changing my opinion.
Praise Brother/Prophet Jobs! So it is written, so it shall be done...! He shall tell us how to think and dictates how the future of media formats shall be and we shall blindly follow./sarcasm
I totally didn't think that was sarcastic, thanks for pointing it out.
Which is depressing, because the quality of downloads sucks balls and you usually can't get surround sound.
Does this idiot (jobs) believe EVERYBODY has access to super freaking fast internet? with unlimited caps?!
I mean over here the best unlimited cap comes with 25kb/s download speeds, and the best we have is 20-25Mbits with a combo of at least 250-500GB a month!
If blu-ray movies would cost cheaper, in no way in hell would they disappear.
Up to the moment I read this article, I was thinking Blue ray was a big fat joke. Now that jobs thinks its a joke, I'm changing my opinion.
Way to think for yourself there. This is almost just as bad as the people who blindly follow Jobs.
Too many people around getting on the Blu-Ray bandwagon to believe this. Actually having something physical along with artwork has always appealed to enough people to justify medium changes. That psychology has been beaten into society for over fifty years since the advent of vinyl. It's a way of thinking that even the great Steve Jobs and the notorious Bill Gates, both of which are now singing the same tune on the subject, can't root out of society in under ten years (especially not by simply saying it will be so).
Also it's the same attitude Lucas Film is taking which is hypocritical. I think we can all accept it as an axiom that if the entire Star Wars saga came to Blu-Ray it would sell fifty fold what they'd need to justify the release.
Now I realize kids these days are growing up in a download now, instant gratification world. So... They're not the ones with the deepest pockets. And if I want something to show for when I support a well made movie, well... hard drives aren't that sexy.
Well Jobs.. why don't you attack the Internet providers that cap our bandwidth, and throttle our downloads first....
.... and one day I'll stick a wireless adapter up my ass and browse the internet.
Not so difficult to say something stupid is it Jobs?
OK, I'll say it...This guy is a ****ing idiot.
Until everyone, the world over, has fibre optic broadband, and we have servers with near unlimited space, a product such as a blu-ray movie will not disappear. Sure we may upgrade, but the hard media will still be there.
It also appears he is forgetting how useful blu-ray is for backing up data. At 120GB per disc [as long as you have a writer] it is a relatively cheap way of backing up your entire hard drive, much cheaper than alternatives.
YAY! One more reason to NOT buy their products...
[millions of fanboys bow...]
Yeeeeees, Lord Jobs, as you say oh mighty powerful iGod.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say Jobs won't be at the helm of Apple this time next year. The things he says just are more and more delusional. What happens when you run into your ISP's hard cap? Every ISP has or will have one. Even using my 50mbps pipe from Comcast I still run into bottlenecks. "Blu-ray may not come to Apple products for a long while." I could careless as there will never be an apple computer in my house. The only reason I have an ipod is because my car's stereo has intergrated controls.
Actually, we went all digital with the demise of the cassette tape and the VHS tape. CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays are all digital already...
Well he is a retard, ill be the first in line to say it, but in my case he could be right.
I never rent movies i see them all in the theater. about once a year i use a dvd or cd to install a game. almost all of the games i buy are digital(steam ftw). I don't back up data to disk anymore, the prices of external hardrives are so cheap if i need more data for backups ill just buy another. I don't have 500TBs of data i need to back up every month, so i wont be buying a new external every year.
So for me i could see this happening, but i don't represent the whole population. nor does everyone have access to a good ISP/high speed internet so i cant really agree that blueray is just an in-between. there should always be a physical storage available.
If you watch Blu-Ray on your PC, you are in a very small minority. There are not enough people who do so to justify the extra cost of using a BD drive instead of a CD drive in Macs. They are already overpriced enough as it is.
well I don't know many people that actually use blu-ray outside of the internet but I think physical media will survive but dwarfed by DD.
Blu-Ray will have a market but I don't see it ever being as large as DVD.
backing up 150GB of files would mean one new blue ray disc.....or a few days of uploading.....which wastes half of my bandwidth limit....and the other half would go on downloading it again.
Jobs future scares me....
BD 30pack x 25gb disc's (750GB) $54.99
Lowest price BD ROM $59.99
750 GB HDD $54.99
why buy disposable media for 2x the price of rewriteable much faster media?
Well, torrents definately get a lot of downloads, but that's no excuse for not building useful products with the features that your customers want.
whata stupid Bastard.
I feel so ashamed he is rich.
HE seems so retarded that makes me wounder, how Apple, ever made a computer in the first place!
All he does is speak out his ass, and mindless zombie people listen to his every word.
He remimnds me of Soviet russia, or Nazi germany.
Give it up jobs. You're a failure at "reading the future"
that's what he said about the HDMI standard a few years ago...yeah we know how that turned out lol
EXACTLY!!!
I hope some of you realize how rediculous this guy is.
We should pakc him in a crate, and ship him to either Nazi germany, soviet russia, or send him to china, where they arnt allowed to freely browse the internet. "im sure those countries will easily listen to his every word, and call him a phophet/god/the right path to world domination.
Steve jobs, is like a severe case of genital herpes.
IT JUST WONT GO AWAY!!!!!!
Sorry, toms fails at Edit options.