Singulus reveals uptake of replication hardware is ahead of ‘last-gen’ disc format

OK, Tim said that I had to hold the Richard head title for a week so I thought to myself don't be a lame duck Richard Head. But this is actual news to me.

Quote:
Optical disc hardware specialist Singulus has received orders for 21 Blu-Ray dual-layer duplication machines in the first quarter of this year – a faster adoption than of the format’s predeccesor DVD 11 years ago.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/30809/Blu-Ray-sales-outpacing-DVD

Be careful what you ask for Tim. Where is Deadmeat w/flies?

Eventually blank media and burners/duplicators will reach the current pricing of DVD but i am afraid sony won a war for no good reason.

By the looks of it, solid-state media (such as dvd's and CD's) are going to be pretty much dead.
If you want an example, take a look at the music industry which is always experiencing what the movie industry will a few years ahead.
iTunes offers 100% legal mp3s @ 250kbps (cd quality according to apple, which is not true, even with the current compression methods). They are now officially the number 1 music seller in the world (leaving behind brick&mortar franchises like best by and virgin).

The same started with the movies. Many set top boxes started appearing over the last two years offering what eventually is, a hard drive plucked to a TV.
Apple released the AppleTV, offering users to rent and download movies in HD and SD (Don't start screaming, ill talk about quality below), Netflix now offers the "Roky Netflix Player" to stream their entire catalog with features such as instant play, etc etc.

Now, hardcore video/audiophiles like myself, and i guess most of you guys out there, know that those solutions are not acceptable. It only takes simple math to realize that movies streamed look "something like dvd" and in HD from apple, heavily compressed,far from a 1080p source disc. But then again, the mass audience that drives this market does not care. Let's go back to music for one second. Sure, "CD Quality" sounds fine, but there are SACD'S and DTS CD's out there, offering a much more higher bit rate and multichannel recordings yet NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE.

People wanna get back from work, sit down on their tv, and have the ability to BROWSE and CHOOSE from a big catalog instantly. They don't know that the online rented HD movie is playing at smt like 6mbits/ps (a good SD DVD is usually mastered at 8mbits), most of them don't even know what proper HD looks like, all they've seen was a couple of football matches in HD.

You're right, but videophiles are not currently satisfied as well will apple and certainly not Netflix. I am one of those people that stream from Netflix and in no way do they offer what Blu-ray or HD-DVD offer, other than Hi-Def picture, like you mention, Apple does not offer HD sound. I was watching for the first time Harry Potter: The Order of the Pheonix with LPCM sound and was blown away.

I think SpoonieG added a link to a thread in which HD audio will be available while streaming. Is there any validaty? Idon't know but we'll see.

As an AppleTV user one note I should point out. While the standard def movies available on Itunes are crap if you take the time to encode the movies yourself there is no noticible difference between the quality of the DVD and the encoded movie. That has been what we have been doing. We have almost finished encoding all of our DVD collection,.

Likewise HD movies available are not as good of quality as HD-DVD or Bluray, but they are better than standard def. Add to that the huge number of HD movies available through bit torrent sites at 720p and there is a fairly large collection of movies available. At least a larger collection then HD-DVD or Bluray at this point.