We’re trying to figure out if our readers are still buying Blu-ray Discs or moving completely to digital format. We’d also like to know if you would consider purchasing a 4k TV if a 4k Blu-ray Disc format was released, or, if 4k movies were sold on Flash (USB) drives. Please help us by answering the short Google form below. We’ll publish a follow up article with the results. To keep users from submitting multiple times, the form requires a Google log-in.
User Poll: Are you still buying Blu-ray Discs?
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Great point John. I think the term digital gets used loosely, and the fact that downloadable and streaming copies are marketed as “Digital HD.” We’ll try to distinguish better in future articles. – J
OK, now for the poll. Discs are good for scenarios where internet connections could be inconsistent or you know you will be watching a particular movie more than once. It could also be better if your internet speed is never going to be good because you live in a remote place, even if the connection is mostly reliable. How long would it take to download a 60Gig movie at 200kpbs? The rough answer would be 300,000 seconds. Divide by 3600 and you get 83 hours. So then, the only way you could get that movie is if the media provider compresses the movie to a greater extent than what’s on the disk. It may or may not be noticeable. The movie industry uses a bandwidth for both video and audio that mathematically should not create distortion of any type in any of the streams (video, audio, text) To compress more than that doesn’t guarantee there will be distortion, but increases the likelihood. Even if there is distortion, it doesn’t mean you will notice it. A typical movie comes off a bluray with a data size for all the streams between 20 and 35 gigs. That’s a lot of bandwidth for downloading if you intend on watching a lot of movies and expect the highest quality possible. 4k means 4 times the pixels. The compression needed to make it feasible to download pretty much guarantees distortion, but once again it doesn’t guarantee you will notice it.
I will be living in a remote location when I retire, but I will have consistent electricity, and I like watching movies. The best bet for me is to buy discs. I won’t have high speed internet.
In a couple of articles, you mention streaming as “digital” and that’s one source of getting movies, and you mention discs.
DIscs are also digital, and they have been that way ever since there have been DVDs. Music has been digital ever since there have been CDs. Digital recording has been going on since when? It’s all pretty much digital with very minor exceptions, but discs have always been, and always will be digital.
You should use another way to refer to streaming, such as: streaming
You could refer then to discs as: discs
Leave the digital out of the story unless you are referring to details about data.