DVDs are Dying – and Movies May Be Next
dan tynan on Oct 07 2008 at 8:52 am | Filed under: Apple, Sony is baloney, US Airways Magazine, Video, Web 2.0
The future of entertainment can be found inside a game console
Hi, my name is Dan and I have a problem with electronics. (“Hi, Dan.”)
As a professional gadget wrangler, my home often looks like an electronics warehouse. These days my living room is filled with devices designed to deliver content from the Internet to my TV.
As I write this, we have a Roku Netflix Player that streams movies from our Netflix DVD queue directly to our TV (and works quite seamlessly, thanks). We have a TiVo that can play shows downloaded from Amazon’s Unbox service (somewhat less seamless). We have a Sony PlayStation3 that lets us download standard and high definition movies from the PlayStation Store and an Xbox 360 that lets us do the same from the Xbox Live Marketplace. By the time you read this, the Xbox 360 should also be able to stream movies from Netflix, just the Roku.
If there were any more room in our overcrowded entertainment cabinet we’d probably have a VUDU Box (which lets you download movies from its own online video store) and an AppleTV (which sells shows via the iTunes Store).
Oh yeah – we also have a DVD player. But we’re using it less and less.
“DVD is dead,” says Joe Hutsko, author of a blog appropriately titled DVDisDEAD. “I have rented maybe 5 DVDs (if that) in the last two years, yet I’ve watched three or four movies a week via downloads. We’re at the stage where media is moving forward into the ether and away from something you hold in your hand - unless, that is, you’ve downloaded one of the movies to your iPhone, Playstation Portable, or other portable device.”
But even Hutsko admits over the short term most normal humans will continue to get much of their entertainment on shiny plastic platters. For one thing, DVD discs and players are cheap and widely available. And unlike DVDs, digital downloads are not very portable. Because of digital rights management rules built into the content, a movie downloaded from iTunes will play on your PC, your AppleTV, or an iPhone/iPod – and nowhere else. Movies downloaded from the PlayStation Store play on PS3s and PlayStation Portables. Other digital devices are even more restrictive.
Getting into digital downloads today means locking yourself into a particular hardware platform. I think that will eventually change, as today’s movie and music moguls retire and take their fixation with DRM with them.
But there’s an even bigger change coming that will rock Hollywood much harder. The reason Microsoft and Sony added movie downloads to the Xbox and PS3 is to convince old farts like me to put these things in our living rooms. My 12-year-old son doesn’t need any convincing. The first thing he wants to do is play Halo on the Xbox (and, when I play against him, find unique and painful ways to kill me).
The second thing he wants to do is sit at his PC and watch episodes of Red vs. Blue – a five-minute show that takes place inside Halo, using the animated soldiers from the game but with real actors voicing scripted dialog. It’s now in its fifth season and it’s surprisingly good. His third choice is to watch funny videos people have posted on YouTube, many of them involving Halo or some other game that lets you capture the action as you play.
In a few years I expect him to be making his own silly movies and uploading them – and, hopefully, figuring out how to make money doing it so we can afford all this gear.
To my son’s generation, movies and traditional TV shows will seem as quaint (and boring) as 78 RPM records and rotary phones are to us. Along with DVDs, we may soon be adding movies and television to the list of endangered entertainment species.
A slightly different version of this post was published in the October 2008 issue of US Airways Magazine.
