Tech Column

The War That Everyone Lost

History says Sony’s Blu-ray won the format war, but five years later look around. See any stores renting Blurays? Better yet, see any video rental stores? So who really won? Consumers voted with their butts on their couches to stream movies from Netflix, Apple TV, their cable providers and (shh!) bootlegging copies online.

They’ve traded quality for convenience. Just maybe, however, the quality vacuum left by the orphaning of Blu-ray and the bottleneck of bandwidth might buy some time for theatre owners to invest in upgrades to get those butts back into their seats.

The race for bigger and better quality is on, and it’s moving at pace as home theatres upgrade to 4K screens. The weakest link, however, remains the disk. The proof is on the street: Blockbuster Video has gone, Rogers withdrew, and Redbox – the kiosk movie rental business – hasn’t established itself everywhere. Certainly there are many consumers who want to buy movies, but for most, movies are consumed à la minute and consigned to memory.

The numbers, generally, are trending down. According to research company NPD Group’s Video Watch VOD report on the U.S. trend in 2012, “rentals of physical disks, while dominant, are becoming less so; in fact, year-over-year disk rentals from all sources declined by 17 per cent, as digital movie rentals (streaming) increased by five per cent.”

There’s further wiggle room for theatre owners to capitalize on the quality gap in that those who stream run into the wall erected by Internet Service Providers, which cap bandwidth and penalize large file downloaders to make 1080p downloads uneconomical. The ISPs say it’s to prevent clogging the network with massive data packets, but in reality it’s to protect their own sales of online content and to block their own customers from opting for Netflix or Apple TV.

Meanwhile, things are evolving on the capture side: data is getting bigger as 4K RAW emerges as a standard —next up 5K, 6K, and in Japan NHK is piloting 8K. Ironically, it’s a little frustrating because there are so few places to experience the splendor of this cutting-edge technology, and if it just gets squished to 720p for streaming, what’s the point?

Don’t sweat it, says Bert Dunk csc, asc, technology supervisor at the Screen Industries Research and Training Centre (SIRT) in Toronto, compression standards are also about to morph again. The new MPEG standard will create files half the size of MPEG4, making delivery of higher resolutions online more feasible, he says, and there are other developments in the works. As CSC Treasurer Joseph Sunday notes, the future is gaming where consoles put out 4K already, and 4K TVs are already dropping in price, as he saw at NAB in April. With HDMI 1.4 and higher end Blu-ray players which will upscale to 4K, things are changing there too, Dunk points out. Of course, he’s a hardcore Blu-ray consumer, loading his Amazon cart with titles by the dozen and waiting until the price cycles down and buying.

Meanwhile, the quality of output and display resolution continue to advance. “They’re also working on a new HDMI standard because Hi-Vision is coming,” he says, though ironically in Japan, where Hi-Vision was invented and introduced 30 years ago, they’re pushing on to Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV), which seeks to push the TV resolution to 8K and was approved last fall. At the top end, it’s 16 times more pixels than 1080p.

All of which brings us back to theatres, where technology is the trump card to get bums off couches and into seats: more resolution, better sound and a more immersive experience, though, as always, good stories, well told.

“One of the real questions seems to be scan rates and appreciation of high frame rates,” Dunk says. “I’ve got an F65 camera in the studio we’re going to be testing. For that to be fully appreciated properly (at 4K) it’s got to be running at 60 frames a second because the temporal resolution needs to increase on that. Visual technologies company Christie is going to come up with a projector which will allow me to do that, and we’re talking 2D not even 3D.

“Part of what this high frame rate is trying to do is bring people back into the theatre,” he says. “They’re also looking at surround sound systems with 22 speakers.”

Digital projector chips are also getting bigger, while laser projectors are moving from the test bench to testing.

Finally, back on the home front, Sunday says what caught his eye at NAB was Sony’s demonstration of a 4K-download device with robust copy-protection built-in. “Sony recognizes 4K will not be distributed by broadcast,” he says. “And the colour and shape of this device does lend us to nickname it the ‘4K hockey puck.’ I’d give it the media Stanley Cup this year.”

Ian Harvey is a veteran Toronto-based journalist who writes for a variety of publications and covers the technology sector. He welcomes feedback and eagerly solicits subject matter ideas at ian@pitbullmedia.ca.