Blu Tide Continues to Turn: Porn Studios Ready to Abandon HD-DVD?

[hermanv]

FileCat13 and Ajani:

Great points. One of the larger issues for me at least is content. Over 90% of the recent movies I've seen are crap. The bigger the budget the worse they are. The only ones that aren't crap are mostly rip-offs of small foreign films; substituting name brand actors, a reduction in intelligence and an increase in the number of things that need to explode.

I think Marketing 101 is the problem not the answer. New grads are taught to chase the latest fad for a quick buck, rather then focusing and building on a core competency. Take Detroit, they decided to go into the finance business, Their own credit cards help sell cars you know. This bled a lot of money and talent with the end result that the financing market where they had little experience got most of them in deep trouble and their core competency of building cars was suddenly under financed and under staffed. This is why Detroit builds cars with 50 year old technology and why they use a lot of money to convince government to "rescue" them and put up trade barriers 'cause otherwise no one would buy their junk at all, so much for a "market driven" economy.

Ditto the music industry, overblown piracy estimates with no hard core data to back it up (other than they are loosing sales). Obviously it couldn't be the fault of pressing consumers to buy no talent performers sold only based on looks that's at fault. Or the fact that those marketing geniuses identified 13 year olds as the biggest spenders and promptly abandoned every other customer. Or the fact that the 76 minute capacity CD is being sold with fewer and fewer minutes of music. No! We need laws, protection and bailouts.

Mediocrity rules US corporations.

[Ajani]

....... One of the larger issues for me at least is content. Over 90% of the recent movies I've seen are crap.....

LOL... So true... So true....

That's a problem with both movies and music... weak content... A couple of years ago I took the plunge and tried downloading a few songs from itunes... and what made the difference for me (despite the fact that itunes songs are compressed) was the fact that I could just spend 99c and get the 1 good song on an album... I didn't have to buy the entire album just to get one song or pray that the artist released that one track as a single (which I believe still cost more than 99c)...

At one point I kept a growing dvd library.... Having realized that I rarely ever watch a film more than once... I gave my collection to my little brother and now I just rent films...

Most of the content is disposable and overpriced.... so cheap and downloadable works for most films and modern music.....

[filecat13]

Yes, the iTunes experience really changed how I bought music. Now some content companies want to force bundles and whole albums and extra pricing on us, but so far Apple refuses to comply. Good.

Interestingly, I listen to music now more than ever, even during those halcyon days of my youth when that darned 8 transistor radio was constantly glued to my ear. Man, talk about low quality sound!

The service I use most is eMusic, which uses a similar model to iTunes (though there's a monthly fee, it's all converted to purchased downloads at about 33 cents a song and works fine with my iPods) and I believe is the second most successful download service. I probably buy twenty songs off eMusic for every one I get off iTunes, and most of the discoveries I've made have been on eMusic. I got 22 songs just last week.

There are also specialty sites where I can get downloads of genres I enjoy, like dance, trance, electronica, jazz, and classical for next to nothing.

At this point, I'd rather wait for video services to catch up than waste money on a BR or HD DVD player and discs.