OT: Steve Jobs on Blu-Ray

bbcdrum wrote on 10/14/2008, 4:31 PM
According to Gizmodo, Steve Jobs on the lack of Blu-Ray drives in the new Mac notebooks:

"Blu-ray is a bag of hurt. I don’t mean from the consumer point of view. It’s great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex. We’re waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off before we burden our customers with the cost of licensing."

This seems to echo some of what has been posted here about the cost of Blu-Ray licensing. Although, it might just be Apple's opening (public) salvo in trying to get a better deal on Blu-Ray licensing.

Kevin

Comments

Coursedesign wrote on 10/14/2008, 5:24 PM
It is very clear that Blu-Ray is managed by the elite of the Sales Prevention Department.

They really should hire business people to run Blu-Ray, and promptly fire the bean counters who are sinking the company.

farss wrote on 10/14/2008, 6:21 PM
Yes, licencing for replication is expensive although the cost per title has dropped dramatically recently. However this doesn't impact the consummer or us authoring. It does impact 2nd tier producers, the costs per title are too expensive to make it viable for medium scale runs. That will not change because of anything Apple does or doesn't do and it'd not cost Apple anything that I know of to roll out support for it as Microsoft has done.

Perhaps it's more to do with why external firewire burners don't work right with OSX.

One has to laugh though. Microsoft were the one being blasted over HD DVD and here we are today with only their OS's supporting BD playback, strange times indeed.
Bob.
Xander wrote on 10/14/2008, 7:52 PM
Apple like Microsoft are probably pushing for digital downloads. Blu-ray is still $0.28 per GB (excludes cost of drive). My 1.5TB harddrive cost $0.13 per GB. DVDs are around $0.06 per GB (100 DVD spindle, excludes cost of drive).

You can rent a $5 PPV movie 5-6 times for the same price as buying a Blu-ray movie in the store. Only worth buying it if you plan on watching it more than six times in your life.

Blu-ray has along ways to go.
Spot|DSE wrote on 10/14/2008, 10:15 PM
Apple just simply won't pay licensing when they don't feel they need to. Note the absence of real AVCHD or HDV support....
Coursedesign wrote on 10/14/2008, 11:02 PM
For sure Apple doesn't like paying license fees to others, but in the case of AVCHD and HDV I think they are right in suggesting to work in ProRes instead.

ProRes (or DNxHD, etc.) is close to uncompressed but at a fraction of the bandwidth, so it is much sweeter and faster to work with than "native" editing in an acquisition format that couldn't be worse for editing purposes.

blink3times wrote on 10/15/2008, 5:31 AM
Well... I hate to say it.... you know my feelings toward apple Course :) But I think they're right in this respect. In particular with avchd. It has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that direct avchd edit (so far) has been nothing short of a disaster.