Netflix Killing DVDs Like Apple Killed Floppies? 345
cheezitmike writes "While there has been lots of outcry about Netflix separating their DVD service from their streaming service, media expert Eric Garland says they're just doing to the DVD what Apple did to the floppy disk. 'I was reminded of so many precedents: Facebook revamping its user interface, the introduction of the first Blueberry iMac, the one with the conspicuously missing 3.5-inch floppy drive on the front. All of these were moments when there was a paradigm shift that led to an immediate public outcry. People made a lot of noise and had a lot of complaints. People were very upset about these shifts...until they weren't. In the news cycle, the outcry is significant and it is problematic, but it's also important to note how quickly these things are forgotten.'"
Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
What did apple do to floppies?
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Or maybe they introduced a new line of computers without a floppy drive and the comparison doesn't apply.
Re:Apple (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone knows AOL killed the floppy disk when they gave everyone a CD ROM with the whole Internet on it.
Re:Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't get it...I'm surprised I see as many people as I do opting for streaming over the disks from Netflix with this price rise. Is this mainly people that do not have a nice HD tv to watch on.....?
I mean, I've been with netflix since 2000. I've always been on the 3 out at a time...and upgraded to bluray.
The streaming, was a nice add on...for free.
However, I pretty much only used streaming (when I could find something good in the very limited selection) for older shows or movies that weren't very high quality source material.
But for newer movies or shows...I'm always opting for bluray rental. I mean, I didn't shell out over $2K for a 59" plasma HD tv (and I have a sound system to back up the great image) to just watch substandard source material on. I mean, streaming can't match the quality video/audio that I get on a bluray disk.
*sigh*....are there really that few people today that care about quality audio and video? I guess. Then again, I"m one of those that has refused to buy music online until it comes in a lossless format with no DRM. I buy CD's....and rip them myself to lossy formats for portable players in lesser listening environments (gym, car)...but I'd rather have the best source I can get for my living room where I have spent years since my childhood building a quality audio/video system. I'm not talking about the crazy audiophile stuff you hear about (frozen cables for $1K/ft, etc)...but solid equipment.
Ok...enough said...I ramble...but if you do ignore the audio aspect of it...most of the good HD tv's coming out today DO present an awesome picture, so, just wondering...why so many people settle for streaming when they spent so much $$ on a quality HDTV?
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Ok...enough said...I ramble...but if you do ignore the audio aspect of it...most of the good HD tv's coming out today DO present an awesome picture, so, just wondering...why so many people settle for streaming when they spent so much $$ on a quality HDTV?
People used to buy 50-inch SDTVs and watch VHS tapes on them.
Re:Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't shell out over $2K for a 59" plasma HD tv (and I have a sound system to back up the great image) to just watch substandard source material on.
Well there you go. I -didn't' shell out $2K for a 59" plasma HD tv. My TV is 32" LCD, only 780p. No sound system, just the TV speakers.
The big win for streaming for me and my kids is that I get to decide what I want to watch -right now-, not two days from now when I can get turnaround of my latest DVD from Netflix. Yes, it's mostly back catalog, but so what: it's not like I've already seen every movie ever made. There are dozens of flicks from the past 5 years I still haven't seen. And my daughter is gobbling up the tween-age series available like she's never had TV before.
I'll be dropping the DVD subscription when the price goes up. For the occasional desire to see a recent release, I'll go Redbox.
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The big win for streaming for me and my kids is that I get to decide what I want to watch -right now-, not two days from now when I can get turnaround of my latest DVD from Netflix.
A million times, this. I used to cycle out the one DVD at a time thing... but like others, it tends to sit around forever until I watch it. I know my friends and family have this problem too.
In the meantime, I'm cruising through 20 discs worth of TV shows I like and various movies I wouldn't want to gamble on getting in the mail. Streaming from a large catalog of content suits both my indecisiveness and sense of immediacy, just right. And the picture is quite good, if even as a trade-off for unmatch
Re:Apple (Score:4)
It's really a matter of convenience and immediacy. With streaming, I can choose from a pretty good selection of movies and TV shows as soon as I decide I want to watch one. I don't have to try to predict what I'll be in the mood to watch 3 days from now, and I don't have to sift through the smoldering ruins of a video store or deal with the tiny selection of a Redbox.
Yes, the streaming quality is worse than, say, blu ray, but it's still perfectly adequate for most movies. Hell, I grew up on VHS, and the streaming is much better than that.
So why do I have the HDTV at all? Because certain movies really benefit from it, and those movies I'll usually rent on DVD or blu ray from a Redbox (or the locally-owned kiosk that has better movies, probably because they buy the "not for rental" copies of movies and rent them out anyway), or buy them on blu ray. Also, televised sports are better on HD (although they're not full 1080p of course).
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I'm not sure, but I think it involved Vaseline, peanut brittle, and a keg.
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it is quite simple. their brilliant move away from floppies was like this
- apple stopped deploying floppy drive with G3 and replaced it with another even more abysmal technology... zip drive, which off course flopped badly for its disks being so easy corruptable.
- G4 stopped zip nonsense, leaving users complaining how there was no external device where they could save data to. floppy removed, no more scsi, cd-rom by default and lack of any usb external device. you couldn't believe how many usb floppies were
Re:Apple (Score:5, Informative)
even more abysmal technology... zip drive, which off course flopped badly for its disks being so easy corruptable.
Wtf? Zip was revolutionary at the time. A typical 486 had a 200 to 400 Meg hard drive. A lot of the computers couldn't even address more space than that without a software hack to simulate LBA. A single $20 zip disk represented 1/4 to 1/1 of a typical PC hard drive. The Zip drive was the first reasonable device on which a user could easily back up their entire computer. Yeah, they had reliablity problems, but the cost per megabyte and ease with which they could be moved from PC to PC (parallel port version) was totally unmatched at the time. They sold millons of them for a reason.
I for one simply stopped using floppies in 486 era as soon as i bought my first cd recorder. never bought one floppy drive after that
Your timeline is off, or you were fabulously weathy. The 486 golden era was around 93' to 95. (the pentium 60 came out around '94). At that time, many computers shipped without CD drives of any sort. A really hot-shot machine had a 4x reader and no writer. Even around '97 a CDR (not RW) cost many hundreds of dollars, ran at 1x or 2x speeds, required a 3rd party program because there was no OS integration (and they were all horrible), and produced as many coasters as finalized disks, at nearly $1 per disk.
ha (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ha (Score:5, Insightful)
That and cheap USB keys which were faster, considerably more reliable and many times the capacity.
Re:ha (Score:5, Insightful)
Both of which took a couple years to become affordable after Apple prematurely killed floppies.
I was still using floppies long after Apple "killed" them. And when a worthy replacement came along... I switched.
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I didn't think thumb drives came until later. I thought it was RW CDs/DVDs that brought the end of the floppy, though, they were not nearly as simple to use as floppy disks, hence the need for thumb drives.
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Oh they did come later than CDRs, but nothing truly replace the functionality of the floppy until thumb drives. USB drives were small and portable, robust, rewritable, sharable, and as of Windows 2000/ME could be plugged into almost any computer. Still they were more expensive than the floppy, but of course that changed rapidly.
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Wait! Floppies are dead? But...but...that means I am working in a graveyard! I am pretty sure that should be illegal.
Seriously though, floppies still have their use. A quick reliable way to boot an old machine up and run small utilities? Pass the 'dead' disk please!
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Re:ha (Score:4, Insightful)
Older hardware has it uses. I mean, you don't need a brand new, screaming i7 multi-core box with SLI graphics cards to run a home firewall with iptables, etc....you don't need it to make a nice little audio server for the home stereo to host your music collection ripped to flac, etc.
I am by NO stretch of the imagination a 'green' person, tree hugger or someone who has ever bothered with recycling anything...BUT, hey, if something is still useful, why spend money on something new if the old will keep working reliably for awhile longer?
Re:ha (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, if it's supposed to run 24/7 for some months or even years, it might be 'greener' to get a new device like a router that runs Linux or a Sheevaplug, since they'll probably use much less energy than older machines (the Sheeva uses about 7W or so).
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Floppies reliable? I don'.(8n%6s
DISK READ ERROR Abort Retry Fail
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Re:ha (Score:4, Insightful)
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SCSI? Popular? Really? In servers only, not desktops.
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E-mail killed floppies (Score:4, Insightful)
I would say that the wide-adoption of corporate/small-business e-mail systems in the mid-late 90s killed the floppy disk. Up until then, legal assistants, secretaries, financial analysts, and other workers on the lower-rungs would truck a floppy disk from desk to desk to collaborate with colleagues, present work to the boss, or deliver documents to clients. With e-mail, the small files that could go on floppy disks could more easily be sent more easily with even the slower LAN and shared-internet connections.
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They might not have killed anything, but they sure as hell popularized it. How many USB peripherials did you see before the iMac came out? USB was around at the time - I have a Gateway P100 with USB ports on it from the late 90's. Couldn't find anything to plug into them until the iMac came out - then nearly all the available peripherals were in some garish color, or translucent, to match the iMac.
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The iMac came out in 1998.... the same year as a little known operating system that found its way on to 90% of computers and also happened to include native USB support.
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Nope, I had a Diamond RIO Mp3 player (huge full size HD w/ an LCD Screen), keyboards, mice, cameras, etc. Apple's baby was Firewire, not USB. Apple had Zip to do with the passing of floppies.
It was the increase in the RAM in computers which resulted in much larger programs being written. Since high speed network connectivity didn't really exist, there had to be a different medium to install all these huge programs; 30 disks just wasn't going to cut it. So, the next logical choice at the time was either
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That's why it's a perfect analogy! Netflix has about as much influence over the DVD business right now. They are equal levels of ridiculous hyperbole...
Netflix often doesn't even have new releases on DVD for the first month they are out, and it takes them years, if ever, to get a movie on their streaming service after it's on DVD. That's not a particularly good way to "replace" something...
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I would disagree. Even though in sales Apple wasn't so great. They had the public eye. Especially with the iMacs, A dramatic change from the White/Gray/Beige/Black (The Gray and Black PC were often for specialized systems) boxed PC Boxes that was so common. The Multi-colored Cute iMacs really got the public eye. (the first Girl friendly PC with enough processing power to allow a guy to use it without laughing) It got a lot of news attention. And other PC manufacturers took notice (Dell, Gateway 2000, Co
That and USB drives (Score:3)
The Mac Zealot RDF version of history says "Apple stopped including floppies and they died off!" However if you look at what actually happened it was more like they stopped shipping floppies and users had to run out and buy USB floppy drives because there was no replacement. I remember at the newspaper I worked at when we got a bunch of iMacs for our newsroom, and they all needed to have floppy drives so that journalists could transfer stories to and from them.
The floppy started dying when CD-RWs got cheap,
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Apple has never been relevant enough on the desktop to kill any desktop technology. PC CD-Rs and then the internet killed floppy drives.
If anything, one of the reasons I refused to buy an Apple back in those days was the lack of a floppy disk. I stayed with a floppy drive right up until USB flash drives were cheap enough and front-facing USB ports were ubiquitous. Actually, I stayed with them a little bit longer, until it was possible to flash my motherboard's bios with a thumb drive.
I own apple computers now though (when they switched to Intel and I knew I could dual-boot windows).
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It wasn't so much that Apple "killed" the floppy, but that they demonstrated that it was no longer needed. And they were proven right.
The Windows-PC manufacturers got the message several years later, and finally killed it.
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Re:ha (Score:4, Insightful)
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We have several planes, jets I might add, that use floppies to update nav databases. That's a lot of floppies every 2 weeks.
We could get the CD upgrade but Honeywell wants 12 grand for each aircraft.
No. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's nothing like that. CD-ROMs were already well adopted by the time floppies came along, and there was no licensing issue going from floppy to optical media the way there is when going from optical to streaming.
So no, the comparison isn't meaningful.
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Floppies only hold 1.44MB of data, compared to 640MB for a CD. It was capacity that killed the floppy. Reliability, too.
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You're missing the point -- it's got nothing to do with one medium being "better" than another. People aren't clamoring to convert to BD-R disks even though they hold 10x what you can cram onto a DVD-R.
The problem is and always has been that a new storage medium has to become cheap enough at the right time to solve a real problem, and it has to work well enough to convince people to spend time and money switching.
By the time floppies "died," they were well-past their sell-by date, and CD-R drives were not
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No, I guess my point is that we went from installing an application on 27 floppies in which one could be bad and kill the whole process, to installing an application on a single CD.
Since DVDs are RO, that's what my comparison is based on
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DVDs are read only?
Since when? I have a stack of a 100 blanks here that says different.
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The DVDs you get from netflix are. Which seems to be the topic of this entire post.
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People here are having trouble separating "computers stopped coming with floppy drives" and "I was using CD-Rs long before machines stopped using floppies" ... also this is a thread about Netflix but the off-topic mod isn't being used properly.
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CD-ROMs were already well adopted by the time floppies came along.
Wha?
.gnola emac seippolf emit eht by detpoda llew ydaela erew sMOR-DC
There, FTFA.
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Floppy disks were around long before the CD was invented, much less the CD-ROM.
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You know what I meant. I just can't go back and edit posts, because that feature hasn't "come along" yet in the world of Slashdot. :)
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Totally false analogy. (Score:5, Informative)
All Netflix is doing is chasing away customers. The reasons behind this can be debated, costs etc, but the end result is the same. More money for less service means fewer customers.
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DVD are not really that much better compared to streaming you probably need to get off dialup.
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killing dvd deliveries kills netflix. simple as that. soon enough pretty much any company can license the stuff from studios, buy space and bandwidth from the cloud and that's it. but setting up the logistics for the dvd mailer system - now that's not something anyone can do.
Uh...NO! (Score:2)
Considering that Internet access is FAR removed from Universal and it's prohibitively expensive for many areas to stream video, I think not.
Not yet. (Score:2)
Maybe if they offered their entire DVD library via streaming. But even then, there are still many people who don't have streaming hooked up to their TV or are in a rural area where they have no access to broadband.
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Maybe if they offered their entire DVD library via streaming. But even then, there are still many people who don't have streaming hooked up to their TV or are in a rural area where they have no access to broadband.
I think those are the key points - until the back catalog of DVD movies / TV shows is available via streaming the DVD is likely, in some incarnation, here to stay. Even then, there is a sizable segment of the market for whom streaming is simply not an option. In addition, until there is a good way to save streamed material for times when there is no access available DVD's will still be a preferred medium.
In addition, the fight over bandwidth caps and who can pays for usage will delay the adoption of stream
No (Score:5, Informative)
Have you seen the lines at redbox units on the weekend? Four and five people deep at out local Kroger, with two redbox vending machines.
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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a shopping bag loaded with DVDs.
Well, okay, the bandwidth isn't that great, perhaps, but I'm pretty sure you'd hit your ISP's 'unlimited' (FUCK YOU ISPS) cap well before you'd hit the bag's maximum capacity. :p
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If you can get their DSL, they sell up to 6.0/1.5Mbps. You likely can get UVerse as well, which goes up to 25Mbps. Uverse uses the same lines, but different equipment is necessary at the neighborhood box.
Like Vanilla Ice? (Score:4, Funny)
like Vanilla Ice was able to kill our brain like a poisonous mushroom?
Can we get any other good examples?
A Long Death (Score:2)
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Haven't bought new DVDs in years (Score:3)
Bondi, not Blueberry (Score:3)
For the record, the iMac that debuted without a floppy drive came in only one color: Bondi Blue. The Blueberry iMac was part of a later generation.
DVD isn't the issue (Score:2)
If he's right, and in 6 months to year the streaming library covers more than the DVDs, that would be awesome, and nobody would complain.
I'm highly doubtful, as I've already watched many of my favorite things that were available for streaming get knocked off the service.
PC Games Killed the Floppy (Score:3)
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Until downloaded games cost a LOT less than DVD games, that is what I will buy.
If I lose the ability to sell something I paid for then I need a discounted purchase price.
Someone has to... (Score:2)
Let me just say it and just get it out of the way:
The DVD is dead. RIP.
intent of the industry (Score:2)
The whole Netflix pricing thing was driven, at least in large part, by the industry increasing prices. I don't think it is completely unlikely that the industry (or the MPAA mafia if you prefer) P>
Of course I'm talking about the same people who at first fought technology like the video tape, but now see a very significant share of their revenue come from DVD and Blu-Ray sales. While many wouldn't give them the credit to be smart enough to deliberately take action that might help phase out the DVD, I'm s
At the time the transparent Macs arrived... (Score:2)
Just as so many others here have said: Apple didn't kill the floppy drive. They may have been one of the earliest companies to recognize that the floppy was already dead, but that's not the same thing.
Without DVDs, you'll never own a movie. (Score:2)
If it's in the "cloud", in time, it will go away. Most "streaming" services seem to have a life of about five years. Size doesn't matter; WalMart Music and Microsoft PlaysForSure both went away. Zune may be going away, too.
And if it's in the "cloud", cable companies can slowly cut off your air supply with bandwidth caps, forcing you to watch their "premium" services.
They're making the same flawed assumption as Apple (Score:3)
Slashdot Shill (Score:2)
It really feels like the Slashdot editors are shilling for Netflix lately - first a summary about how they "had" to raise prices, linking to an article without any data supporting that conclusion. Now an article about how it's "not so bad" - it's "progressive" and normal people just don't understand yet.
I think Netflix provides a good service, but less than a year ago they had a dollar or two price hike for the sole purpose of forcing people from 1DVD to streaming-only plans, when they were released. An h
Apple fanboys are funny (Score:3)
Apple may have been among the first to stop supporting floppies, but only a fanboy would claim that removing them from Apple machines that made up a minute percentage of the desktop market somehow killed them. Floppies simply became obsolete, though I still had to find a floppy disk to install a BIOS upgrade on a new system as late as 2008.
how quickly forgotten ... maybe in the NEWS (Score:2)
... the outcry is significant and it is problematic, but it's also important to note how quickly these things are forgotten.
WRONG. Just because the media stops reporting on something after a week doesn't mean it's forgotten. The people who are pissed off remain pissed off a lot longer than that.
BIOS (Score:2)
The only reason I put floppy drives in my PC builds back in the day was that most BIOS didn't seem to be able to reliably boot by other means. I had one floppy with master boot loader hanging out of my dell for years when linux didn't want to behave with my sketchy BIOS.
Now that everything can boot by CDROM or DVD easily, or even USB, there ceased to be a need for them. USB memory killed it a long time ago, and before that CD's got cheap enough not to care.
So one could point to any number of contributing re
What about the MPAA? (Score:2)
I don't think Netflix is the only one with a vested interest in killing DVDs. I'd bet that the studios are anxious to move away from DVDs, with their effective lack of copy protection, and move towards streaming. With streaming solutions, the DRM can be modified with a software update, and non-compliant devices can be cut-off in the field without warning.
I could see the argument... (Score:2)
...if netflix's streaming service had a much wider catalog to offer. And wasn't under constant threat from the content holders.
Neither one happened (Score:3)
Apple killed the floppy? They killed a technology by omitting it from a product whose market share couldn't even be measured in single-digit percentages? I know Steve Jobs is amazing and all, but that's just super human.
Apple merely recognized the obsolescence of the floppy disk, and omitted it because it was overhead that provided little value. Netflix is recognizing that streaming is the future of their business, and is acting to make that future as lucrative as possible.
The article assumes these companies are causing trends, when they are merely reacting to them.
Floppy was not killed by Apple. (Score:3)
Floppy died a painfully slow death, but did thanks to Zip disks (100MB capacity, and could survive back-pack abuse much better than the 3.5" 1.44MB cousin) Which worked for a while (having to carry around the Zip drive... but really USB flash killed it all. Highly durable, will survive laundry. Small, fast, and accepted everywhere.
DVDs in comparison are fragile. Scratched media. Over-powered lasers (lie on some Sony players) kill RW disks.
And for those of us on the "edge" wireless and dropbox is replacing any media at all.
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I don't have access to Netflix's financials, but I do have to wonder about the cost of mailing out DVDs and how that effects their bottom line. I don't know what they are paying for their mail outs, but I don't see that cost going down any time soon.
Bandwidth on the other hand has had a general decrease in cost over time. Would you need to employee less people if you were streaming only?
Having said all that, I agree that DVDs aren't going away any time soon. I suspect the studios pushing Blu-ray or similar
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Only on 3G and other wireless connections.
The cost according to Netflix (Score:2)
That the cost of streaming a movie 1/20th of the cost of DVD mailing. [slashdot.org]
At $8 per month, Netflix may not even be making a profit off of someone with a single DVD plan who always has a one-day turnaround.
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Just about on par with Apple killing floppies.
But maybe it's playing out the same. Apple saw the writing on the wall. There was great wailing and gnashing of teeth, but after 2-3 years, nobody talked about floppies any more.
Is Netflix right? Is DVD movie distribution going the way of the floppy?
I was totally ready for floppies to go away 5 years before Apple made their move. But I could get anything on the network that I could get on a floppy. The same is not really true of DVDs, yet.
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aha! maybe that was the point?
the notion that Apple killed floppies is absurd... and so is the idea that netflix is/could kill DVDs so....
Yes, Netflix is killing DVDs the way Apple killed floppies.
which is to say, not at all.
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Well, for one thing folks needed to be able to write to the media. Which means that you'd have to have a CDR in ever single computer you wanted to transfer data between. I remember buying my first CDRW about that time and having to pay over $200 for it.
And you'd end up having to shell out a lot for CDRs as CDRWs were never particularly reliable, in fact I think I've yet to have one which didn't lose all the data on it after a relatively short period of time.
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Gee, I dunno dumbass... people who needed to SAVE stuff ? In 1998, a CD burner cost about $700, plus another $200 for the SCSI adapter. I know, I was the only guy in town with one, and business was gooooood!
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Dude, you do realize nearly all digital video is progressive, right ? Or were you thinking of some fancy inter-frame interpolation gadget to turn 24fps film into 48fps, and 29.97 into 59.94 ?
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It's likely that streaming video users don't care.
The loss in picture quality is similar to the loss of audio quality with the move from CDs to MP3s and to the loss of unmetered phone usage with the move from POTS to cellular phones.
New technologies don't have to be superior in every way to the technologies they supplant, just superior in the ways that people want.
MP3 listeners want the convenience of downloading small audio files more than they want high fidelity. Cellular phone users are willing to
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It's not just streaming. OTA digital TV is compressed to hell. Any time you see wind blown grass or rough seas on OTA digital you get all sorts of macroblocking. Even at HD resolutions, it looks worse than analog SD TV.
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And when hell freezes over (aka fast broadband to both the poor and country folk that currently don't have the joys of cable internet or DSL).
From a survey in 2009, only 60% of the population had broadband internet, which was defined as anything above 256kbps at the time, which can't even stream a decent youtube video. Hell that speed covers 3G phones. The actual number of people with a good 4Mbps connection (current definition of broadband) is quite low overall.
Some people don't have the money or just refu