http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/ Engadget HD Comments for Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending July 7th, 2008 http://www.engadgethd.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadgethd.com en-us Copyright 2008 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/Jul 13th 2008 4:16PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
The recession is abviously taking it's toll, on both sides of the atlantic now.

This is down even on the poor $8 million/wk they were showing previously (when we got any numbers at all).

(I wonder when the BDA are going to have the guts to show actual verifiable numbers sold?)

Blu-ray may well end up extremely unlucky with it's timing.

No wonder even Sony are rolling out alternatives to Blu-ray.

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/03/sony-talks-future-of-oled-blu-rays-chances-against-dvd/#readercomments]]>Jul 13th 2008 6:09PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/Jul 13th 2008 10:30PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
]]>Jul 14th 2008 1:41AMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
In the mean time consumers will continue to spend, yes at a slower rate and yes more and more are losing confidence, but recession isn't defined by "feelings" nor necessarily the current stock market value. Knee jerk reactions are exactly the reason we don't cry out recession at every down turn.

Having said that, the effects on entertainment dollars may prove counter-intuitive. Less may be spent going to the theaters and more spent on cheaper home entertainment. The net effect on home entertainment could be a wash or even small growth. Hard to tell but let's not get reactionary....]]>Jul 14th 2008 12:47PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
Our nation's economy always makes a recovery. But first we need new leadership who actually care about our country. I don't expect ANY product to be an outstanding seller until this turns around, blu-ray is just one of those products. That doesn't mean 9.95 or 19.95 downloads are doing any better either, or regular dvd. I think many people are watching television and the collections they already own until we see some relief with the bad economy, nothing will change. Hopefully by the holidays things might lighten up a bit?. ]]>Jul 13th 2008 7:34PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://youtube.com/watch?v=zjwv0sofytE
Accepting tax breaks to keep US residents and citizens employed, then laying them off, and hiring temporary H1-B workers: treacherous, unpatriotic, albeit legal. Are there no standards?]]>Jul 13th 2008 8:08PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/Jul 13th 2008 9:14PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
You are correct. I am doing fairly well financially yet I have not purchased a Blu-ray disc in over two months. I am currently working very hard to pay off all of my debt so that in case of a worsening financial crisis here in the states I will be in a better position to weather it. Most of the people I know are in a similar situation.

The few people I know that are still purchasing movies are buying either used movies or are buying bargain bin movies. Neither of these markets are conducive for blu-ray at the moment. Further, the used movies will never show up on a sales chart like this one.]]>Jul 13th 2008 8:16PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
So my guess is this would be happening to HD DVD now too if it had been Sony who threw in the towel back in February.

DVD is affordable and "higher quality" is very much a luxury expectation, especially at a time when simply swapping your existing crappy CRT or rear projection unit for an LCD or plasma HDTV will make your DVDs look a hundred times better. Yes, Blu-ray may be able to beat DVD if player prices drop to sub-$100 levels, but that's a long way off.

Ouch.

If I were Netflix, Amazon/TiVo, Apple, Microsoft, or even working for Sony's online division, I'd be feeling pretty confident right now. Indeed, Toshiba's decision to hold off jumping onto the Blu-ray bandwagon seems to be paying off. What we need is a modern, low cost, format. Nobody has it yet. DVD will be difficult to displace until a compelling alternative comes about, and higher resolution is a nice feature, not a compelling application by itself.]]>Jul 13th 2008 8:33PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
One thing is for sure, on new DVD releases benefit from the extra attention transfers are getting for their Hi-Def release. Are the studios passing all of that cost on to blu releases? Well they shouldn't be.]]>Jul 13th 2008 9:18PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/Jul 13th 2008 8:34PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/Jul 14th 2008 4:41PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
I really would like to know where the safety is is storing up 100 movies on a hard drive is? ALL hard drives eventually fail, they can fail within a month, a year after you buy or fill them. Then where are your 100 movies? I know for certain, unless I have a fire, that my movies are on the shelf and safe and ready for play at any time, with all of the extras and the 1080p picture and the lossless soundtracks. Now where are those features in the downloads?

I love these propaganda-propelled posters (we know who they are) who have their death wish for blu-ray. These are the exact same people that are saying downloads are the future. They are also the exact same people that said exactly 7 months ago that hd-dvd was the next generation high def format and it's success would be astounding. Take a look at their previous posts from that time period, it's a riot. Of course one of them has decided to make their former posts "private.Gee, I wonder why.]]>Jul 13th 2008 11:32PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
There are more models than the "Store movies permanently on a hard drive with DRM making them impossible to copy" approach, though with a more sane approach to DRM such a system might work. The two major models - that is, the two generating some excitement - are rentals and library subscriptions. Apple, Dish, Microsoft, and Sony are all doing the former. Netflix is currently the only company doing the latter but there's enormous interest in it.

Blu-ray is doing badly at the moment, the last few months of stats have fairly consistently shown it either growing slower than DVD, or shrinking faster than DVD, depending on whether the week was a good week or a bad week. I suspect, unfortunately, HD DVD would have had the same problems.

You need to take the blinders off - yes, there are some mindless Blu-ray attackers here, but BD really does have major issues. Just because it "won" the battle against HD DVD doesn't mean it's going to win the war. We've had an example before of a technology whose selling point was higher quality than the system it was up against: Laserdisc carved out a niche, but it didn't end up displacing VHS in any way. BD needs to be more affordable, and it needs the serious issues with versions and BD+ removed before the platform ends up used widely enough for the problems to become noticed. Most of all, it needs to be recognized that there are competing technologies out there, including DVD, HD PPV/HD movie channels, and many forms of downloads. They may not all compete on quality, but they do all compete in terms of convenience and price. And the over-all package they offer may well end up being better for consumers than Blu-ray, if Blu-ray's backers do not get their acts together.
]]>Jul 14th 2008 5:35AMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/I supported HD DVD mainly because of the interest sparked by the format war, but now I couldn't care less. There are tons of cheap HD DVDs around, but I stopped buying them a long time ago, I really don't care anymore, even if HD DVD had won, I wouldn't be buying new HD discs now.
I live in a PAL region and 9 out of 10 DVD's are so good and cheap it really does not matter, my wife could never tell the difference then and still cant now between HD and DVD anyway.
Maybe the difference between PAL and what you have in the USA makes a big difference, I don't know, but unless blu ray was very cheap, same as DVD, I wouldn't bother, lossless audio is something I do enjoy, but not at the current prices, it's just not worth it to me personally.]]>Jul 14th 2008 12:02AMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
An interesting question is what would have happened if early on in DVD's lifespan (say, as part of the dual layer transition), they'd specified mandatory support for 720p24 in all new players. Even with MPEG2 encoding, a 2-3 hour movie encoded that way would fit easily on one side of a single dual-layer disc with plenty of space left over for extras. The resolution is approximately double that of a PAL DVD, but has the advantage of not being interlaced and of having a lower frame rate. The processing power would probably have needed to be doubled, but I doubt over-all there'd have been a serious increase in the cost of DVD players.

While in that environment I can see Blu-ray discs still being invented and manufactured, it would have been largely as a data storage format. As for HD DVD, I doubt it would have even been proposed.

Oh well. Hindsight's 20/20.]]>Jul 14th 2008 7:01AMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/They both have it tough, the only thing that saves them is selling cheap and let the product do the talking. I love watching Batman Begins in Blu, Beuwolf and Transformers, but as always my complaint was the same as most of you. We are not in the money is tight category, but none of us want to be ripped off. I still think a DVD for 16 dollars is too much.

But as I predicted last week (oops wrong week) This week will be higher for Blu because of Batman Begins and the Animated movie. ]]>Jul 14th 2008 12:21AMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/We all know differently on the streets though, it might not be officially named a recession, but for the average consumer, that is exactly what we have right now.]]>Jul 14th 2008 12:57AMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
1. We are in a recession
2. BD sucks
3. Movie studios are producing total crap right now that noone wants to watch.

Take your pick.]]>Jul 14th 2008 3:53PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
And here we were hoping your extended absence after HD DVD dieing would be similar, but alas...

I'll just convert my blu-ray library over to digital in 2009 when it all goes digital. I guess 4 TB hard drives will cost $50 to hold my collection, right? Or better yet, My ISP won't mind me downloading hundreds of GBs of data a month when time warner is charging people $1/GB extra for anything over 40GB a month.]]>Jul 14th 2008 9:37PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
Three words.

Broadband. Usage. Caps.

Rentals, sure. But for Movie's you are gong to "keep?" Even at say 4GB per HD movie...any sizable collection is going to be over a Terabyte. This pretty much eliminates any console based system (unless of course you want a bunch of USB drives laying around) and what happens when you have a hard drive failure and you have no on-site backup? It would take you four months (if we assume Comcast's 250GB per month limit) of nothing but restoring (hope you won't miss email or web browsing for those four months) to get your collection back. ]]>Jul 14th 2008 5:23PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
1. The two models are "Rental" and "Store local copies".
2. HD is a must-have for downloads to beat Blu-ray.

I think both are off-base to a certain extent. The Netflix model - buy a box, subscribe to the service, and watch anything you want from a massive library on-demand without per-viewing charges - has generated enormous excitement amongst the people I know, and I suspect as the online library becomes more complete, it will surge in popularity.

The second: well, I'm not dissing HD in any way, but it's important to realize that the real competition here - the one BD has to gain ground on - is not "What's the best way to deliver HD" but "What's the most viable technology to replace DVD". Something of equal or higher quality than DVD is going to beat DVD. What it needs are compelling advantages over the format. I question whether HD is a compelling advantage - it's a strong advantage but it's not compelling. The quality of a regular DVD upscaled onto a standard LCD or Plasma screen is extraordinary and I've had friends think that regular DVDs I have are HD, in the absence of seeing an actual HD version of the same DVD.

When you think about the number of movies most people will watch in a month, and compare it to even the worst bandwidth caps (50Gb, I think, is the limit with some of the worst ISPs), and when you also factor in that those same ISPs will, inevitably, want to find a way to make downloads work because it increases the value of and demand for their own products, you start to realize that even at HD rates of 4-6Gb per movie (about ten movies a month for 50Gb - one every three days, or 50 movies a month - more than one per day - for 250Gb), the system is very do-able.

(The 50Gb limit turns into 30-50 a month, more than one a day, for DVD quality. You can see the ISPs now: "Get an HD-ready Internet Service for just $40 a month!")

Personally, I'm on the verge of getting a Netflix subscription and Roku box. I'm just waiting to see the library increase and find out what they're doing regarding anamorphic 480p content. If Netflix goes one better and creates the HD version they're rumored to be planning, I'll probably buy the box the next day.]]>Jul 15th 2008 9:18AMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
I am using the vmcNetFlix plug-in for Media Center now...and frankly, I can't even get through a 24 minute cartoon without some pausing to buffer the video up. Possibly its a bug in the plug-in, it could also be bandwidth, hard for me to say without really investigating it. I have had better luck downloading the video and then playing but that really isn't a good solution either. Maybe a dedicated box or console may work better, but I am not investing the money to find out especially if there is no high-def. Will probably try the XBOX 360 client once it is available, but even that has a problem as it requires XBOX Live Gold Accounts to work (and only one of my XBOX 360s has Gold).

Also, the library on NetFlix is really low...mostly older movies and television series...going to need a much better selection than this, even Comcast's VOD service has more programming, and HD to boot.

If you are talking downloads as an alternative to renting, sure, I'm with you there. But for those of us who want to own a "local copy" of our favorite movies download services have a lot of issues and to me it's not even about resolution and sound...720p and Dolby Digital 5.1 only is acceptable to me if it is priced correctly. The big issues are.

1. Ability to move to a Physical Medium for archiving and playback at another location. You can compress HD down so it will fit on a single-layer DVD with 720p video and 5.1 Dolby Digital (I do it now with by HD-DVD/Blu-Ray rips)...how about the option of creating a DVD-R that a Blu-Ray player can play.

2. Abiliity to move it to an iPod, PSP, or other portable device (downscaled and downmixed to Stereo of course).

3. A documented "Disaster Recovery" method, guarantee me that I will be able to redownload my purchases if I lose a Hard Drive also make it easy to back my purchases up myself.

4. The ability to play the media back on any TV in the house if I have the required STB on the TV, biggest problem with the current NetFlix STBs. I can do this with Media Center.

AppleTV is probably the closest thing to this, just need the ability to create a physical disc for playback and you'd have a deal in my book.



]]>Jul 15th 2008 11:35AMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
If you mean "100 channels with schedules", then no, I can imagine those who offer broadband and video services promoting video downloads, because there's no simularity between the two. Very few people would say it's an either/or thing.

If, on the other hand, you mean "AT&T (or Comcast or Verizon - BTW, AT&T doesn't do video, they resell Dish at the moment and they have plans to drop that) may announce its own on-demand all-you-can-eat 'watch any movie ever made' service, and offer that and not advertise their competitors", well, you're making the point really, not arguing against it. It's quite possible the major ISPs will offer it as a bundled service. And if they do, well, we're looking at the death of DVD.

The only companies that currently compete with this model are Blockbuster and Netflix. Netflix, obviously, has decided the best way to deal with competition is to have one foot in each product category. Blockbuster, currently, has decided that what people want, and all they'll ever want, are to pass around plastic discs with movies on them.

"If you are talking downloads as an alternative to renting, sure, I'm with you there. But for those of us who want to own a "local copy" of our favorite movies download services have a lot of issues and to me it's not even about resolution and sound...720p and Dolby Digital 5.1 only is acceptable to me if it is priced correctly."

No, I'm not. I'm talking about all-you-can-eat being an alternative to buying. Why would you rent or buy if you have access to every movie ever made, in some reliable form?

You're saying right now "Oh no, I wouldn't do it, because..." and then you list some temporary issues that have to do with your particular set-up and the newness of the technology. Yes, we know some services have problems streaming right now. Yes, we know the selection is limited. We also know that Apple and others have proven that you can stream reliably, and we know that the selection is going to increase as time goes on. We know that quality is poor for Netflix's initial selection but that Apple et al have proven it doesn't have to be. In short, the complaint that online downloads are doomed because one implementation that supports the model that's likely to be the successful one isn't 100% reliable right now isn't sustainable.

"Ability to move to a Physical Medium for archiving and playback at another location. You can compress HD down so it will fit on a single-layer DVD with 720p video and 5.1 Dolby Digital (I do it now with by HD-DVD/Blu-Ray rips)...how about the option of creating a DVD-R that a Blu-Ray player can play."

Well, what are you asking for here and in what context? If it's "Ability to buy a copy over the Internet", then yeah, I agree, this is necessary, to avoid losing what you've bought. The DVD Forum's Download/DL standard may well be this, if the plan really is to build it into DVD players (it was going to be a Kiosk-only thing) (on that note, wouldn't it be nice if the DVD Forum salvaged some of HD DVD by making 3xDVD a part of the base DVD standard? That's assuming they'd never support BD9. Download-and-burn in HD. Nice.)

If you're talking about download and burn from an all-you-can-eat monthly-subscription service, the utility of the function is far more limited. Yes, it means you can take a copy to somewhere where you wouldn't normally have Internet service. On the other hand, how often, really, would you use this? Would the ability to occasionally watch a movie of your choice on a plane be such a compelling feature that you'd rather buy physical, losable, copies of every movie you want to watch than pay $10 a month to watch anything you want as often as you want?

Which, I guess, brings me back to the point. The major issue is not to see downloads as having to be perfect in order to succeed. The issue is that the service has to be "good enough" and "better than DVD" to succeed. So for downloads to take over from DVD.

- They have to be of decent enough quality. My assumption would be that DVD quality is probably the minimum standard for "good enough" even if many skeptics claim they'd never use anything poorer than 720p.
- It has to be reliable. The Roku box probably, ultimately, needs enough storage space to download the entire movie so people can download it in advance and watch it once it's ready. I haven't tried DishONLINE, but supposedly that works the same way. AppleTV definitely does.
- The user interface has to make the system accessible. People have to feel able to use it.
- The customer must feel like they get what they've paid for. Which is the current problem with the purchase model.

"Abiliity to move it to an iPod, PSP, or other portable device (downscaled and downmixed to Stereo of course)."

Well, I'd argue this is a variant of the above. A good question is whether a better option might be to treat this as supplementary. In other words, you buy content for your iPod from Apple, and subscribe to unlimited movies on your TV from Hollywood Movies Inc.

"A documented "Disaster Recovery" method, guarantee me that I will be able to redownload my purchases if I lose a Hard Drive also make it easy to back my purchases up myself."

This only appears to apply to the "Buy a movie to own" model, which, as I've implied, is not where I think this is going. Something like Download/DL, if implemented at the player level, may well make this question obsolete as there's no hard disk - the player downloads the movie and places it on a disk for you. At that point, if you lose the disk, well, you have exactly the same issue as you would if you'd gone to the store, bought a disk, and lost it.

"The ability to play the media back on any TV in the house if I have the required STB on the TV, biggest problem with the current NetFlix STBs. I can do this with Media Center."

Is this really a problem with the Netflix STBs?]]>Jul 15th 2008 12:29PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
Three Models for Broadband Video Downloads

One Time Rental
All You Can Eat Monthly Plan
Purchases

You should also understand how I watch and purchase movies.

I have Comcast HD Cable with all the movie channels
I have a NetFlix Account
I will probably use Sony's Playstation Video Store that was just announced.

I classify movies into 4 tiers.

Tier 4 - I will watch it when it becomes available on NetFlix or one of the Movie Channels on cable
Tier 3 - I will rent the movie to watch it
Tier 2 - I will purchase the movie but only on a discounted price (may or may not get it on BluRay)
Tier 1 - I will purchase on BluRay, full price if need be (this happens very rarely).

One Time Rental - Tier 3 movies only, would accept 720p/24 and Dolby Digital 5.1. I would definitely like the ability to watch it for a limited time on a portable device (I travel alot and spend a lot of times in Airports, Planes, and Hotels) so the PSN store is appealing to me. Also, being able to stop the movie on one STB and continue watching it on another STB would be a huge plus.

All You Can Eat - Tier 4 movies, 720p/24, DD5.1 is acceptable, again a portable copy is necessary and again I would like to be able to pause/resume on another STB.

Purchase - Tier 2 Movies, if the price is right 720p, DD5.1 is acceptable but I also need to be able to move it to a portable device as needed and I need disaster recovery options (easy to backup, guarantees that I can redownload if neccessary) and burning to optical media is neccessary as well.



For One Time Rentals - 720p/24 with Dolby Digital 5.1 is fine but I want the ability to play it on a portable device for a limited amount of time. The ability to stop playback on one STB and pick up on another would be a good option.]]>Jul 15th 2008 6:23PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/07/13/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-july-7th/
My main 50" 768p Plasma in the Living Room connected with an XBOX360

The bedroom 42" 1080p Plasma in our Bedroom connected with another XBOX360

The 27" ProScan CRT in the office which is connected directly to the Media Center PC.

Having the ability to pause on one set and pick it back up on another (SD or HD, doesn't matter, Media Center upconverts and downconverts as neccessary) is absolutely killer and I can't dream of ever going back. Look at the post above on the inability of AT&T to deliver their WHDVR (Whole Home DVR) and the disappointment that is causing with their subscriber base if you don't think it is an important feature. Plus having all our DVDs, HDDVDs, and Blu-Rays on NASes and available on any TV via the XBOX 360 and PS3 (When Sony has DLNA streaming working), having to watch certain media on a certain TV just seems silly and a huge step backwards at this point.


]]>Jul 15th 2008 6:51PM