Bye-Bye disc based movies....

[Dr Mordrid]

IIRC I mentioned this a year or so ago, and now it's here....Paramount and Kingston are teaming up to put movies on flash cards.

IMO this initiative will evolve rapidly into providing HD content on SDXC cards, which start at 32 GB and will max out at 2 TB (theoretically up to 100 HD films)



Link....

If you buy Kingston Flash memory in the near future you might just get a little more than a way to store your digital media. Paramount Digital Entertainment has teamed up with Kingston to offer full-length movies on Flash memory cards.

The feature films will be made available on Kingston's Flash memory products either as part of a bundle or specifically for sale as a digital movie. The company's Rick Webb said that the company is looking forward to working with Paramount Digital Entertainment, a division of Paramount Pictures Corp, "to bundle additional Paramount content on our full line of USB drives and Flash memory cards."

This format will no doubt be welcomed by users of devices such as netbooks, who might not have easy access to DVD or Blu-Ray optical drives or may not have enough disk space to make digital downloads a viable option.

It will be interesting to see if this particular method of supplying digitized movies will also prove of interest to fans of digitized media with PCs and laptops. A lot will depend on pricing, available titles, video format and video quality of course but at present details are scant.

[Fluff]

Will be interesting to see how secure these devices are.... As we haven't seen much of the 'secure' part of SD cards in the wild yet.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/01...u_ever_wanted/ a very old article....

[VJ]

So Sandisk was ahead of the game, when it announced that music would be sold on SD cards (mid last year I believe). Granted, maybe the got the content wrong (movies rather than music), but the idea still holds.

There are things to say for it, after all, isn't a disc just a storage medium like a card? Psychologically tough it feels odd to me, given the high tech components of a card; and I can't imagine producing an SD card could be as cheap as pressing discs... Still, it would be a lot more compact...

[Dr Mordrid]

There have been a couple of really major advances in NV memory the last few months in price, speed and density, one being a 3D arrangement of cells, so making them dirt cheap isn't just a pipe dream any more.

[Fluff]

Could this be why Apple haven't gone blu ray, but have added SD card readers to their laptops / desktops?

[Dr Mordrid]

For purchased movies it sure looks like they're heading that way, and then there is this wrinkle in the disc-based distribution plan....

(remember that HULU is a joint venture between Fox and GE/NBC with Disney/ABC as a third participant. This is made even more intriguing by NBC/Universal's spin-off, becoming a joint venture of GE [49%] and Comcast [51%])

Business Week....

What Disney-Hulu Means for Apple

The growing popularity of free video-viewing site Hulu could test the viability of Apple's pay-as-you-go iTunes download business

By Cliff Edwards

When Walt Disney (DIS) said it would start streaming shows via online video site Hulu, attention immediately turned to what the deal means for Hulu rival YouTube as well as for CBS, the only major network outside Hulu's orbit.

The Disney-Hulu content-sharing arrangement may have even bigger implications for a company that neither creates video content nor distributes it free online: Apple (AAPL). It's not hard to gauge the impact of the Disney-Hulu deal on Google's (GOOG) YouTube and CBS (CBS), owner of TV.com. Both companies are locked in a battle with Hulu over online video viewers and the revenue from ads that run in conjunction with that programming. The more programming available on Hulu, the more time Web users are likely to spend on that site.

And the more popular Hulu becomes, the less compelling Apple's strategy of renting and selling video content online is, says Gartner (IT) analyst Michael McGuire. "Over time, perhaps the direct-payment model goes away," he says. Hulu is poised to become a bigger threat in the event it can strike content-sharing partnerships with cable companies, analysts say. Cable content could help the unprofitable Hulu wring profit from the placement of ads alongside its programming. For cable companies, partnering with Hulu represents a way to remain relevant as consumers increasingly view video online.
>

[Evildead666]

From what i'd heard, the movies on the cards would be 720p, and AC3 or something, a far cry from the quality of Bluray, and price seemed too much also....

They'll have to do better than that....

[Jammrock]

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/11/blockbuster-kiosks-to-offer-movies-on-sd-cards-you-some-candy-a/

Looks like BlockBuster has already announced an SD card kiosk. There are some problems I see with this distribution model.

1) You still have to go somewhere to get it. With a service like NetFlix or Hulu you don't. You sit on your rump on the couch and order a disk or stream it from any large number of devices that support it.

2) Unless there is a single, unified DRM format for SD card distribution you are locked into a single device that can playback your content. Do you get a BlockBuster box? A RedBox or DVDExpress box? Who do you pick as your content provider? People don't like formats wars, especially not modern consumers.

3) Continuing on with #3, you have to pay for the DRM'ed playback device. Sure you do with DVD and Blu-ray too, but prices are down to under $200 for Blu-ray and everything DVD is under $100. HTPC's and other media playback boxes are still fairly expensive. This will change with the advent of cheap HD chipsets (i.e. Atom 2, ION 2, etc.) though it's still a bit off.

4) The time it takes to copy the movies will be pretty high. The fastest SD cards out now write at 30 MB/s, but they are expensive so most consumer won't get them. The average consumer gets cards that write at 6-8 MB/s. This makes transferring even a 2 GB 720p heavily compressed movie will take about 256-336 seconds, or 4-5 minutes. Even at 30 MB/s a 2 GB movie will take over 1 minute.

Can you imagine how long it would take to fill the order of a long line of people waiting at the kiosk? How about getting 1080p content? a 5 GB movie? No way the consumer is going to go for this. Anything over 60 seconds will be unacceptable to the average consumer. Once they pick out their movie they want to be gone as quickly as possible, and no one will wait 15 minutes in queue because while a few people vend movies to a slow SD card, or come back if something like that happens over and over.

5) The quality is a big concern for me. The kiosk owners will want people out of the queue quickly so they will compress the hell out of these movies to make them smaller, and possibly use reduces resolutions as well. If I'm forking out $1.99 for a rental it better be good quality, which takes a bigger size file, which takes longer to transfer. It's a conundrum in my opinion. If I want low quality on my HDTV I'll just stream my movies from NetFlix, Hulu or Joost. Cheaper that way too.

6) Online distribution. If net neutrality laws get passed and broadband gets improved (two objectives of the Obama administration) then online distribution could kill all physical distribution methods. If (more likely when) I could stream 1080p/24 from NetFlix without any hiccups...Blu-ray, DVD and SDXC all become moot points.

Just my $0.02.

[Dr Mordrid]

I think there is room for both physical storage and streaming - the latter being like a rental and the former a purchase, just like with DVD's. The differences vs. disc are improved portability, no moving parts and higher performance.

SD cards can have DRM in the form of CPRM using the C2 cipher (Cryptomeria), though I'd bet SDXC gets an improvement.

Speeds will start out at 60 MB/s initially then go to 104 MB/s next year. The SD Assn. lists the roadmap going to 300 MB/s. At 300 MB/s a typical BR movie (Ice Age, Sernity lenght) is about 22 gb, so do the math for kiosk copying. I get about 74 seconds theoretical, but more likely closer to 2 minutes. Works for me. If you're that impatient it's time to get a Ritalin 'script.

There will also be a mini and micro-SDXC.

Sony has announced an XC version of the Memory Stick, but it won't be as fast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FCXSPhWpHI

[Elie]

How the heck are they going to do this?????????????

The cost of a blank SD or Micro SD card minimum is $30 CDN for 4 to 6GB's, now they want to put movies on there and sell it for what $60 or more?
Secondly, what format will these movies be in? AVCHD? H.264 what? Do we need dedicated software players for this? Most LCD/OLED based TV's don't have SD card readers or USB, how is that going to work? what about poeple with PS3's for example?

Now since it's a file on your SD, it's easily downloadable and hackers will manage to hack it easily, i think they are shooting themselves in the foot. It's only a matter of time.

I don't see this working out for them at all.

[Dr Mordrid]

Are you including the cost of the disc deck in your calculations? What about maintenance and the possibility of mechanical failure? A 2T SDXC could store up to 100 HD movies and only require a cheap reader interface, neither of which has any moving parts or sensitive optics.

AVCHD is a wrapper for H.264 and Nero Showtime plays them and .mp4 files.

Newer TV's are getting card readers and USB.

[WxDude]

The problem right now with most TV's/BluRay players with SD slots is that they only support FAT32. This limits you to a file size of 4 GB. NTFS would solve that problem (or any number of file systems under linux), but there is not a big uptake on licensing NTFS.

4 GB doesn't give you a very good 1080P H.264 video (unless it is short)

[Evildead666]

Yup, thats a good point.

My 16Gb usb key won't take large MKV files being copied on it, 4Gb max seemingly...
So this could be a prob for the film on the flash media.....BR quality in 4Gb is not possible.
The uncompressed audio (Truhd and DTSHD) take up up to 5-6Gb of space anyway....

[Dr Mordrid]

Newer media devices that are set up for SDXC will have to use M$'s exFAT filesystem, aka FAT64.

Max FAT64 file size = 127 PiB (pedibyte = 2^50 bytes)

M$ exFAT support update for XP SP2/SP3, Server 2003 and XP-64 here....

[xortam]

<<< The problem right now with most TV's/BluRay players with SD slots is that they only support FAT32. >>>

That isn't much of a problem if they support seamless playback of sequential files. I watch videos off of a USB HDD on my PS3 that way. mkv2vob demuxes and breaks the video into FAT32 chunks.