Samsung: Blu-ray will last five years
- Posted September 4th, 2008 at 11:33 EDT by
- 8,180 views
- 88 Comments
Speaking to Pocket-lint, electronics giant Samsung has claimed that the Sony-sponsored Blu-ray format will be dead in five years.
"I think it [Blu-ray] has five years left," commented Andy Griffiths, director of consumer electronics at Samsung UK. "I certainly wouldn't give it 10." The reason? In five years time Samsung thinks downloadable distribution will reign supreme.
It wasn't all doom and gloom though. Griffith said that 2008 would be Blu-ray's golden year, citing cheaper Blu-ray players and the victory over Toshiba's rival HD-DVD format as justification.
"It's going to be huge," he told Pocket-lint. "We are heavily back-ordered at the moment."
The entertainment industry's transition to downloadable distribution is widely considered inevitable, but just how will this affect Sony's projected ten year PlayStation 3 life cycle? Will slowing Blu-ray sales have a knock-on effect on PS3 unit sales, as the console's built-in Blu-ray player becomes less of a commercial asset? Or will PS3's built-in storage space offset the growing obsolescence of its Blu-ray component?
Let us know in the comments below.
Comments
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The Mask |
JSack20- 5:42pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 52
this will only happen when holagraphic discs have been out long enough to be afordable and mass produced for home use but, cds are still going strong and i know lots of people that buy cds rather than download mp3s, so blu-ray will still be more popular even if people end up just ripping them to a holagraphic disc like they would when they buy cds. also there are ways of getting anything on the internet for free
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TheWorldEndsWithMe |
DonovanTheICEMAN- 5:56pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 53
Wow, I didn't think Samsung could be any dumber than they are. Downloadable content will, for decades at least, be an alternative. Firstly, you would need a vast series of hard drives to be able to make the kind of dvd or blu-ray collections that people have now even possible. Secondly, people don't trust downloaded content for permanency because it is subject to being obliterated by hardware or software bugs. Not to mention that it's so easy to delete that people will inevitable do it by accident. People want a solid product they can hold in thier hand. Thirdly: the baby boomers still have no idea how to do the necessary steps. Fourth: High Speed internet companies (I'm looking at you Comcast) are so buggy and screwy it would take forever to complete a download, not to mention they are about to set a standard by imposing a bandwidth limit on users.
Do your homework Samsung, and fix your phone service!
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angryplaystationdude |
sympozium_666- 6:02pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 54
Get a life Blu-Ray is gonna die in 5 years no your crappy company will die in 5 years. WTH I don't wanna download MGS5 or GTA V I want the box with the beautiful boxart NOT SOME LOUSY MICRO$CRAP IDEA. XBOX BALLSUCKOR= It won't even have a disc drive
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DSeco
- 6:09pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 55
Samsung - I disagree. We will start to buy more Blue-rays in five years as the DVD format will say goodbye. Only threat I can see is that companies as Sony decide to sale there movies on a flash memory sticker. I cannot see how the memory sticker will become cheaper than the disks. Furthermore, downloading Full HD movies requires quite some bandwith...
I can see the Samsung guy downloading the movie for 3 hrs while the Sony guy rents it in 5 mins...
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Limmex
- 6:34pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 58
interesting point he's made. i think blu ray has a reasonable future, dvd has ben around a long time now but i think the downloadable concept will catch on in the next five or so too. i like to own the physical item, and for me dvd is serving a good medium, cheap now and looks fine when upscaled on my ps3... blu ray is superior but with technologies such as 4k 2k and the like blu ray might be a transitional technology. have to wait and see!
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jinxk
- 6:59pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 60
technology doubles roughly every 11 months or so. 1TB harddrives are readily available. 5 years from now, we'll have at least 10 TB harddrives. flash drives are steadily increasing in capacity, and with new research being done in that sector, we'll have flash drives with hard drive capacity before long.
the samsung rep is probably from korea. the average BB speed in korea is ~8 times faster than average BB speed in US. faster speeds approaching 20-30MB/s for the same price as US 3-4MB/s. the age of DD would seem a lot closer in their minds (and other countries as well) than for the US. US has been lazy with upgrading infrastructure, mostly because the US is too freaking big. maybe major cities will get wiring upgrades, but US won't spend the money necessary to upgrade the infrastructure nationwide.
That's gonna leave us in the dust though. More things like verizon's FiOS services need to get going. I suspect BB companies will start focusing more on upgrading infrastructure with or without gov't aid within the next few years. And although DD taing over is perfectly feasible for countries like korea and japan within 5 years, there are too many other countries that won't be up to standards for it to happen. maybe 15-20 years down the line it'll be world wide.
we'll all have our personal devices by then. a little doohickey that works as our phone, planner, tv, media player, storage system, computer, car keys, home keys, taser, etc
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EFFORTLESS8 |
r_e_f_l_e_x- 7:33pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 61
blu ray may die in the next five years, however samsung's addiction to cocaine will last decades....
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irg7620
- 7:44pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 63
That's crap. And how big of a hard drive do you expect us to get then? I would rather have discs than use a hard drive to store all of my games or whatever it is I have. I would rather have a shelf of 100 games than 10 hard drives laying around waiting for me to put one in just to play a game. that's stupid. cable internet is not fast enough even for a super large file. it would still take hours to download a single game when you could just go out an buy the game on a disc and instantly play it (or almost instantly).
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west_end_matt
- 8:19pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 66
While I love the idea of strictly downloadable content i still want the ability to back it up to disc and at 50 gigs a pop it takes a huge chunk out of the stacks of external drives you'll be racking up with all the supposed downloadable content........provided your ISP allows you to download that content at a realistic speed (STOP INTERNET THROTTLING)
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biron_w
- 8:30pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 67
For this to happen then they will have to design a tv with something built in that enables downloading and playback of movies and is simple to use.I cant see people that dont know much about technology knowing how to download a movie to the pc,how to make sure it works properly and then how to actually hook the pc to a tv.
I can see downloads taking over in the future but in a longer time than 5 years.
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Xandure |
Xandure- 8:39pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 68
I dont know why these companies believe that digital distribution will be key, they have to understand that all homes built do not run fiber optic cable, they run coax cable, id understand if everyone i mean "everyone" had high speed internet coming from a fiber optic modem, so for those of you who claim to have fiber optic high speed internet i hope for your sake that your house is wired for such a feat if so kudos so if in 5 yrs the cable company decides to run fiber optic cable into every single house then they better start now
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svtschmidt
- 8:52pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 69
What Samsung and Microsoft fail to recognize is that the United States does not have the infrastructure to handle large data transfers by the current consumer base let alone the future base. In addition, not everyone wants to pay the price for the speed needed to make downloading a high definition movie worth while. In addition, even with terabyte drives do you know how many you would need to keep all you video games and movies? Me thinks both companies have been hitting the wacky weed pretty hard. Eventually it will happen but not in 5 years or even 10 years.
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bnolan56 |
snowy311- 9:35pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 70
digital downloads?? bahhaha. we have just seen fios which is costing Verizon a LOT of money. not only is the average download speed in the US around 6mbps but also hardly anyone really uses digital download. I can see Blockbuster going out of business however because a lot of ppl either buy blu-ray/dvd's or rent them from Netflix.
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lurkingshadow89 |
DEATH555666- 10:26pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 72
you have got to be out of your mind to beleive this Garbage. physical copys r always better. i admit i have some downloaded content of my own but if u give a person a choice of a hard copy or a digital copy the hard copy will win out every time for two reasons. 1 it gives the illusian of getting more for your money because u can turn it digital and have another copy to cary on the go. 2 i cant tell u how many problems come from digital copys from reformate deletions. errors in copy, or simply just misplaceing it some where in the hardrive. simply enough hard copy. ps samsung i guese u guys haveing put out an hd dvd player for microsoft had nothing to do with that comment. see u in 5 years when i predict sony releaseing a new 5 layer blu ray dis with a tera byte.
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Anim3Fr33K |
Anim3Fr33K- 10:49pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 74
i dont like the digital distrubution format personaly, i prefer hard coppys of things i buy, i dont want just 1s and 0s, i want to physicaly own it
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xBuTcHeRx992 |
xBuTcHeRx- 11:19pm BST - September 4th, 2008
- 75
Digital downloads are not worth waiting to watch a 2-3gig video, when I can go to the store and watch the movie in an instant, or rent on Netflix or buy Blu-ray, either way Blu-ray wouldn't be beaten by digital movie downloads, not in a lifetime.
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gameoholic |
Demented007- 12:40am BST - September 5th, 2008
- 76
I don't think downloads are goin to rule over disks, because look at it this way, there are a ton of people that still don't have the internet, there is still a ton of people that can't, or do not want the internet, and there are still a lot of places in the world, even here in th US that do not have access to high speed internet. So, if they take disks away, how are all these people goin to get games? Plus, you are goin to need a huge HDD space to store all of the content, the file sizes are gettin bigger and bigger.(Killzone 2) Personally, I rather have a disk, rather than downloads. PSN ID- Demented007
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Fijiandoce |
Fijiandoce- 12:47am BST - September 5th, 2008
- 77
aren't CD's still made for music?......... if the CD is still being used i doubt the blu-ray will be gone that soon. can anyone see themselves downloading 100 gb?( thats essentially how big games are gunna get.) and in any case xbox live has 300 MB file limit....>_> hows that gunna be any better for them
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LastJohn34
- 12:51am BST - September 5th, 2008
- 78
whatever, with downloading threholds, even the fastest speeds takeing a hour and a half to to download a movie crippling your connection, still about 30% of people without access to affordable broadband. Yep this seems likely.
How can people be this dumb?
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xxIvErx
- 1:46am BST - September 5th, 2008
- 79
This guy has to think of all the consumers around the world before stating something like that. Most countries won't be able to provide technologies to their people that would be able for them to be able to download huge media files at a convenient time (e.g. Fiber Optics). So there won't be a worldwide demand for downloadable content which means it's not going to be succesfull anytime soon. I would say the very earliest downloadable content will be a bigger demand then hard copy media will be at least 15 years from now.
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Hyourinmaru |
DAT1AZNPAN- 2:59am BST - September 5th, 2008
- 81
now i regret givin my buisness to samsung buyin a 52 inch LCD JUST to play my ps3 n watch blu ray >.> if blu ray is gonna be over samsung can have their HDTV back
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jigglespsu
- 5:30am BST - September 5th, 2008
- 82
So many comments.
what a lot to read ... so I didn't read it all but wanted to say that The Samsung statement is b0ll0x. Yes Download Distribution will become more important but I predict that blu-ray will remain the storage mainstay for media/games for the duration. We may start to see games on SD cards but I think that's a long way off as the preoduction costs are still too high. Bluray-RW will make it into PC's before too long and people will slowly move away from DVD which just isn't big enough
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zarajoe
- 5:48am BST - September 5th, 2008
- 83
I can't see this happening in five years time when
1. Internet speeds meay will probably be faster, but I doubt fast enough to download Blu-ray quality content, in a reasonable amount of time.
2. There will always be people that want a hard copy
3. For downloadable movies to truly take off, home media centres will need to become popular first (eg. Windows Media Centre) and they haven't had too much success yet.
I can see Blu-ray lasting at least 10 years easy.
Also why are they saying this when music downloads have yet to fully replace physical media.
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nextgen3 |
Nextgen22- 7:33am BST - September 5th, 2008
- 84
there is no way i see blu-ray dead in 5 years time. only because there are a large amount of people who still buy blu-ray movies online or at shops, on the other side the downloadable distribution is usless it cant download anything quicker than going out and buying a blu-ray movie its just waste of time & uses far to much space to download, id rather stick to buying the blu-ray disks online or instores i never download films. plus blu-ray will surpass dvd in 2-3 years time for what im hearing.
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princevegeta1980
- 5:22pm BST - September 5th, 2008
- 86
It takes me hours to download 700mb divx so I can't even imagine how long it would take me to download a HD film, can't see BD being beat by this, someone should shut this guy up!
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