I can recall getting a computer which had a 2x CD (player) integrated into the desktop tower…I thought that this was the harbinger of great things to come… Since that scene in the early 1990’s, I just realized that while I have gone through various CD burners, DVD players, DVD burners…I haven’t used any of these tools for years (with one or two inconsequential exceptions…). By 2007 I had replaced using optical drives with external thumbdrives (BTW which were of real value when traveling…).
But even here I can see that I use external drives of every sort far less than I would have expected…only two or three years ago…
I seem to be in the process of loading more and more into the cloud. The vast proportion of media I consume comes from the cloud…Movies (Netflix…versus all of the movies I had ripped and which reside on various external hard drives); Pictures, I have moved to where I never print them, and keep most of mine online; Music, I use Pandora far more than the MP3’s residing on my C: / drive… The magazines I may have read in the past are not almost completely replaced with Web equivalents, and to be honest, it feels like TV is a habit which is becoming easy to quit all the time.
The net result is that most of the delivery vehicles for the media we consume are becoming less and less important, and that the computer /internet world is subsuming more and more of these forms of information into new forms of distribution.
For me, it means that my computer just got lighter…
More proof DVDs are a dying medium
http://www.macworld.com/article/159441/2011/04/more_proof_dvds_are_a_dying_medium.html
While Hollywood pushes Blu-ray as the next generation entertainment format new research suggests it may be wasting its time pedaling the optical disc format. In a research note to clients, BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield notes that Google searches for rental services like Redbox and especially Netflix have skyrocketed and searches for DVDs have flat-lined.
Greenfield suspects that the rise in popularity of Netflix has a lot to do with the rise in on-demand content, as consumers are just no longer interested in ownership. If this is the case it could spell trouble for Blu-ray: Hollywood is banking that physical media still has a few years of life left.
The Netflix Effect? DVD Sales Fall 20%
http://mashable.com/2011/05/04/dvd-sales-fall-20percent
DVD sales fell 20% in the first quarter of 2011, suggesting that video streaming from Netflix and others may be having an impact on the business.
The Digital Entertainment Group, which monitors DVD sales, has a different spin: The organization blames the lack of blockbuster releases and the fact that Easter came later this year than last year — when it fell during the first quarter — for the shortfall.
Video in the cloud
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/05/video-in-the-cloud.html
A third of Netflix’ new subscribers are opting for the streaming only plan
We’ve been Netflix customers for a long time and we currently have the "4 DVDs at a time Unlimited" plan. But when I went to look at our Netflix account this morning, I saw that we’ve only ordered one DVD in all of 2011 and we have streamed eleven movies in the past seven days. We are not ready to go to streaming only because the Netflix streaming library isn’t complete enough and there are times when we really want to see a film and we order it on DVD. That’s happened once so far this year so we probably should cut back our account to 1 DVD at a time.
Last night the Gotham Gal and I decided to make dinner at home and watch a movie. We made that decision around 6pm. There are no video-rental stores anymore west of Seventh Avenue between 14th and Houston that I know of. So it was a pretty easy call. We went with Netflix Watch Instantly. We found a good film we hadn’t seen (City Island) and enjoyed it. We could have watched the movie on any one of four devices we have connected our family room display (boxee box, XBox 360, Sony blue ray player, and Mac mini via the browser). We went with Boxee for obvious reasons.
