Why Blu-ray means business |1| 2|

Discussions on Blu-ray--availability of titles, drives, software support, and pricing--appear everywhere. A strong thread of discontent also appears in a few, suggesting that the day of the optical drive is over--both for ingestion and production in studios as well for distribution to consumers. The ruckus over HD DVD and Blu-ray is seen as much ado about nothing. And nothing could be further from the truth.
Make no mistake--Blu-ray will fast become the standard medium for low-cost archiving and distribution for sound business reasons.

In the Studio
What is the most valuable commodity in the studio? Time . To save time, it is essential to preserve, retrieve, and repurpose content using an effective backup and archive system that includes RAID, tape, and an optical archive. Time lost to recreating or rediscovering old content is painful.

Many think though that cheap hard drives make RAID the preferred or only solution for storage and archiving. Users in this camp are in for a rude awakening as the cost of electricity continues to push the cost of maintaining this strategy ever upward. (Don't forget--it's not just the cost of spinning all those drives, it is the cost of both spinning and cooling the drives which adds to the overall cost.) Also, can anyone defend relying on any one technology for asset protection in a creative industry?

Second, in HD production, the capacity of dual-layer Blu-ray directly lends itself to project archives. One disc may contain the essential parts of a project, making it convenient to store and retrieve these in the future. Large-capacity hard drives, though, push a "pack rat" mentality, since there's all this space and you don't want to store just one project on there. Plus, the data tends to be scattered about on these discs, making the ongoing search for pieces and parts another time-waster.

Third, although archiving on powered-down cheap hard drives on a shelf might be a pleasing notion, who knows if drives can spin up again in three, five, or ten years time? There's little reason to doubt that Blu-ray discs will be able to. And if you don't trust those accelerated-aging optical media tests, consider how many of us have 20-year-old CDs that we can still play.

For the Consumer
There's also been a lot of ink put out about how content is going all-digital and will be distributed over the Internet. Nice notion, too, and I'd love see it happen, especially at my own house. But as in many homes, I can't get broadband in mine. So what about my ability to be part of this streaming world?

Even if I could, how fast could I download an HD movie anyway? If I can't get 1.5Mbps service, when could I expect the 100Mbps or 1Gbps that I would need to actually download movies, the World Cup, or the Super Bowl, at least in the same week as the event?

Meantime, I'm committing my PC and my Internet connection to a night-long download. Frankly, I'd prefer to use my NetFlix service instead. That way I can get three movies at once, rather than one.

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