In 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made headlines when he called Blu-ray “a bag of hurt.”
At the time, Jobs said: “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.”
Two years later and Blu-ray is mainstream but Jobs is still anti-Blu. Last month he said the following: “Blu-ray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD - like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats.”
This week, the BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) has responded, saying Jobs is wrong in his assertions that Blu-ray is just for a niche market and that it will soon be replaced by streaming and HD downloads.
Says the BDA: “According to market analysis, Blu-ray has a rate of adoption very similar to that of DVD at the same seniority (18 million U.S. homes with Blu-ray in Q4 ‘10 vs the same numbers as the penetration of DVD in Q1 of the fifth year on the market). We agree that the Internet will increase its importance (for streaming and downloads) but we do believe that physical media like Blu-ray Disc will continue to dominate for many years, due to ease of use, high durability, and certainly the ability to deliver a high definition experience and quality available anywhere.”
Result for: headlines
Microsoft has announced today that they will be releasing a 64GB model of the Zune HD media device, double the largest capacity of currently available units.
The device will be available in Platinum, Black, Blue, Red, Green, Purple and Magenta when it goes on sale on April 12th.
As an added bonus, the company is slashing the price of the 32GB and 16GB models, dropping the MSRP to $270 and $200, a $20 cut.
The Zune HD was recently in the headlines when Microsoft announced that the much-anticipated v4.5 firmware was “coming soon,” bringing with it SmartDJ and native Xvid support.
Result for: headlines
According to founder Chad Hurley, YouTube now gets over 1 billion hits every day, three years after Google purchased the video sharing site for $1.65 billion USD.
Says his blog:
Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We’d just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world’s information (in our case, video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere. Today, I’m proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.
Looking back at those early days, we were committed to some basic principles that have since become fundamental tenets in the world of online video:
* Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.
* Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content.
* Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn’t our business; it’s yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so.
Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we’ve started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we’ve brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business. We’re working hard to keep up with the fast pace of technology to bring you everything you would expect from the world’s largest video site: better quality; a full spectrum of choices and tools for users, partners and advertisers; and ways to make the YouTube experience your own anywhere, anytime.
