Uh... no, each salary is supported by 24 kiosks. Granted that there are other overheads than just salaries, but that on its own puts your math out by a factor of 576, leading to a figure of 325 rents per kiosk per annum (less than one per day per kiosk).I was doing some simple math and the model seems really unsustainable.
The article said they have 1,000 employees and 24,000 kiosks. So let's say each kiosk has to support 24 salaries. Let's make the math easy and say each one of these people makes $60,000 annually. That's $1,440,000 that each kiosk has to bring in in gross profit. Add a benefits package at 30% of gross salary and you're up to $1,872,000.
I'm not sure what it costs to rent a DVD at a kiosk but it's easy to see how unsustainable this is. For example, at $10 per rental, you would need 187,200 rentals annually (that's about 512 per day per kiosk) without even factoring in ANY business costs! Many retail locations they are set up outside of don't even have that many customers in a day.
‘I guess …. the only way to get physical media will be to pirate the files and burn it yourself...’
Yeah, about that.Last I checked, our local library has thousands of DVDs available for rental, at a cost of "free".
“Filler crap” is just a fancy way of saying “stuff other people like, because they don’t care about the absolute shit-awful garbage I somehow convinced myself is good”.Worrying about what you won't watch isn't a useful way to think about streaming services, or cable bundles, or libraries, or whatever.
Do Americans not learn that the prefix 'm' means milli (thousandths and 'M' means mega (millions)? I know the American educational system is poor but I thought Ars readers at least knew the basics.Sorry to be the "um actually" guy, but even 4K BRDs are still very compressed compared to the master file sizes. 4K BRD is capped at 128mbit/sec. I don't remember the exact figure offhand but uncompressed 4k 24bit at 24fps is something more like 40x that, ~5Gbit/sec
edit: guess I could do the math. 24*3840*2160*24 = 4.78Gbit/sec
Clearly you knew they meant mega, so get over yourself.Do Americans not learn that the prefix 'm' means milli (thousandths and 'M' means mega (millions)? I know the American educational system is poor but I thought Ars readers at least knew the basics.
Is there a such thing as a milibit? No? Then the lowercase m is fine.Do Americans not learn that the prefix 'm' means milli (thousandths and 'M' means mega (millions)? I know the American educational system is poor but I thought Ars readers at least knew the basics.
It depends what you're watching. 3-4 years ago, I borrowed a DVD/Blu-Ray combo anime set from a library but accidentally put the DVD in my player one night. I watched an entire episode before noticing and I'm faily observant.480 still looks like shit compared to 1080, let alone 2160. Unless you're watching on a tiny screen from a mile away, it's immediately obvious when something is that low resolution.
They shouldn't: streaming and discs generally use the same codecs at similar bitrates. You can get full-bore high bitrate EAC3 Atmos on most premium services now. And often literally the same audio bitstream reused.Physical disks also seem to have vastly better surround sound.
yep, it’ll kill BDRIP dead. Without a high bit rate digital source, Web-DL is the best that would be available. And that quality itself will depend on the streamer. For example, Netflix reliably does a good job encoding with high visual and audio quality and high nitrates. Amazon Video is mildly shirty. Paramount’s is appallingly bad.I do wonder what's going to happen if physical format stop being produced. Most of the pirated content of media come from rips of physical media. So if they stopped making Blu-ray discs, will they only have Web-DL rips?
They can also watch the content if the Internet goes out and be certain that they're getting uncompressed 4K resolution.
I'm willing to bet that the problem here isn't the sound stream; rather, it's much more likely to be the playback hardware. It doesn't matter how good the sound stream is if it's being played back through cheap PC speakers, for example (to give an extreme example that I hope wouldn't be representative of somebody's setup in the real world.)They shouldn't: streaming and discs generally use the same codecs at similar bitrates. You can get full-bore high bitrate EAC3 Atmos on most premium services now. And often literally the same audio bitstream reused.
People just go for convenience - so they don't bux physical media.Physical media allow those who purchase it...to, for all intents and purposes, 'own it' for their own personal use.
The big companies running Hollywood, when given the chance (as streaming does)...will always vote in favor of delivery content systems that enable them to retain control of their product (and the revenue it generates).
The DVD isn't just better because you actually own something tangible after you pay your money. They are better because they also (usually) contain a lot of other material which is never included with the streaming versions. Interviews with the actors, directors, and others, a blooper reel, alternate scenes, the trailers, sometimes alternate versions or the same version with director's comments throughout. As far as I can tell this material will not be made and essentially lost forever on a streaming only distribution.
Blockbuster, say hello to Redbox!
I'll just toss this 28-year-old video in here:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKsxE1cbQ-U
If that's a Counting Crows nodThey close RedBox, sitting by the parking lot.
They took all the DVDs and put them in a video museum. Then charged all the people $15 just to see them.
Plus you get BR rips that are higher quality video and sound than what streaming offers. It's a mad world.Watch torrent popularity rise.
If I remember right, DVDs normally were 480p (although a data DVD can hold higher resolution video files as long as they fit within the maximum size, which is normally 4.7 GB [for single layer on one side] and sometimes 8.5 GB [on double layer discs]).This is meant to say Blu-Rays for uncompressed 4K resolution right? I don't think DVDs had 4K. But I guess the gist was that if you used physical media, your quality would be the maximum that the physical format allowed and not compressed for streaming.
For all intents and purposes? It literally lets us own a copy. No weird license agreements or anything. That specific copy is our's free and clear, just like a book or those popular music media that came back into popularity... 8 tracks!Physical media allow those who purchase it...to, for all intents and purposes, 'own it' for their own personal use.
The big companies running Hollywood, when given the chance (as streaming does)...will always vote in favor of delivery content systems that enable them to retain control of their product (and the revenue it generates).
I don't need either working internet to watch my Blurays, or have to worry about any algorithms at all, and I can rip every Bluray I own.... so long as I have the physical space to put all those gigs on a drive. Now 4K? 4K introduces firmware-locked drives as a requirement meaning I can no longer rip those discs unless I somehow firmware hack my Ultra Bluray drive. Now THAT'S frustrating.480p is often good enough for me. To be fair, my screen sizes are pretty small by current standards, and my aging eyes are not the best.
I sometimes prefer using DVDs rather than streaming or Blu-Ray because...
- I can rip them to my hard drive without much hassle.
- I can use them when my internet isn't working.
- They don't use annoying algorithms to beg me to watch more.
It depends on what you mean by "DVD". The DVD-Video format only supported a maximum of 480i60 and 576i50 for NTSC and PAL content, respectively. That's the most you could get that would be playable in a DVD player.If I remember right, DVDs normally were 480p (although a data DVD can hold higher resolution video files as long as they fit within the maximum size, which is normally 4.7 GB [for single layer on one side] and sometimes 8.5 GB [on double layer discs]).
When someone buys or rents a DVD, they know exactly what content they're paying for and for how long they'll have it (assuming they take care of the physical media). They can also watch the content if the Internet goes out and be certain that they're getting uncompressed 4K resolution. DVD viewers are also less likely to be bombarded with ads whenever they pause and can get around an ad-riddled smart TV home screen (nothing's perfect; some DVDs have unskippable commercials).
"(nothing's perfect; some DVDs have unskippable commercials)"
MakeMKV can solve this for DVDs and BluRays, HD and UHD. It also solves region locking and NTSC/PAL incompatibilities. MKVToolNix and Handbrake are also helpful utilities.
What do you mean "slow responsiveness"? I hit play, the movie plays, and the lips seem to sync up just fine.Hmm, DVDs were awful though- low quality video, very slow responsiveness. BluRay and its UHD/8K successors are much better of course... And I suppose modern players perform upscaling and other enhancements on the old DVDs and maybe original BD? But not sure how many households have those (enhanced) disc players.
But the lament for the original redbox products falls a little flat, like wanting VGA gaming.
Ripping discs is slow, so use more drives and rip discs concurrently.Ripping BDs is no harder than DVDs really. You just need a drive that can read them. After that, the process is much the same; sit and wait because optical media is slow as shit.
It's been so long I'm not sure I could get back into it (safely).The high seas will always be there, matey!
I wondered when somebody would mention AVCHD.Also, the AVCHD format for camcorders allowed for recording HD content onto DVD discs, in a format very similar to Blu-ray.
AVCHD - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Did you try reversing the polarity?Nor those $5000 gold speaker wires.