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only about half of the nation’s TV owners.
Plus, few HDTV types are even buying
Blu-ray. Consumer electronics companies
apparently see the writing on the wall:
Although Blu-ray players can be had for
less than $100, the latest-generationmod-
els are shipping with Hulu, Netflix and
Amazon built in. Around 44 percent of U.S.
cellphone users now own a smartphone,
offering further alternatives for streaming.
Is it any surprise that Netflix’s streaming
subscribers number 21.7 million versus
11.2million for its DVD rental subscribers?
While it’s a sad state of affairs, there is
an upside—I’ve found classics for as li le
as $7 in various Blu-ray clearance bins, and
I’m going to keep collect-
ing them until the format
is officially retired. When
that day wi l l actual ly
come, however, is still a
ma er of debate. Last year
director Michael Mann
predicted the format
would be around for at
least another six to eight
years; analysts at the Enderle Group, a
research firm focused on consumer tech-
nology, say it’ll be 15.
I’m not so sure that either is right.
Despite the compact-disc death knell
that’s been tolling for more than a decade,
there are still better-than-MP3-quality
CDs around—and who would have fore-
seen the resurgence of vinyl among
millennials? So I’m holding out hope for
Blu-ray. When it comes to quality versus
convenience, sometimes be er is still best.
Hemispheres
tech columnist
TOM
SAMILJAN
’s parents didn’t let him watch TV
on school nights. He’s spending his adult life
making up for it.
MAY CROSSWORD ANSWERS
Collection, which offers some of the
best restored classics on Blu-ray, from
Fellini’s
8½
and Terrence Malick’s
Days of
Heaven
to the first
Godzilla
. “Now we’re
able to go back to the original negative,
and the detail available there is amazing.”
Of course, I’d take the HD streams
of Bergman’s
Fanny and Alexander
on
Hulu or David Lean’s
Doctor Zhivago
on
Netflix over standard-def any day. But
they can’t hold a candle to the richer
colors, sharper detail and theater-quality
audio on a Blu-ray disc. It boils down to
the difference between squeezing a boat-
load of video and audio information for
real-time delivery over the Internet and
having that information available locally,
on a disc next to your TV. Streamed and
downloadedvideoneeds tobe compressed
to transmit smoothly over even the fast-
est home Internet connections. A er the
file is unzipped onto your TV or computer,
it still has less of the original sound and
video information (about 2 to 20megabits
per second, orMbps) than a Blu-ray, which
has way more space—nine HD-video
hours’ worth—on a single disc (allowing
for about 25 to 40 Mbps). And because of
this extra, localized capacity, Blu-ray’s ver-
sion of a movie hews much closer to the
original print and soundtrack.
Moreover, I don’t see better-than-
Blu-ray streaming qual i ty coming
anytime soon. Yes, Cablevision, Charter
and Comcast offer residential 100-Mbps
downloading in a few select areas, but the
global average is still just 2.7 Mbps, with
the United States at around 6.1 Mbps and
South Korea, the world’s fastest, at 16.7
Mbps. These are hardly speeds that can
replicate Blu-ray quality. (Even with my
Optimum Online download speed of 15
Mbps, the movies I streamare frequently
interrupted by buffering.)
Unfortunately, that isn’t enough to get
a lot of people to shell out $20 to $40 per
disc for a superior viewing experience.
Though about 74 million U.S. households
own the HDTVs necessary to make the
most of Blu-ray’s higher resolution, that’s
Modern-day restorations
on Blu-ray are o en
be er than the theatrical
versions, making them
gold for film lovers.
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