DrunkenBlog

MacWorld 2005 Keynote: Wag the Porn

I was just going to post this interview (14 MB) with Steve Jobs that someone sent to me yesterday from after the keynote which I dug (Ken Burns is not mentioned once). However, judging by my Inbox, one of the biggest things that stuck out at people from yesterday's post was the whole Sony thing.

People also sent rants agreeing about the UI problems in 10.4 (Yes, I've seen the movies at Apple's site, and yes I'm scared), but apparently the Sony part sparked caused a whole bunch of speculation to be thrown my way. Obviously I wasn't the only one really confused by it, so it's worth (hopefully) clearing that up.

To recap my words:

Erm, he's just lost his place and started to stammer. Jobs is coming to the rescue... there is a really disturbing screenshot of Jobs' crotch on the big screen at the moment... the guy won't leave! And the crotch is just saying there. I'm hoping this is just happening on the webcast. He did just say they're trying to make the cameras smaller and cheaper. He came a long way just to drop that... this is just weird.

Hmm, ok... Sony part is over. Sometime in some book someone is going to have to explain what the hell this part was supposed to be about and what led to it. Either way, this guy has made the keynote for me so far.

The speculation went in a bunch of different ways... big iPod/iTunes partnerships in the works between the two, Pixar, you name it. Because of the lateness of the hour when I posted, and the fact that I somehow turned the Keynote into a drinking game, I had to go back and read what I wrote to see where people were getting this stuff... which didn't help a lot as I was obviously a lost cause by that point. So I had to go back and flick around the stream to that part again.

It's just as amusing the second time around, and just as worthless a segment of the keynote, but if you go back and watch, Jobs mentions 'Blu-Ray' which if I had to guess was what the whole thing was really about. If you go back and read 'Deconstructing H.264/AVC', towards the end I start talking about HD-DVD. Unfortunately that was in the context of H.264/AVC and HD-DVD, and not HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray.

Long story short, we're gearing up for yet another format war involving blue-based lasers, and it looks like Apple has picked its side and just happened to do it in such a stumbling way that no one was really aware. After rewatching that part, I think it's because Jobs just quickly pointed it out the impending format war while talking about H.264, but then quickly moved onto the Sony thing... without really tying it together.

Shorter story longer:

• HD-DVD
  The main technical backers of this format are NEC and Toshiba, while Warner Brothers, New Line, Paramount, Universal, etc. have all signed onto this and announced they'll start releasing content on the format very, very soon. There's also this little body called the DVD-consortium that is responsible for, well, DVDs, and it's basically chosen this format to be the successor. Toshiba has recorders coming out at around the $1k range this year I think.
• Blu-Ray
  Blu-Ray has broader support on the technical end: Sony, Dell, HP, Hitachi, Panasonic, LG, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp, TDK, etc. are all backing it... and now Apple. Going from memory here, so I could be off by a few. Sony actually made a jump on getting recorders out for commercial use, but they came in at $4k and are now around $3k I believe. This was also really, really early and only available in Japan, and compatibility between everything was very spotty. IE, burn a Blu-Ray disc in your Sony, then try it in your Panasonic, and it might not work at all.

Like I mentioned, both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are based on blue-laser technology (DVDs and CDs use red) and the goal of both is to increase data sizes to handle what I talked about in my H.264 post. Unfortunately they aren't quite equal in this regard:

• HD-DVD
  15 GB per layer
• Blu-Ray
  25 GB per layer

Basically, both have plenty of storage to handle most of the media that is going to be thrown at them in terms of High Definition television and movies, but Blu-Ray has a cool 40% lead in terms of storage per layer when you're actually writing stuff out. The difference is less pronounced when you talk about dual-layered discs, like the DVDs most of us buy from the store with our movies on them... 30 Gigs is plenty for that. Luckily all the codecs, like Jobs mentioned, are supported on both the standards. IE, both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players will support MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Microsoft's VC-9, H.264 AVC, etc. And they are all backwards-compatible with current DVDs and CDs. Sweet.

At the same time, Blu-Ray is considered to have greater 'legs' when it comes to pushing the standard forward. They already have a 50 Gig player, and they've stated they have a 200 Gig player in the works... which basically means sometime in our lifetime. Since Blu-Ray has such an obvious edge in terms of storage, the choice here would seem really clear cut... but unfortunately it's not. A hint is how many studios are behind the HD-DVD spec, while so many computer companies are behind the Blu-Ray spec.

An HD-DVD is made in a very similar way to current DVDs: you have a recording layer sandwiched in between two thin layers of plastic. Blu-Ray is very different, with the recording layer something like 0.1 millimeters below the surface of 1.1 millimeter coating. This has real ramifications, the first being durability, and the second being cost. Blu-Ray discs are to fragile to be able to just pick up and hold like a DVD, so they are required to exist in a caddy. If you've been around long enough, you probably remember that caddy's kinda suck.

The major one is really cost, though. Because HD-DVDs are so similar to current DVDs, a factory in China that exists to do nothing but stamp out millions of DVDs of The Incredibles can be quickly retooled to pump out HD-DVDs. To do the same for Blu-Ray, that factory would basically have to start over with all new equipment and processing lines. HD-DVDs are going to have a very, very large edge in cost all around. Imagine you're someone like Time Warner, who is pumping out DVDs by the boatload, and you can see why it's a big deal for them. Sony doesn't really count, as it's this odd sort of beast in the industry that is both an electronics and a content company.

When you start weighing all the different considerations, the situation isn't quite as black and white anymore, which is why people are gearing up for a format war... you don't really have those unless there are pro's and con's to both. Of course, you still want to know who will win anyways, and to even start to make a guess we have to look at that greatest of marketplace catalysts: Porno.

I'm probably freaking out the Google Ads big time right now, but I don't think it's a surprise to anyone to say that Pornography has, and will continue to be, a huge catalyst for technologies. It always comes back to sex. Prior to the VCR, if you wanted to get all tingly in that special way you had to go to a very shady adult movie theatre on the bad side of town. No amount of "Know what I mean, nudge nudge" was going to get the Mrs. there easily.

Some would also call this the Golden Age of porn, because the barrier to entry hadn't been lowered by video cameras, which meant you were actually using film and if you were going to spend that much money you might as well try to work some story into it... either way, the VCR meant porn became cheap to produce and manufacture, and lots of houses started getting plain brown packages delivered to them. Yes, people wanted to tape their TV shows and such too, but you can't write off the porn effect.

Yes, the internet allows one to pull in data from across the globe, speeds up business process and turns everything into a global economy. But any research paper will show porn just exploded across the net, and seriously drove growth. Now you didn't even have to worry about your package accidently getting dropped at the neighbors, or the mailman giving you knowing looks -- you just had to hope site had a nondescript billing name for your credit card statement. It birthed a whole second wave of amateur porn. All you needed was a scanner, a place to develop your film, and a webhost that would put up with it. Then digital cameras came along...

When it comes to pushing the envelope in terms of technologies on the net, like video, more mainstream services are starting to catch up but it was porn that paved the way. Yes, I'm sure iMovie and iDVD are being used to create some downright adorable family movies and other types of things, but I can also guarantee you they're being used heavily in the porno industry, especially a lot of the low-volume amateur-ish stuff.

All it really took for every one-man-with-a-camera adult site in the world to become a DVD distributor was for prices of writers to come down below a level. At that point, moving up to pressing houses is just a matter of how much volume you're doing and whether or not it's worth it to you. If this sounds familiar, it's because the same thing happened with VHS and then CDs.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD place our beloved pr0n peddlers in an interesting situation: capacity isn't that big of a deal for what they're doing, but price is, so HD-DVD would seem to have the upper hand. Yet at the same time, computer companies seem to be routing themselves towards Blu-Ray... and if every producer already has Blu-Ray in their computer, perhaps they'll gravitate towards that. Perhaps the larger, more established pr0n companies who are pushing out more volume will push the market towards HD-DVD because they can make more profit on the end product... or it may just come down to whichever technology can get the price of their writers down faster enough.

There may be an even bigger third wave of amateur pron as the cost of digital cameras, camcorders, and the hardware and software to put it all together drops even further. Or perhaps much of the above will be negated as bandwidth costs fall even further...

I don't really have a clue, as these sorts of things tend to follow the path of least resistance, and I'm not sure that's clear yet. If in the future it does suddenly become clear to you though, it'll probably be because you were watching the porn.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    January 14, 2005, at 11:43 AM