I don't even own a bluray player. I don't see them go away though, in fact I can see them try to come up with yet another format so you have to buy yet another player. Probably to try to push 8k. Can BR do 4k? If not, then they'll come up with a format for 4k, then later on one for 8k. The movie companies love that since they can sell the same movie like 10 times.
"Star Wars digitally enhanced!" No matter what way you put it, it was still filmed at whatever resolution was available at the time, but they'll still try to sell it again and again and again on new formats. :awe:
I love having a file. It never goes obsolete, I can view it through any program I want, I can back it up, etc... As a kid, there was a novelty of owning a movie on VHS and having it physical, but now I find it's not really a novelty anymore, I'm happy with a file sitting on my SAN.
If it was FILMED, on film, then it can actually be presented at higher quality than we have now.
Have you seriously not heard about the quality of a well-mastered film negative? 4K isn't enough to match what the film can actually produce.
You're happy with low-quality rips - great, enjoy.
Blu-ray will actually be around for some time - some of the earliest Blu-ray players will not be capable of playing new discs mastered under new revisions to the Blu-ray standard, such as discs with 4 or more layers, but the standard will live on and many players available today will simply need firmware updates.
Blu-ray was designed to NOT require a new format come the next wave in technology. That next wave is 4K. I don't know if there was ever a plan to survive beyond 4K (to include 4K-3D, which will surely be on BD as well), but that's two generations of consumer video technology. Not a single home video format ever survived a leap. Heck, TV's were still 480i (same as when VHS was launched) when VHS was officially replaced with DVD, of which also remained dedicated to 480i, though with support for 480p introduced later.
It's not really about maximizing resales of old movies. You make it sound easy.
The first, and most challenging aspect, is convincing the consumer the new format is indeed necessary. There's an extreme cost to getting formats up and running from the development and licensing standpoint, and the new consumer electronics will be necessarily expensive to both recoup this R&D cost and support new hardware component production when costs are still high at the manufacturer.
FWIW, I'll stream content from Netflix and Amazon, and even Vudu on occasion, but ultimately, Vudu is where I go only when it's a movie I want the best quality, yet I cannot find it in a Redbox nor is it a disc I actually want to purchase.
If it's a movie where I want the best possible experience, I am either buying it, renting it from Redbox, or doing one of two things: waiting until I see a good sale, or just watching it on Vudu.
I will never replace "the ultimate experience" will lousy and lossy audio and video. Too much is lost compared to what can be achieved through Blu-ray.
And I hope nobody kids themselves into believing we'll be streaming Blu-ray quality content in the next 10 years. The infrastructure projects move at a snails pace in the US, and even if you can get gigabit to the home, that's last-mile. You might get a few places you can max out that link, but the Tier 1 providers and CDNs can not sustain the roughly 50Mbps bandwidth for content to the majority of users who wish to view digital video. The top actual bitrates for streaming we see is, iirc, around 8-10Mbps? A provider like Vudu might suggest you have a 20Mbps downlink for HDX, but the video and audio combined is not 20Mbps. It might peak in some scenes higher, but average, iirc, is around 10Mbps or less. Netflix, likewise, suggests, what, 12Mbps for HD but the top 1080p bitrate is around 7Mbps. If my source is accurate, Netflix's 4K is roughly 15Mbps - which is pathetic for 4K, even with advances in compression algorithms.
And don't even get my started on the sound, ugh... I think they still top out at less than 500Kbps for DD+ or whatever. Even if the streaming services deliver quality video, they still refuse to add the option to deliver improved audio tracks. Even with a lossy codec, you can get close to 2Mbps for good DD+ tracks. Lossless tracks can trend toward 15Mbps average -- the Blu-ray standard allows for 24.5Mbps DTS-MA. In many scenes, that is unnecessary, so it could be 5Mbps in one scene and nearly 25Mbps in another.
Tier 1 ISPs and CDNs cannot provide even half a million viewers with a sustained 50Mbps throughput for a Blu-ray quality experience. And they won't be able to for quite some time - the U.S. is behind in broadband for many reasons, and not all are driven by corporate greed. The U.S. has a very low average population density, with population in pockets far more spread out than anywhere else in the world. To support that, for our 318 Million-strong country, would cost significantly more than it costs to upgrade more dense (and geographically smaller) countries like Japan and most of Europe.
You can get individual cities and regions up to gigabit (and do so with high costs), but you can't really get them much of the greater-internet delivered anywhere near that speed. You can get bursts, and random data mirrors, but not sustained throughput and media content from the largest content networks in the world.
If you don't care about video quality and watch on TV speakers or budget surround sound... you won't miss the quality. It's not everyone's desire to care that much, I get that. Quite a few, like my parents, basically could care less, but still don't really give two shits. They'll still watch non-HD digital cable channels on either of the plasmas, and my dad might turn on a non-HD ESPN channel even when HD actually is an option. Yet they did accept Blu-ray, they have but a small handful of movies, and don't rent. I've come to realize my parents represent the absolute average of the general population. They haven't adopted streaming, but with cable VOD they basically get what they want in that sense.
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