SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Samsung stops releasing Blu-ray players in the US
Did you notice that Samsung hasn't made a peep about Blu-ray players at CES or other recent trade shows? There's a good reason for it: the company is exiting the category in the US. Samsung told Forbes and CNET that it's no longer introducing Blu-ray players for the country. It didn't provide reasoning for the move, but Forbes sources reportedly said that Samsung had scrapped a high-end model that was supposed to arrive later in 2019.
Related: Ultra HD Blu-Ray Specification Completed
Sony Launches Quad-Layer 128 GB Blu-Ray Discs
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Samsung to Stop Releasing New Blu-ray Players in the U.S.
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 31 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
(1)
Not recommended for children.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @10:24PM (5 children)
I still have the VHS/DVD combo player hooked up to the tv, and they rarely ever get used.
Same with the cd player in cars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NateMich on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:42PM (2 children)
CD players in cars?
VHS/TV combos?
I didn't think anybody even had those anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:45PM
Sorry to tell you this then, but you're obviously not well informed.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:15AM
The car is the only place I use discs. Now, if I had a lot a more free time, I would hack together something with a SBC and an SSD, but for now, my aftermarket radio has 3 USB inputs, radio, CD, SD slot, bluetooth, aux input, 6 RCA channels out + factory connections. I can use all those USBs and whatnot, but CD sounds better ('m not about to download terabytes of FLAC or spend days ripping all of them, unless I had a ton of free time), it's convenient, and I already buy them from artists that I want to support.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @12:17AM
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @03:46AM
Guess I am 'nobody'
I buy my media because other peoples servers 'go away' when they no longer make money.
http://cinegods.com/ultraviolet-calls-quits-disney-format-will-prevail-new-movies-anywhere-locker-initiative/ [cinegods.com]
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/20/17033602/flixster-video-service-shuts-down [theverge.com]
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/31/18204943/ultraviolet-locker-shutdown-date [theverge.com]
http://fortune.com/2019/02/09/spotify-ad-blocker-terminated/ [fortune.com]
Maybe I am just funny I want to continue to use what I paid for.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:25PM (3 children)
Not crying any tears. BluRay devices are about as anti-consumer as you can get. Big Entertainment is on fucking crack if they think a 3D 4K movie is worth multiple times the price of a movie ticket. Get back to under $10 per title and I might consider a purchase, but never the hardware.
Instead of putting in such a device, that doesn't respect my ownership or privacy in any way, shape, or form, I choose piracy:
It's an environmental waste too. All that damn plastic wrapping, the sleeves, the BluRay itself. We have the Internet. Distribution would be environmentally neutral, if you didn't consider the impact of the hardware creation and power generation. Even then, better than creating all that useless waste and BluRay players destined for the dumps.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NateMich on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:44PM (2 children)
More importantly, almost all recent movies are just garbage anyway. I wouldn't watch most of that shit for free.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:53PM (1 child)
Couldn't agree more. It's been that way for at least 15 years. When will it end?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:56PM
When the Chinese audience stops gobbling up CGI movies en masse.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:44PM (6 children)
Hijacking technical standards to enslave people should not be rewarded. I hope every single company that ever supported blu-ray in any way shape or form lost money on it. And I guarantee I did my part to make that happen. I wouldn't even buy a blu-ray for $1, at a yard sale, if it was of my favorite lost classic.
Well, no, scratch that last clause. I can live with the rest of it.
And fuck blu-ray.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:49PM
I'm mostly on board with that, although I can't say I've been quite as strict in enforcing it. I've got probably 1 or 2 buray-only things. Those were bought when HMV was in it's final days of liquidation a couple years back. (So people were definitely losing money!)
All the other things I have that are on a bluray disc are part of a bluray-dvd combo pack. Otherwise I still get dvd-only assuming they aren't trying to charge too much for it. (And over 20 bucks is too much for dvd these days unless I'm buying a full series of something.)
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday February 17 2019, @12:20AM (3 children)
The over the top DRM turned me off pretty hard as well. Never needed to switch off DVD so never have.
Mostly moot with streaming anyway.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @07:56AM (1 child)
In addition to that, the twenty minute wait for loading a new disk that I saw on a friend's gen 1 Sony BluRay player indicated that the format was something I was never going to buy, players or disks. To this day I've never purchased a bluray player or a bluray disk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:16PM
https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones [theoatmeal.com]
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Sunday February 17 2019, @08:17AM
AFAICT, I have never even met anyone with a Blu-Ray player.
I am in the UK, which may have a bearing on it. I guess a lot of people here would interpret DRM and forced advertising as "it does not work".
Plus, if you wanted Hollywood films, and had a choice of "now, via streaming" or "on a disk, after they are a year old". Which one would you choose?
For everyone else there is Youtube (or Pornhub).
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 5, Funny) by EvilSS on Sunday February 17 2019, @01:30AM
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Sunday February 17 2019, @01:30AM (11 children)
Optical media is dead. It's all about the streaming now. Best Buy stopped stelling CDs [billboard.com] in their stores last year. Kmart in Australia stopped selling DVDs and CDs [news.com.au] last year. Oppo Digital stopped making [cnet.com] Blu-Ray players last year. Physical disc sales and rentals plummeted in 2017 [variety.com], falling 14% in 2017, after falling 10% in 2016. Meanwhile, video streaming subscription services finally eclipsed DVD and Blu-Ray sales for the first time in 2016, and expanded by an additional 30% in 2017. In addition, purchasing digital videos on Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, Google Play Movies & TV, etc., totaled over $2 billion in 2017.
In my not-so-popular opinion, this doesn't matter to me. I live in a condominium, so I rarely buy physical media as I simply don't have the room for it. I've been all digital now for books, comic books, graphic novels, movies, music, and television for years. I buy books on Amazon Kindle and Kobo, comic books and graphic novels on Comixology and Google Play Books, movies and television on Amazon Prime Video and Vudu, and music on 7digital, Bandcamp, and Apple iTunes.
Buy those DVDs and Blu-Rays while you can, they won't be here much longer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:00AM (3 children)
I would love to purchase optical media again. But it should be blank holographic media with a capacity around 1 petabyte (1,000 terabytes) or preferably 1 exabyte (1 million terabytes).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday February 17 2019, @03:32AM (2 children)
Is there any particular reason you want optical media? I want reliable large capacity storage, but I don't care for optical media and as the optical aspect (and the necessary mechanical reader) gets in the way of reliability.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday February 17 2019, @04:42AM
It would be interesting to see the 12 cm format preserved yet again, and possibly see drives that read everything from CD, DVD, Blu-ray/XL, to new-fangled disc. I'm not saying that a holographic storage medium would necessarily be engineered that way, or even spin at all. But it is, by definition, "optical" storage.
Define "reliability". M-DISC is supposedly much more reliable than normal DVDs and Blu-rays. A new technology could be inherently more reliable. Or it might be worth it to construct the disc out of better materials depending on the $/TB.
If the medium was rewritable and had an absurd capacity, it could be packaged as a hard drive replacement instead of a tray-loaded disc.
Here are some candidates [soylentnews.org]. If we do end up with a spinning optical disc with petabytes or exabytes of storage, we might be able to forgive some inconveniences.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @07:19AM
Where are the holographic data cubes? Conceivably, if the media doesn't move it should be more stable & reliable than the spinning discs we're currently stuck with. Is somebody in big data, or worse, big media blocking the technology the way big oil did electric motors for so long?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @07:13AM (3 children)
Easy for you to say, but not all of us live in a magical fairyland with uncapped high-speed data connections to the internet.
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Sunday February 17 2019, @07:40AM (1 child)
It's easy for me to say, but I also backed it up with facts. I realize that not everyone has uncapped high speed Internet, but the fact is optical media is being phased out. That's just undisputed. Stores have begun to stop stocking and selling optical media. Optical media player manufacturers like Samsung and Oppo have ceased manufacturing optical media players. The sales of optical media have plummeted over the past few years while video streaming subscriptions rise and the sale of digital media have substantially risen. The writing is on the wall, whether or not you want to see it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Apparition on Sunday February 17 2019, @07:47AM
I should also mention that Hollywood has recently begun doubting the 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray format, and several 4K Ultra HD movie restorations are only being released digitally, like It's a Wonderful Life, Lawrence of Arabia, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Also, rumor is that both the next Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox (scheduled for release in 2020 or 2021), will forego any kind of optical media drive. They will both be digital media only, according to the rumor. Now whether that's true or not, we'll see, but it wouldn't surprise me. Half of all Sony's and Microsoft's video game sales in 2018 were digital.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:10PM
NBN plans in Australia can be $60/month for unlimited data on the NBN or DSL2.
Join us.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @12:16PM (1 child)
A few years back, I got the hankerin' to rewatch Babylon 5. Fortunately it was on the streaming platform I was subscribed to at the time, so I began watching from the beginning, an episode every couple of days or so. Then I had to stop, because it wasn't on that streaming platform anymore -- all the seasons were gone. Their license had run out.
I suppose I could have run around, trying to find out where it was licensed to next, if anywhere. Instead, I bought the DVDs, and now I can watch it as many times as I want, whenever I want. I don't have to worry about who has the license today, or if it's on a platform I have access to (physical or legal). I can (and do) rip the video from the DVDs (and my BluRays) and convert them to any video codec I wish, for playing wherever I desire.
When the internet's down, and here in the hinterland that happens a fair bit, I have plenty of content I can still watch. Or I can read on my Kindle -- hey, I'm not a complete luddite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:13PM
I watched the first couple of seasons of an old anime on Netflix. Strangely they old have that. And not the rest.
So, we're not there yet.
But.
From the looks of moves being made by others big media are looking to kill the market if they can't control it.
(Score: 1) by nwf on Monday February 18 2019, @07:59PM
That's premature. I still buy Blu-rays because they are often cheaper than buying the digital download version, and come with the digital download version. Plus a 4K blu-ray looks much better for the same movie when streamed. There just isn't enough bandwidth to most houses. A 4K movie is 50-75 GB.
Plus Netflix and other streaming companies never have new movies or any popular movies that they didn't make. Amazon, iTunes, etc. let you buy movies, but again, getting the disc is often cheaper, especially if you wait a little. It's trivial to rip a standard blu-ray anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @07:06AM
I can give you one valid use for dvds: RedBox dvd rental kiosks conveniently located at gas stations and such for popping a new movie in to occupy the kids during a long car trip. Obtain dvd in one state, view on the way, drop off viewed movie in the next state.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 18 2019, @04:31PM
Blu-Ray will die when Sony says it will. Other than that, I'm not too worried that the only optical format that can hold an entire 4k Movie is just going to go poof overnight. While, I dislike the whole captured market for playing movies, I much prefer having a physical copy that can be played on generic hardware. As opposed to being stuck forever with Amazon Prime, Ultraviolet, or iTunes. Most consumer protections are related to physical things. You lose most of your protections, the moment you trade your entire physical collection for a digital collection.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"