Ultra HD Blu-Ray Discs are not a thing to miss. We know that we live in the cloud and streaming era, and physical media is kinda getting the boot, but if you’re taking a stance against Blu-Ray in general then you’ll miss out on one of the greatest, if not the only, alternatives to 4k streaming.
The BDA – Bluray-Disc Association, announced this week that they have finally finished the new Ultra HD Blu-Ray format.
The new format will be able to output 4k resolutions of 3840×2160, while at the same time offering HDR – high dynamic range, and high frame rate content- most likely up to 60fps. This sounds really great considering that physical media is something of the past. We either buy our software, games, movies, or songs from their digital stores, or we stream them. But is it enough for consumers to shift their positions back to discs? Has that ship sailed already?
The BDA is hoping that the ship is still in port – although, I highly doubt it.
Licensing will begin this summer, and backward-compatible Ultra HD Blu-ray players will hit the street sometime at the end of this year. They’re hoping to jump on the X-mas bandwagon. It’s probably a great idea – I wouldn’t mind if I get a player as a gift for the holidays, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to save up money to buy one. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t buy one even if I had all the funds necessary.
Victor Matsuda, which is the chair of the BDA’s promotions committee has stated that the new Ultra HD format is consistent, and the movie experience is repeatable. Is Victor hinting that we can’t get this kind of quality anywhere else? Because I know for sure that you can watch 4k movies on Netflix, YouTube and Amazon, and I can do so on any rig, regardless if I have an Ultra HD player, or not.
The storage, or UHD will hold up to 66GB of data on dual-layer discs, and 100GB on triple-layer discs. You can’t possibly hope to download that much of data in a day, or two, and it will probably strike a chord with those who have horrible internet connections.
But the trend is changing, and better internet connections, and higher bandwidths are becoming more and more popular – not because Comcast wants it, but because consumers are sick and tired of being treated like the scum of the Earth.
We’ll see at the end of this year if the BDA has bet on the right horse, or it has lost all of its plausibility.
