Netflix streaming has made it’s way into everything and people like it. As usual, Blockbuster is behind. But here’s some good news for the company.
According to Chairman Jim Keyes, Blockbuster’s download-to-rent service in a Blu-ray player will be here by Q1 of next year. Basically, if you’re an HD film fan then you’ll be able to rent HD quality films from Blockbuster directly through your Blu-ray Disc machine. No word if this will be in the form of a firmware update for existing hardware or part of a new player, but it’ll need to standout a bit and lower the price in order to compete with Netflix.
[Reghardware]
TAGS:
Blockbuster, Blu-ray, download, OnDemand, players, service
Folks,
I think the way this will stand our is the Blockbuster system uses Widevine’s HD Adaptive streaming and virtual Blu-ray experience.
You have to see this to believe it. Widevine was showing the HD Adaptive streaming at Cablelabs last week.
It was amazing to see. The clip was 1080i it was encoded in H.264. It seamlessly adapted from 2.5 Mbps to 10Mbps …I think there were 4 or 5 different bit rates. The quality was amazing. It was playing back on Windows, Mac and a Blu-ray player.
What was even more amazing then the HD adaptive technology was that the 1080i Mbps H.264 clip played back on the PC/MAC. They attempted to play back the low bit rate version using a Flash player and silverlight and the CPU maxed out, stuterd and lost frames.
Sonic and Widevine really have something here.
- Morgan