Would you like all of B5 on a single disk?

[Andrew_Swallow]

According to this BBC article in about 5 years time a new form of DVD may come onto the market able to hold all the episodes of Babylon 5 on a single disk.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3696306.stm

Time to start saving up for a new player?

[OmahaStar]

Babylon 5 is like a series of books ... a new book for each season, and when the volumes are on my shelf, they really do give the feeling of a living book.

Having everything on just one disc, I think, would take away from that feeling.

[Towelmaster]

I wouldn't mind a writer that writes such data-volumes. I could make a safety-copy of my B5-DVDs on a single disk.

[Radhil]

Meh. Maybe in computers this will have a lot of impact. I don't see the home-video market taking off over it. They're still trying to come up with the "Next DVD", and seem to be missing completely that's it's not radically necessary. Current compression tech lets practically any film get shrunk to one disk. This would be usless except to rich folk with 60" High defs.

[Ranger1]

I would buy it only if they will improve the quality (aka digital restoration).

[Capt.Montoya]

Who knows if that will ever get to market... unless they have applied for a patent that interested companies could license and make mone from, or release it as an open standard all the companies can use and compete in it might not happen.
Of course maybe this will just give the idea on future research to the people at Phillips and Sony to again develop competing technologies and have another VHS vs Betamax, or Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD war.

Whatever happens... I suspect discs like those, combined with advances to come in home theater systems might result in movie theater quality image and size for home theaters...
Which would be nice, but no necessary.

[Firebird]

An interseting idea. I see it going in one of two ways.

1) The studios will TOTALLY LOVE IT! and release all their titles again in this new format, exactly as hapened with DVD in its present form. Oh, and also charging a substantial premium in the proccess (what's new?)....

2) The studios will either TOTALLY HATE IT , or just plain ignore it and so it will never make it into the kind of domestic machines we are enjoying at the moment.

My personal opinion is that the next big leap is still going to be on the quality-rather-than-quantity side of things. CRT TVs are so well established (either 4:3 or 16:9) that I feel that this is where the next major improvement will have to come. Plasma TVs are OK but don't really seem to offer too much of an improvement, they're better....but not that much. And I am talking about machines by SONY, PHILLIPS, PANASONIC because those are the ones that I have seen working.

[bakana]

The studios will concentrate on the question of whether or not they can find a way to get Consumers to pay $100 ++ for a single Disk that everybody knows only costs them 25 Cents to actually Make.

And another $1 for the label and the box.

Stuff like that is Cheap when you buy 1,000,000 at a time...

[Andrew_Swallow]

I notice that we are getting replies from the fans; lets bring the industry people in.

The proposed discs can hold 472 hours of film and, if made write-able, will almost certainly be used to store computer data. Consequently the drives and disks will be mass-produced. It will probably be something like 10 years time before the studios' marketing departments notice. Do you think that by then that your collected works will fill one of these disks?

[CRONAN]

All I can say is, BRING IT ON. The sooner, the better. I'm getting sick of having to change discs so freaking often between episodes. Time that changed.

Though, assuming they did put all the B5 seasons into one disc.....
If anything ever happened to that disc, well, that'd be $500 down the drain. Perhaps one season per disc then; the loss of a one would not mean sacrificing the whole.

[Bonehead]

I think the industry would never go for it. On some series' a single season can be quite a substantial amount of money. Now you're talking about increasing that amount by five, in some cases more. Put simply, people will not spend that amount of money at once.

Of course the hardcore fans may do, but average Jo public will not. I would estimate that already the percentage of people that buy entire seasons in boxsets is fairly low, compared to the amount of people that buy single films or single episodes.

In short, the bigger, more expensive, a product is, the less people will buy it.

[Ranger1]

Its not about the quantity its about the quality (too),you keep forgetting that today's dvd standard is...well...standard (heh),there is much place for quality improvement.
I remember George Lucas and James Cameron always said that they would love to put a whole a lot more things on their dvd but in order to keep the film itself with a good quality,they just had to let things go.
Why aren't there more Audio options? that's right,no more space.
This new dvd's (whether its blu-ray or god knows what),can give a chance to do some amazing stuff,beside improving the quality (both for video and new sound formats),it can store many extra features like more commentaries,separate tracks for audio and i can go on for ever.

[Capt.Montoya]

Something else to consider:
DVD is compressed video and audio data (MPEG2), a higher capacity disc could be used for uncompressed video, maybe with higher resolution.
But until High Definition TV becomes a standard, higher resolution seems unnecessary.

[Dr Maturin]

<<But until High Definition TV becomes a standard, higher resolution seems unnecessary.>>

The sets are getting lower and lower in price, but I don't know how much programming is HD.

[Andrew_Swallow]

We are talking about blu-rays replacement.

Having just seen an advert for a collection of Country and Western songs such high capacity disks are likely to be used for the film equivalent. For instance the collected films of John Wayne.