It is going to be quite some time--if ever--for the streaming experience to come close to matching the hard media experience in terms of detail, nuance, sound quality--well, in terms of everything, really. There are two sad truths in this discussion: (1) People will take convenience over quality most of the time, because they think that "good enough" is good enough for them. (2) More than 90 percent of the population has never been shown truly high performance in any area, video, audio, autmotive, gustatory, sartorial and so on, so they can't know what they are missing. And these folk are not at fault! It is the retail world that has failed them by not educating them. I can't think of a more short-sighted and lazy industry than US mass-market retail. I work in high-end luxury retail, which is altogether different.
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DarkKnight (262)
7 years ago
Agreed. People will always choose what's convenient over what's better.
Why did Betamax lose to VHS? It was the better product, yet VHS won in the end.
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strntz (12773)
7 years ago
There were two reasons for Beta's demise (well three).
The first is that the VHS format was always double the length in run/record time. The first Betas were 1 hour, the first VHS was two. Most movies could be contained on one cassette with VHS.
The second reason was that RCA picked VHS for their format. Back in the late 70s, RCA was a powerhouse in consumer electronics and most industry experts agreeded that if RCA went Beta (Zenith did), then Beta would have been the dominant format just on the strength of RCA, Zenith, and Sony all backing that format.
The third reason was simply that once one format took the majority lead, the other would fail.
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