But they still announce 8K TVs in a world where fiber 10gbs connection is still the exception. I am missing a piece of the puzzle.

The physical media selections in general stores have certainly been dropping year by year, which can only mean less people are buying them. Hardware player manufacturers have no choice but to accept that reality. I personally feel it's strange this shift means people gladly embrace lesser quality without a word of complaint. Although it's not like I wouldn't understand the benefits, assuming everything continues as it has. But then again, lots of people are also happy with the less than stellar speakers LCD/LED TVs possess. TV sound actually suffered when the tubes disappeared because there was no space for bigger speakers in flat TVs. Ironically enough lots of people got considerably better sound by buying a BD player amplifier combo with a set of speakers, like 5.1. Now the BD player is slowly becoming obsolete, then. But then again, I'm not really a movie enthusiast, so I guess I shouldn't speak so much. I've only been buying a handful of BDs a year.

I am sad that Oppo called it quits. I was holding out hope for Samsung.

well streaming quality is nothing exceptional, i have problem comparing it to a standard 1080p well made bluray. Also with streaming you are on rent for the life, i like to buy movies personally. I hope next playstation has the 4k br option

I love my 4k samsung blu-ray. The quality when streaming movies isnt close to as good especially the audio. ATMOS and DTS-HD is awesome when you have a decent sound system.

I'll be quite disappointed if Blurays and Ultra HD Blurays disappear. The audio quality on DTS HD is way way ahead of streaming quality. They seem to have completely forgotten about audio quality on streaming sites.

FM57:

But they still announce 8K TVs in a world where fiber 10gbs connection is still the exception. I am missing a piece of the puzzle.

In Asia and Europe they are removing copper and previous fiber to have complete full speed fiber... it's just a question of time. Anyway there is no more DVD / BR / physical game shop in were i live, they have been erased by streaming and downloadable media.

Richard Nutman:

I'll be quite disappointed if Blurays and Ultra HD Blurays disappear. The audio quality on DTS HD is way way ahead of streaming quality. They seem to have completely forgotten about audio quality on streaming sites.

It depend a lot of the provider, and i agree when i look at Netflix it doesn't sound good at all, even good old DVD in DTS do it better on this point, but it's like that.

deusex:

For me, its not internet streaming but how you view it. DVD/BR gives you bars top bottom, streaming you have no bars actually better looking picture.

Not sure what you're saying here.... You are saying that because you stream content to your setup that they make the format different for you from what they originally had setup? As in.....you watch a movie with a 21:9 format on blu-ray and its got bars on the screen yet when you stream it it does not have it? Makes no sense to me. Formats do not change over media types. One thing that does change is the garbage compression used for video and the lack of proper audio options like lossless and or dolby atmos for that matter. Audio makes up two thirds of the "experience". So much more immersion with proper audio.

And if Samsung wants to get ahead of the game then by all means go ahead. But this guy isn't buying into their nonsensical hype at this moment in time. It'll be years gone before i buy into 8k. I'm still enjoying the 4k media content in my home theaters.

deusex:

For me, its not internet streaming but how you view it. DVD/BR gives you bars top bottom, streaming you have no bars actually better looking picture.

So, your streaming site cuts the left and right sides of the picture away. The screen in a movie theater isn't 16:9 like a usual computer screen, it's much wider: ~2.4:1. That's what the movies are like originally. If you play them on a 16:9 screen, it either has bars or zoomed so that stuff is dropped left and right to fill the screen vertically. Decent screens (TVs)/players should allow you to do it manually if you want to.

I don't mind Netflix and the likes for streaming shows and movies, but at the end of the day i like my fave movies and TV shows on boxsets and physical media at my beck and call, and that is not going to change anytime soon, but if any of your across the pond need one of these in the future let me know, my exports fee's are very reasonable from here in the UK. 😛

Khronikos:

I will always value the physical media for movies unless they give you full quality elsewhere. And being realistic I would fill a terabyte up pretty quick, but I would need the full bluray in digital to care. And now with 4K that is about 100GB per disc for some of them. You could go through drive space so fast it is definitely cheaper when they are like 5 bucks. I don't mind having a decent collection. A streaming membership all years is expensive is around 150 bucks. That is too much for me to own nothing unless I really want to watch stuff on netflix. If netflix were full quality that would be cool, but it is not happening any time soon.

It gets even worse if you have TV shows on BD. Around 1.7TB for this alone! If I understand the Netflix subscription tiers correctly it'd run $192/year to get FHD BD quality (thereabouts).

FM57:

But they still announce 8K TVs in a world where fiber 10gbs connection is still the exception. I am missing a piece of the puzzle.

I mean, the piece of the puzzle you're missing is understanding how much bandwidth these applications actually require. A stable 5 mbps connection is plenty for streaming HD netflix. A stable 20 mbps connection is plenty for streaming UHD Netflix. I haven't seen recommendations for streaming 8k(and it's undoubtedly a few years away), but one wouldn't think you'd need more than say, 50 mbps for a single stream. What makes you think anyone needs 10 gbps for streaming video? That's nonsense. Throughput is not going to be the bottle neck here, it's going to be the data caps imposed by certain ISP's. For example, in the USA many Cable providers have started implementing data caps(Comcast/Xfinity imposes a 1TB data cap). THAT is a huge problem for families that stream a lot of HD content. But bandwidth? I pay $39.99 a month for 60/5. Not the best deal in the world, but streaming HD video or even UHD video is not a problem at all.

deefop:

Throughput is not going to be the bottle neck here, it's going to be the data caps imposed by certain ISP's. For example, in the USA many Cable providers have started implementing data caps(Comcast/Xfinity imposes a 1TB data cap). THAT is a huge problem for families that stream a lot of HD content.

Movie rental shops/DVD and BD stores/player manufacturers: "People don't anymore want physical media, they stream everything, so we are out of business." ISP: "Eh, they stream everything? Hold my beer, I'm gonna make sure they stream nuthing with a draconian data cap." Hollywood [Darth Vader voice]: "Nooooooo!"

There's no point to regular blu-ray players or DVD players, instead of stopping producing the player that can play all available current medium now, how about stop producing players that are gimped to only play some of them.

deusex:

For me, its not internet streaming but how you view it. DVD/BR gives you bars top bottom, streaming you have no bars actually better looking picture.

Don't understand what you're saying here, what "streaming" service do you use that does this? For that matter, have you actually compared to to the physical media? You either have your media player on zoom (something you can do with physical media as well) or your streaming service is not giving you the full content which is a rip off. DVD/BR doesn't "give" you bars on the top and bottom, it gives you the full released content, its up to you to decide if you want to zoom and cut off the sides and see less content. That being said your last statement of "no bars actually better looking picture"....yeah, there's no objectiveness in that, it's purely an incorrect statement. You can prefer to lose content just so it "fills" up the screen, but it's definitely not "better looking picture", as you literally have less content. It's the same nonsense statement made by people when fullscreen went to widescreen "but, but, there's bars! i want to see all the content, not bars!" and having zero understanding or willingless to pay attention to the fact that widescreen provided more content. This is why whenever you saw a "fullscreen" movie, it stated it had been edited, AKA cropped, to fit the "full screen" televisions. Often they cut off more then just the sides for that matter due to needing to make the fullscreen picture make sense. This is the same thing you're saying makes your supposed streaming that is supposedly doing the zooming, again something you can do yourself, for you, without choice. Nonsense. https://www.slashfilm.com/wp/wp-content/images/widescreenfullscreen.jpg

Panasonic and Sony are still in the game and offering new models for 2019.

The DVD/Bluray/CD enterprises only have themselves to blame for their market demise. If a Bluray movie cost $5, DVD $2.50 CD $1.50 they would all still be in business along with retailers/wholesalers. They could have out-competed the rental market and ended illegal copying at the same time. Sony also has a lot to answer with their bizarre licencing system for both DVD and Bluray, they have effectively committed marketing suicide ensuring nobody wants their product. They needed to do a much cheaper HD disc, it was never going to work.

Call me old fashioned but I like to have my data , photos , movies ,... in physical form , i kind of think that we trust the virtual data storage and internet streaming too much . And the quality + smoothnes of blue ray beats streamed movie over here with slow internet . I fear that we are shooting our selfs in the foot by abandoning physical forms of storage . Just my opinion .

I have to admit, I rarely use my Blu-ray player anymore (and even when I watch Blu-ray movies, I use my PC to do it). I don't even shop for Blu-ray movies anymore as I don't consider them to be worth it. I'm currently considering ripping all my BR discs to my PC. There's no denying the convenience of streaming, where movies are available on demand - as opposed to digging through my Blu-ray collection to find that one movie that I want to watch, only to find the disc is missing. I recently got a 500 Mbps unlimited plan so streaming shouldn't be a problem anytime soon. Physical media will eventually become obsolete. Games already made this transition and there's no reason why movies shouldn't. Samsung is just respond to market trends.

Streaming would be ok if bitrate was as high as UHD Disc (100mbit/s average) But the video is very compressed, most people don't even see the difference, sad... Sound too, Dolby Atmos on Blu-ray is lossless TrueHD, on Netflix it's Atmos lossy DD+ 640kbps... I've had 1gbps fiber for 10 years, bring it on 😛