Author: Digital Digest | Latest News

Netflix sees HDR as a bigger draw for its subscribers than 4K, according to Netflix's Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt, and the streaming giant expects 20% of its content to support HDR by 2019.

HDR, or otherwise known as High Dynamic Range, aims to increase the range between the brightest and the darkest areas in a scene. This increased contrast gives makes the picture stand out more and feels more life-like, and according to Hunt, is what users will notice more easily than a simple upgrade to 4K resolution.

“I think HDR is more visibly different than 4K,” says Hunt. “Over the past 15 years, we have had plenty of increments of pixels on the screen, and from what we saw with digital cameras, pixel count eventually stopped being interesting.” A higher number may have looked nice stamped on the side of the camera, but most people couldn’t discern a 25-megapixel shot from a 20-megapixel shot in real life.

Hurting HDR's chance to be "the next big thing" in home entertainment is, and this should be familiar to earlier adopters of HD, yet another format war, plus the fact that people will need to ensure their displays can support HDR.

Right now, there are two competing HDR standards, Dolby Vision and Ultra HD Premium (also known as HDR 10). Netflix is trying to stay format agnostic - while they currently only provide Dolby Vision versions of its HDR streaming shows Marco Polo and Daredevil, the company will offer HDR 10 versions in the near future.

“There are a couple of manufacturers making Dolby Vision TVs that we will certify and be in the market very soon. In a month or two, we’ll do the same with HDR 10 TVs as well,” Hunt says, also hinting that firmware updates to a few TVs already capable of HDR will make them Netflix-HDR compatible in 2016.

As for content, Netflix is aiming to make 5 percent of its library HDR compatible by the end of 2016, and up to 20% by 2019. While it's possible to add HDR to older content (much like 3D remastering or colorization), to get the best out of HDR, Hunt argues that shows and movies have to be shot in HDR, something Netflix is committed to doing.

“The big step for Netflix this year is that we’re shooting our original shows with cameras that are capable of capturing all the range, then mastering for HDR,” he says. “That includes all the metadata for both types of TVs because we worked with the manufacturers to render it properly. We’re ready to start building a library and the TVs are making a big leap this year.”

EA's boss may have accidentally let known how many Xbox One consoles have been sold so far. It's a number that Microsoft wants to keep secret, so they do not reveal just how far behind in sales their flagship console is compared to Sony's record selling PS4 console.

EA CEO Blake Jorgensen revealed the company's own estimate for the total number of consoles in this current generation in EA's latest financial report, a number that, once combined with Sony's official sales figures for the PS4, would reveal the Xbox One numbers.

"The console purchases up through the end of calendar year 2015, our estimate is 55 million units out there, which has exceeded virtually everyone’s forecast for the year, and is now almost 50% higher than the previous console cycle," writes Jorgensen in the report.

Sony previously announced that 35.9 million PS4s have been sold up to the end of the 2015 holiday period, and when combined with the above 55 million figure (and with EA not really working with the Wii U), this would leave roughly 19 million Xbox Ones being sold so far.

This would suggest that the PS4 is outselling the Xbox One by almost a 2:1 margin, which is not particularly far off previous estimates. 

Despite Microsoft's lagging sales, the company says it's happy with how the Xbox One is doing, the console is still outselling the Xbox 360 at the same stage of its lifecycle.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 23rd January 2016 are in. Straight Outta Compton was the week top selling new release and top seller overall.

Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how Blu-ray (and DVD) did.

From piracy of Hollywood's own creation to Hollywood's creation of a new piracy problem, read the news roundup for the week ending 31 January 2016

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Hollywood's reluctance to accept new technology may be the reason why top films keep on getting pirated.

It's become a tradition every awards season, that the year's top movies, some still yet to hit cinemas, are leaked online via DVD screeners sent to award voters. Many in the industry are already asking for a more secure way to get films to voters.

But according to a Variety report, Hollywood's fear of new technology and ironically, it's fear of piracy is why studios haven't adopted a more secure method to deliver the latest films to voters.

That more secure method would see the use of digital distribution, via a closed and secure ecosystem.

Despite the fact that sending a DVD via the mail, a DVD that can be taken, misplaced and shared, is far from a secure solution, studio execs have not warmed up to the idea of digital mainly because they fear there are piracy risks associated, despite being told that such a digital system would be 99% piracy proof.

Studios executives even worry about how many devices a digital screener can be viewed on for each voter - worried that too many devices could lead to piracy, despite the fact that a DVD screener can be viewed and shared much easier (and if said screener is uploaded online, the "too many devices" could turn into "unlimited number of devices").

Piracy aside, the other major issue is how to ensure voters are watching films in the way they were intended - not on smartphone screens or 7" tablets - something that could affect the vote. However, there is no guarantee that DVD screeners aren't being watched on small screeen laptops instead of on home theater screens, if they're being watched at all.

But it seems it's only a matter of time before the move to digital occurs, not because Hollywood has started to embrace new technology, but only because old technology can no longer be trusted upon, as this awards season has proven so costly.

A free music listening platform that combines the best of YouTube music and Spotify has temporarily suspended services only two weeks after launch.

The platform, called Wefre, provided a Spotify like interface, but sources all music from legally uploaded YouTube music videos, allowing users to enjoy music streaming without having to pay for it, or to use YouTube's interface.

But two weeks after launch, and some 16,000 new user sign-ups, the people behind the start-up has called it quits, for now, blaming the platform's surging popularity, and the legal cloud hanging over the service.

The legal cloud exists because WeFre allows users to listen to YouTube music videos without the video part being shown, which may be a violation of YouTube's terms of service. In addition, the license holders that uploaded these music videos legally would most likely disagree with how it is being used on WeFre, with little or no revenue being generated and passed onto them.

The creators of the site were keen to point out that they had not received any legal threats so far in regards to the site, they have decided to take the more cautions approach and suspend all services until an unspecified time.

And while WeFre's legal status questionable, it's popularity isn't. The Spotify-like interface over YouTube music videos is a huge hit with users, but it also became a huge hit on server resources, with the operators of the site unable to keep it running smoothly, further adding to the need to close the site, for now. 

"We will ensure that we don't broke any law and we will come back with new features, stronger and without technical problems," a post on the website now reads.

While the above statement appears to be quite definitive, WeFre's future is most likely in serious doubt, as neither YouTube, nor rights-holders, or even Spotify (due to the site's uncanny resemblance to Spotify's), will be happy to see WeFre prosper. At their expense, they might say.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 16th January 2016 are in. The Martian was the week's headlining new release, and also the week's top seller.

Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how Blu-ray (and DVD) did.

Digital freedom advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has come out against the adoption of a "take down, stay down" system, warning that it will lead to a "filter-everything" approach.

The U.S. Government's Copyright Office is current seeking public consultation on how it can change existing digital copyright laws to satisfy today's needs, and some rights-holders have called for a "take down, stay down" approach to copyright enforcement.

Under the current DMCA laws, it is up to rights-holders to provide URLs to Internet service provider such as Google for removal. The same piece of content, such as a unique music track, often has multiple URLs, sometimes thousands of them, but under the current approach rights-holders have to submit each URL for service providers to remove.

While rights-holders can submit multiple URLs per DMCA take-down requests, and despite Google removing more than 1,500 URLs per minute, new URLs will usually pop-up faster than they can be taken down. Is this because of this, rights-holders have called for a new approach.

Under the "take down, stay down" approach, rights-holders only have to identify the unique piece of work (Justin Bieber's 'Love Yourself', for example), and it's up to service providers to search and destroy all URLs, new and old, for the content.

With good reason, service providers are wary of this approach, as they predict this will make them ultimately responsible for policing content, and at their own expense. The EFF agrees with this prediction.

"Filter-everything would effectively shift the burden of policing copyright infringement to the platforms themselves, undermining the purpose of the safe harbor in the first place," the EFF's Elliot Harmon warns.

If service providers are tasked with "take down, stay down", automated scanning tools will be a necessity to deal with the millions of pieces content and even more URLs that needs to be processed. This, the EFF says, is also a red flag, as automated tools, or "copyright bots", are notorious for being inaccurate.

“Here’s something else to consider about copyright bots: they’re not very good. Content ID routinely flags videos as infringement that don’t copy from another work at all. Bots also don’t understand the complexities of fair use. In September, a federal appeals court confirmed that copyright holders must consider fair use before sending a takedown notice. Under the filter-everything approach, legitimate uses of works wouldn’t get the reasonable consideration they deserve. Even if content-recognizing technology were airtight, computers would still not be able to consider a work’s fair use status." Harmon adds.

The biggest worry, according to Harmon, is how such a system might be abused by rights-holders to silence critics en masse.

"You don’t need to look far to find examples of copyright holders abusing the system, silencing speech with dubious copyright claims," says Harmon.

From some old thoughts on music piracy to a new paradigm for Blu-ray, read the news roundup for the week ending 24 January 2016

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A new paper published by the Economics department of Canada's Queen's University has found that music piracy may actually help boost digital music sales, although it may have a modest negative affect on physical media sales.

The paper written by Jonathan Lee, a searcher at Queen's, is titled Purchase, Pirate, Publicize: The Effect of File Sharing and uses data from 4.8 million illegal download, from 250,000 albums on a popular private BitTorrent tracker.

Looking at top-tier artists, Lee found that far from hurting digital sales, piracy actually boosts it, suggesting that the "the word-of-mouth effect is most relevant for the digital market". Physical sales did seem to be negative affected by piracy, applying a "statistically significant but economically modest negative" pressure on these sales.

But more importantly, Lee's research seems to suggest that the effect of piracy not only varies significantly depending on the type of media (digital of physical), but also the popularity of the artists, with the mega stars being better off than the lesser known.

"Top-tier artists lose sales, but the loss is partially offset by an increase in digital sales and the overall effect is small," Lee writes in the paper.

"Mid-tier artists are helped slightly and bottom-tier artists are significantly hurt by file sharing, which could indicate that file sharing helps lesser-known artists only if they are actually talented," says Lee.

This seem to indicate that users are using piracy as a discovery tool, and money is only going towards artists whose work is actually worth paying for, in the minds of these pirates.