The Twilight of Digital Download, Epilogue: The Future? (or Able Was I, Ere I Saw Disney)

In the 2001 Ian Holm comedy "The Emperor's New Clothes"--look it up if you get the chance, and no, I'm not talking about the Disney movie--we're offered a whimsical what-if premise:  Instead of dying in exile on the island of St. Helene, what if defeated ex-conqueror Napoleon had switched places with a lookalike commoner, in a plan to return and retake Paris?...But when the plan goes wrong, he finds himself stranded in modern 1820's post-Revolutionary Paris as an average citizen, thought to be one more lunatic every time he tries to tell the world the truth.  
As our now anonymous citizen tries to find work and romance--and even organizes the street fruit-sellers with military strategy--he comes to realize the humiliating truth that years later, he's since become a quaint historical relic in his own country.  The free democratic France he helped create has now grown and matured past him into a country of citizens simply struggling to get by in a nation of their own, have no more need of self-satisfying world conquerors, thank you, and are in no mood to hear the cannons of war start again.

Picking up the pieces from the would-be all-or-nothing, last-man-standing Digital vs. Physical war, we customers in the middle have become like those simple Parisians now:  Home-theater has had a rough history over the last thirty-six years, born in war from the beginning.  VHS battled Betamax, DVD battled DiVX before it could overcome VHS, and Blu-ray had to beat HDDVD to the bitter end before it could have a chance to blow away DVD.  When DVD and Blu-ray's scheming Evil Twins hijacked the battle and represented threats to our very freedom, we rallied around the flag, and fought for principles of liberty and unity.  
But we have two generations who've so grown up with movies in their home, they've never known a time when movies weren't--At the right age, our children are now shown Wizard of Oz on the family disk, with no TV station to show it every year, and if a revival shows up, parents take them to the theater to amaze them with what The Lion King or Star Wars looked like in their day, when it used to play on bigger screens.  Home-theater simply was, and is.
Warner, armed with their experience of the past, believed that the next New Format would be forged in the fires of war...And of course, in format-war, there is only room for one, a Winner that becomes a wildfire overnight phenomenon, and a Loser that quickly blows away into the wind like dandelion seed, and is never heard from again.  The latter is what they were chiefly interested in.

It was when that didn't happen that panic-mode set in:  I was hanging around Warner's online customer-survey community at the time, and new-idea and customer-satisfaction surveys from the company were frequent.  You can guess what most of them were about.  

The most recent, only last month, asked customers to approve a new sales pitch--for use in a radio ad, or podcast, or maybe even an in-theater ad?--saying, and I quote, "Have you heard yet that 'Digital' means you can get movies FIRST?  It's true!  When you think 'Digital', think 'Your movies first!'"
The sheer, disillusioned bafflement in their voice was unmistakable:  Ultraviolet's fortunes were sinking, why hadn't we all caught on yet what a wonderful miracle it was (especially for the studio) to now preorder digital movies while they were still in theaters?...Didn't we KNOW??  Or had we just kept forgetting?  Were we all just six years slow on the uptake?  Was it simply that someone had neglected to tell us yet for our own good, and the truth hadn't yet set us free?
Later, I was shown their survey findings that a majority of new voice-activated-device users were using theirs mostly to listen to their music collections, set reminders and seek quick information on the Internet...Wait, does that mean they weren't using it to sit on the couch, say "Entertain me, Alexa!" and call up a recent hit Friday-night movie rental at random, like in all those Amazon ads?

In Warner's surveys of my customer-interest in digital libraries--which also became more and more often, the more that Blu-ray wasn't falling down yet on schedule and going plotz overnight as much as Marketing predicted it would, and they felt they hadn't hit on just the right sales avenue yet (maybe if they sold movie downloads on Gamestop gift cards?)--the question would often come up, "How many Ultraviolet digital movies are in your library collection?"  Followed by itemizing "How many were A) purchased, B) redeemed with free disk codes, C) promotional bonus/gifts?"  

I had to answer truthfully:  In order, I had 43 movies and 1 TV series in my collection.  23 of those were redeemed from free codes--that I'd received from, ahem, BUYING the DISKS!--and 19 were free promotional bonus/gifts.  They should know, most of those promotional gifts were from Warner, trying to get me hooked on the new convenience of Flixster.  I did buy one with real money, yes...An iTunes downloadable file of Eddie Murphy in "The Haunted Mansion", back in 2007 when we all were all playing with our new Apple Video iPods, and it'd somehow stayed on my Apple-account library ever since.

In fan conversations where I tried to explain whether I was fundamentally Fer or Agin' the idea of Digital, I simply explained that I saw it as a tool, for one specific situation I didn't normally encounter:  I might use Vudu or Amazon to Friday-movie-night rent some recent hit I'd missed in theaters rather than go to Redbox, but didn't really do anything with my library, since my living-room TV was already next to my disk shelf.  But, that I could see an online collection conceivably coming in handy for an emergency someday, if--let's be generous for the sake of argument and say IF--I was ever, say, stuck at the airport with a delayed flight for six hours with free WiFi.  Otherwise, since I wasn't a regular Amtrak commuter, or wasn't usually sitting in some public WiFi hot-spot for two hours when I left the house, I didn't really, y'know, see the point of having it in any other situation.

Last February '17, I was coming home from a cruise vacation, had no idea that the entire Northeastern seaboard was being socked with a major storm, that my flight home was delayed, and that I'd be stranded at Orlando Int'l airport with my iPad from 11am to 8pm, with free WiFi.  Well, what can I say?...I did ASK for it.  

Between naps and app-games, I enjoyed a rather nice afternoon in the airport's rechargeable comfy-chair islands and food-courts with headphones on, watching "The Avengers".  (Er, the original '67 Patrick Macnee/Diana Rigg TV series, that is, that I'd gotten from my free Blu-ray code, not the '99 Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman movie.)   And if it makes Warner feel any better, it did come in handy.

When it was useful, digital became a tool, nothing more or less.  A tool is what you use to solve a problem:  You can't build a house without a hammer and saw, but you can't simply decide that they're more useful than a house, and sleep on them.

We were asked to buy digital libraries because, well, digital was just better, is all--Yet in trying to hook us on sweet sugar by including "Digital Copy" in every Blu-ray disk, what the studios taught us was the very lesson they believed was impossible under the Darwin rules of their industry, and were strategically trying to eliminate:  Co-existence.  Harmony.  Infinite movies in infinite diversity.  Peace on earth, and goodwill to rival formats.  A movie can exist in two different forms...Three, if you ever actually used the DVD copy.  (I never did.)

The strategy may have in fact, ultimately backfired on the studios--Since we would get the digital with the disk combo anyway, why not simply buy the disk, and get TWO things for your buck instead of one?  The digital copy would probably serve some purpose later, but for now, hey, it was Free Stuff.  If we ever sat down and thought when on earth we'd ever need to use the digital-copy, it only brought up the idea that there would be different situations when we might want to watch something.  And the right job would need the right tool.

Warner knew how to sell their movies, but it had lost any personal, emotional, or sentimental connection for why we bought one in the first place--What was left of the DRM industry was turned over to a new service that didn't want to remake the universe in its image, but just round up a place for confused folks to find them.  When we were asked, "But don't you understand how wonderful it is to let us take care of them for you?", the response, en masse, was "NO.  They're our movies now.  You can't have them back."

That became one of the chief battle cries when disk users were under attack.  But with no more enemy at the door, should it still be a militant fist in the air?  It never hurts to be secure, but to bring peace, we have to learn how to beat that one sword into a plowshare, and see it as our freedom:  Yes, they're our movies now...They always were.  They're a part of our lives, for whatever reason we keep them.  They can be any way we want to see them, in the way we want to see them, as long as that option remains available.  If we want more, there is no reason to deny us more; if some want less, less must not be enforced upon everyone.  We can watch in high definition in our living room recliner with commentary and 2-hour documentary, we can watch it in 4K on an 80" home-theater or on Blu-ray on a 40" set, we can stream it out of curiosity on a Netflix subscription, or we can keep a download on a tablet at the airport waiting for our flight.

And as long as we can, movies will live--That's all that should matter for posterity.  But take away that freedom, and movies will die the same way all stories can die:  We forget them.

And will we forget them?  That depends on us.  It depends on what the idea of being able to find movies, old, new, the first ones we saw as kids, or from before our parents were born, means to us, and how willing we are to do it.  On whether we can define what having a movie, or keeping a movie, or discovering a movie, or infecting a beloved newbie with a favorite movie, or taking one home that you found, even from a weekend rental, means, and what that means to us whether or not someone tries to cut a few red-ink costs by taking that away.  We've got to do that hard work ourselves, because we're now building up again from what's become the scorched-earth of somebody else's battlefield.

Once we figure that out for ourselves and build something on that again, no one will ever again be able to sell us any other idea--Because what we build there will also be ours.

And a defeated conqueror with his one dream to improve the world and accept its thanks, will have to resign itself to a life of simple, anonymous usefulness, as it can only stand and stare at the faraway shores of a world that is no longer theirs to conquer.

A Brief History of 3-D, Pt. 2 - Blu3D, Hardware Hostages, and Disney's "Deather" Campaign

The big news in home theater (although it's a few weeks old by now) is that Walt Disney Home Entertainment has announced "Star Wars: the Force Awakens" and last spring's live-action/CGI "The Jungle Book" for release on Blu3D+Blu-ray combo on Nov. 15--To go with its successful release of "Zootopia" on Blu3D+Blu-ray combo last June.
Why is this news?  Because they're both rather surprising releases coming from a studio that's spent the last three years SINGLEHANDEDLY trying to convince the home-video industry that "3-D is Dead", and that "The entire industry agrees."  Especially when it didn't.
It's a slow reversal of policy (recent live-action Disney Studio titles, like "Pete's Dragon" or "The BFG" are still missing from Blu3D disk), but--like certain political candidates that ultimately had to concede facts about presidential birth documents--it also appears to be a bit of a surrender as well.  Stubbornness is not a virtue, and even for Disney, wishes and fantasy can't last long against reality.

The Blu3D format has already survived six years despite being proclaimed "dead" since its first rollout, and almost non-stop ever since.  Disney hasn't been the only faction wielding non-stop propaganda campaigns, fueled by misdirected anger and desperate wishful thinking--But to peel back the onion layers and show the history of willful abuse, bungled mis-marketing and depth of persecution the format has taken literally since its release, it might be necessary to take the questions in some kind of chronological order:

- Why did Disney have a grudge against Blu3D?  - Well, they didn't always, you know--They were originally the champions of the format, and buying a new rollout Sony player at the CES meant not only getting the '09 Robert Zemeckis "A Christmas Carol", but also a bonus introduction with "Lion King"'s Timon & Pumbaa explaining why 3D in the home wasn't so complicated after all:

And Disney's populism--after also using their family base to take the stigma out of Blu-ray's first release two years earlier--was almost all Blu3D had going for it.
Like the current push for 4K UHD, the hardware companies saw the market for a new format, projected their own love onto a stingy, skeptical public, were lured by their own CES-presentation siren song, and believed that if the public wanted the hit movies, they'd rush to buy the new hardware living-room sets and players...OR ELSE.  

Every new format needs a Killer App, and Fox knew they had the title that would sell Blu3D in the home--The most popular movie of all time, Avatar!  And if you wanted the creatures of Pandora to fly out of your screen into your living room, guess what:  You wouldn't be able to unless you took the Big Plunge and made the hardware purchase.  Well, you'd probably have to anyway, but with the three major companies battling for the marketplace--Sony, Samsung and Panasonic--a "Hostage" war erupted over who could tie the most marketable Blu3D title as an exclusive to hardware-only bundles of new standalone Blu3D players, new 3D-compatible 3DTV screens, or new electronic-glasses bundles.  If you were an Avatar fan, Panasonic had your number, if you wanted a more high-class Sony, you'd at least get to watch IMAX documentaries nobody else did, and Samsung had Shrek and every other Dreamworks Animation title wrapped up for three years.  And if you were a new aspiring early-adopter fan in 2010 who liked Sony equipment but wanted to watch Avatar and Monsters vs. Aliens?--Sorry, pal, you're screwed.  You can hook a Sony player to a Panasonic screen, but you can't watch a Panasonic screen with Samsung glasses.  That's life during wartime.
Critics complained that the "Hostage" campaign may have been THE biggest, costliest, most disastrous mistake in home-theater history, and that's counting DiVX.  Not only were potentially hot-selling disk titles refused to be allowed to sell themselves ahead of the hardware, but it was the biggest PR goof of message a company could conceivably send out:  It had taken two years to convince a very skeptical and very stingy public why they should even consider throwing out their faithful DVD player for the miracle of Blu-ray--especially after they'd just had to buy a new HDTV flatscreen to keep up with the FCC's digital-broadcast changeover--and now to tell them they needed to buy even newer players and screens because the old ones wouldn't work with certain hit movies?...Oo.  That's going to take some doing.  And the one way you don't do it is to say "Buy more stuff or else".  That got the industry watching the stumble and eagerly waiting for the fall.
All the campaign ultimately achieved--apart from industry fan-frustration and flagging early sales--was give more aid and comfort to the paranoid cheapskate fans who complained that hardware companies were obviously in a "conspiracy" to "make us buy a new format" every two years to line their greedy pockets.  You can catch more flies with honey, and you can catch more viewers with movies, and since that didn't happen, the Angry Cheapskates ruled Blu3D's image in the media.

Disney may have also been the reason the format survived:  They didn't play the Hostage game.  Although you could get a copy of "Alice in Wonderland" free with your bundle-package of new Sony equipment, Alice, A Christmas Carol, and new Blu3D reissues of their recent titles like Chicken Little, were available as retail off-the-shelf disks.  
Having been through the same public hesitance about Blu-ray, they tried the same strategy that had worked but been misunderstood with customers the first time, sold 3D disks in combos with regular 2D Blu-rays, and said "Buy now, watch later!"  And even if Tim Burton's "Alice" was insufferable and Zemeckis' "Carol" was psychotic, at least you could buy them and watch them later, while you tied a yellow ribbon for our "Pandora Held Hostage: Day 370" captives to come home.  
Ultimately, in 2012--and just before Panasonic could take the new Blu3D disks of "Rio" and the Star Wars: Episode I conversion hostage--the Big Three hardware makers gave into industry criticism and bad sales, and released their hostages for retail-disk sale.  The war was over, and boy, did we want it.

- Sounds like Disney and Blu3D were the best of friends...So what happened?? - Remember those Angry Cheapskates mentioned earlier?  Disney seemed to attract them back in those '08-'10 days.  Michael Eisner had long since been kicked off the company after 2005, but nobody was in a mood to forgive the company, and any bad or puzzling marketing decision was still immediately seen as the greedy, conspiratorial Ghost of Michael Eisner, petting his white Persian cat, plotting to rob good people of their money.

And the big problem rooted BACK to those combos Disney had hit upon:  Combos were starting to be a bigger and clunkier tradition to uphold, with more new formats.  A Blu-ray disk needed to be packaged with a DVD.  A Blu3D disk needed to be packaged with a regular 2D Blu-ray.  Streaming didn't exist, so if you wanted the "Digital Copy", that was also downloaded on iTunes...From another CD-Rom disk.  By the time Pixar's "Brave" was released, it came as a 5-disk Blu3D+BD+DVD+Bonus+Digital Copy Combo for the popular price of $45-49.  The Blu3D format, like any new disk format (who here remembers when Blu-ray used to cost more than $29.99?), was still pricey, but to charge the customer for five disks when he wanted one or two was either unmanageably clunky or highway robbery.  

The complaints became so loud, Disney tried to do the right thing:  They experimented with new marketing strategies trying to figure out how to reduce the Disk Clutter--One successful result was that Streaming had replaced the iPod, so there was no more need for a physical Digital-Copy disk, when a paper-insert code could unlock the movie on their new DisneyMoviesAnywhere service...One down, four to go.  The other experiment was a bit less successful--Since the 3D-adopter public, all Blu fans, said they'd gladly do without the DVD, Disney tried seeing if they could market just the Blu3D-only disk to its niche audience, and let the non-3D Blu fans enjoy their wider-release mass-market combo without.  2013's "Oz the Great & Powerful" was released as various BD+DVD mass combos, and as a Blu3D-only release.  It was a good idea...And NOBODY GOT IT.
Fans had already complained about "cluttered" combos leaving no room for bonus-feature disks, which meant Cars 2 only had bonus features on the 2D combo, not the 3D, and fans tinfoil-hatted that Disney was deliberately plotting for them to "buy both".  The 3D-only Oz was also priced at $39, the same price as the mass-market 4-disk combo, which rather defeated the whole point of releasing smaller combos in the first place and reducing the price--Guess how that was interpreted.  The rare non-paranoid fans, who wanted to see Blu3D marketed more sensibly, protested that a 3D combo should at least have the 2D Blu-ray included, for friends and emergencies--Disney graciously conceded that point, and offered a mail-in exchange.
For the Angry Cheapskates Who Didn't Get It, the Oz 3D cover ended up becoming the ultimate iconic image of images for their conspiracy-theories:  Disney, the company of $40+ movies, was the Wicked Witch of the West, and they were out to get your money and your little dog, too.

Disney, we can assume, may have been...rather hurt.  They never heard from any fans except angry ones, very possibly assumed that it Just Wasn't Worth The Grief to target niche fans, took their ball and went home.  So there, meanies.   In 2014, although their hit Frozen had already been a smash seller on 2D Blu-ray, a "later" Blu3D release was promised to merchants with a new book/toy marketing push in October.  For never disclosed reasons (some suspect manufacturing problems), the release never appeared, the "Sing-Along" version was pushed as the big fan-favorite tentpole for the holiday season, the 3D Frozen and a 3D Disney Fairies movie both skipped physical release and went to digital instead.  And until 2016, although all were available on digital streaming, no Walt Disney Studios movie had been released on physical Blu3D disk since.

The reason they gave was that, well, "the entire industry had now given up" on the format.  Um, well, not the ENTIRE industry--Warner, Sony, Fox, Paramount and Universal still steadily continued to release major Blu3D combos for mass retail.  More embarrassingly, Disney's own sub-studios of Marvel and Pixar, which were independent and allowed to put together their own disk releases, continued to release Blu3D combos steadily, and enjoy healthy sales for "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Inside Out" on 3D.  (And figured out that all customers wanted was a nice, slim 3D+2D Blu combo for $29.) But, er, at least Summit and Lionsgate cut back, if it's any consolation.

- But at least Disney still had the theatrical movies, didn't they? - Yes.  They just got a little too overexcited, is all.  Conversions of existing 2-D movies were the big thing packing moviegoers in and annoying the haters with "unnecessary" poor-quality conversions that still required the $3-5 ticket-surcharge at the box office.
Since their 3D "Nightmare Before Christmas" conversion had now become a popular annual staple, Disney tried releasing more and more 3D-conversions of their traditional-animated classics, beginning with their usual never-fail The Lion King.  It was their first conversion and a novelty, so it packed parents wanting to "pass on the tradition", unquote, of seeing it in a theater with their kids (theatrical reissues had been dead for about seven years by this point), and became an unexpected runaway hit.  What the audience didn't expect was A) there would be more of them, and B) if you already owned a Blu3D player, it would be headed for disk in a few months anyway...And if the audience didn't know, it didn't take them long to catch on.  A reissue of Beauty & the Beast, which was already available on Blu3D, had diminishing returns, Finding Nemo and Cars did middling-well, and when a 3D Monsters Inc. had already been announced on disk by the time it hit theaters, who even bothered?   If Disney was hoping every reissue would be Lion King just for showing up, they were in for a tad of disappointment.  

A completed but unreleased 3D The Little Mermaid was exiled to disk, while Disney instead tried to find the new theater-reissue "gimmick" that would pack them in instead.  A new "Interactive iPhone-friendly" re-release, involving an iPhone/iPad app game that everyone would play in their seats interacting with the onscreen movie (as their Second Screen apps did with their Blu-ray disks), became an unholy disaster with the audience.  Theater-cellphone hate was just starting to become an issue, and the last thing people wanted was to be asked to bring a hundred glowing blue screens to the theater.  An Interactive "Nightmare Before Christmas" never surfaced, and it seems Disney never did find that "replacement" that would let them ignore ungrateful 3D-reissues after all.
More quick fodder to escape blame, and explain why "well, nobody wanted" 3D in theaters after all, did they?

- But everyone said 4K UHD was going to replace 3D! - Uh, yeah, everyone DID "say" that, didn't they?  It wasn't so much that many of those in love with the idea were interested in the format, as in the idea that something would replace the old one.  It was the same "Welcome Our New Overlords" idea as the industry was promoting--namely, that Here Comes the New Thing, so There Goes the Old Thing--and it was a desire for most of the Angry Paranoid Cheapskates to see Blu3D PUNISHED more than simply replaced.  Like 3-D moviegoers in the 50's who tossed it over for Cinemascope, those annoyed by expensive or clunky 3DTV glasses cheered news of the latest mythical in-development "Glasses-free 3DTV!" that seemed to pop up in industry press more often than cold fusion. 
Most of the loudest supporters at the beginning barely knew what 4K UHD was, or how much it would cost, but--like some wishful Trump supporters attacking Mexicans and homeless and telling them "Trump's gonna getcha!"--fed-up 3D haters praised the new CES reports of 4K UHD to the skies, just to tell that expensive Blu3D "conspiracy" was what was Coming to Get Them.   At the worst, it was an excuse for the stingier critics to indulge their cynicism that "Well, there the industry goes again, and they'll probably foist Holo-TV on us in 2020!"  Whatever, as long as the enemy of their enemy was their friend...Those old 2008 traumas die hard.  

And while Samsung did get a little overly optimistic enough to say "Why bother with 3DTV, if 4K is on its way?" what nobody expected was that many of the first UHD sets rolled out with 3D capability as an option.  Wait, what happened to the "war" we were all hoping for?...Did they sign some stupid peace treaty behind our backs??  Even the first line of 4K UHD Blu-rays, like Ghostbusters '16, X-Men: Apocalypse and Star Trek: Beyond continue to come out in both 4K UHD combo and Blu3D combo, and the market, as it should, continues to decide.   And from many indications, it may be that 4K is having less chances of "coming to get" 3D, or anyone, in the next five years, but that's for the customers to figure out.  Unlike the companies, THEY know what they're doing.

Industry critics often sound a bit...disgruntled that the, quote, "dead format walking" kept on walking, and didn't fall down on cue like they believed it was supposed to--The pro-4K supporters continue to tell us that Blu3D will "probably remain as a 'zombie format' for another year or two'" before the public's excitement about the newie-new format will take over, and certainly 3D's had a good six years to shuffle along.

But not every "zombie" stays dead:  The public had written off Laserdisc as the "loser" of the late 70's first format wars for most of the 80's, since, well, everyone knew the VCR, with its taping ability, had taken over, and you could get a VHS at every Blockbuster video on the corner.  Most LD fans bought their discs from Japanese imports, where laser had never lost popularity (VHS was a rental-only format over there, and too expensive to buy movies for the home), and by the late 90's, the "lost" growing cult of laser fans were just starting to make VHS fans aware of a format with digital-stereo sound and amazing picture clarity.  Siskel & Ebert, on their movie-buff TV show, began persuading people to take a second look at the "dead" LD format in the mid-90's, and mainstream curiosity in the prestige format was just starting to reawaken...And then DVD came along in '97, and took all the public credit for a laser format with better picture, sound, and digital convenience.  But the seeds of a Laser Renaissance had been planted, and DVD would never have made a convincing argument if we hadn't already started talking about something better out there.

So we can ask the question:  Why has everyone murderously hated Blu3D as a home-theater format for six years, with a passion far beyond simple hatreds of spinach or accordion music?  And the answer depends on whether or not anyone has actually sat down and watched it.  There have certainly been a lot of reasons thrown about that haven't even bothered to.
It's easy to complain about an "Expensive" format, or an "Annoying" one, or even cry that studios are "Out to get you" by throwing new technology in your direction when you weren't prepared for it...But when, like LD, you calm down, let cool heads prevail, take a deep breath and count to ten over a few months or years, why not sit down afterwards and watch a movie?  You may know a techie friend with who jumped on, and if he has a spare pair of electronic Active 3D glasses handy, it's a safe guarantee you won't have much trouble talking him into showing you something off his shelf.
And you may like what you see.

September 15, 2016 - I'm Mister Dot-Com Energy Housing Digital Bubble, If I Pop, You're in Trouble!

I'll have to warn you ahead of time, I'm not that much up on economics, either.  Had a class in freshman year, and managed to get through unscathed.  Any more informed people who want to step into this subject, I'll gladly yield the floor--Like the rope-twirler once said, all I know is what I read in the papers.
But with this week's headlines about 4K UHD drives in game consoles illustrating the current shakiness of both the 4K industry and the Digital-movie industry, it's probably safe to stand back and look at the over-abused B-word that gets thrown about at times like these.  Most economic forecasters talking about "the next Bubble market" that's about to pop like to use the word, and it's been so sexy in the last decade to use it, people aren't always sure on what exactly is one or isn't.

One PBS Nova special, trying to explain the 00's Mortgage Meltdown, depicted an experiment that tried to explain the psychological mentality of a Bubble market:  Subjects were asked to play a computer stock-simulation game, and buy, sell, compete, and network with the other players for the richest portfolio--BUT, with the condition that they were told outright at the beginning that partway through the game there would be a new startup, let's call it Company X, that would rocket to success in price, but also at some pre-determined point in the game, would begin falling and falling to bankruptcy, and there was nothing in the game programmed to prevent it.

Okay, you're thinking:  If it was me, I'd be the forewarned savvy bear-investor, stay above the whole greedy game, keep just a nest-egg of Company X to pay for my other genius investments, and be the survivor who bailed at the right price once things looked shaky?  Uh-uh.  Didn't happen.  Greed and Playground Bragging-Rights are blood brothers.
Once the rise of Company X started, it became a mania--As prices rose, bold investors who'd jumped on early began liquidating their other stocks just to build a solid core of CX's new phenomenal millions, and a private "Billionaire's Club" between the powerhouse players began turning the entire game into networking together over the heads of the other players to see how insanely far up they could manipulate the new price to unrealistic levels for their secret game-winner.
And once the fall began, there was no parachute--The players who'd put all their eggs in the new basket quickly had to ditch their rapidly bottoming investment at a safe price, and get back some of those more sensible companies they'd sold off when they'd forgotten the rest of the game.  But the problem with selling a stock is that you have to sell it to someone else, and no one wanted it, especially not the other players in the former "billionaire's club" panicking to get rid of their surpluses.

For kids, a simpler metaphor illustrates it better:  Ever play Monopoly, and get so excited that you managed to snag both Boardwalk and Park Place that you trade and sell off every single one of your other properties just to pay for those $200 hotels and pump up that corner to a powerhouse that will crush the other players the minute they land on it...And then no one ever lands on it??  Luxury Tax seems to hate you and love the other players with a karmic kismet.  And then you land on that other player's dinky $600 hotel on Connecticut Ave., and you've got no remaining capital left to pay for it, so down go the hotels and your entire real-estate holdings with them?

Simply put, a Bubble market is an empire of dreams, and what pops it is the alarm clock.  You knew it was going to ring some time, when you set it the night before.

The most famous quoted example of Bubble markets was the reported Great Tulip-Mania of 1634--fueled by the "new market" of Dutch trading--to the point where a single Semper Augustus tulip bulb could buy a house, and when every European garden now started producing tulip bulbs in bulk, the market was soon oversaturated.
Wheat also became a cash crop in 1921 when the US government bought wheat at insane prices to provide relief for the Russian famine, but when the famine was over, overproduced surpluses at home, and acres of wheat farms that had stripped new groundbroken Oklahoma land to a Dust Bowl, were two of the factors that helped trigger the Great Depression.

And then there's that one more people remember:  When the Internet first arrived in the late 90's, no one knew what it was except for those crazy computer wizards in their garages, so all anyone knew was that it was Magic.  The new Virtual Universe meant you could now sit at your keyboard, buy a few servers, click a few magic keys, and run a business full of invisible customers who would pay you invisible money, and the mavericks who'd started up Amazon and Google had done just that.  Since no one knew from what well-meaning little maverick garage the next Amazon or Google would come, every new Internet startup that announced itself became the next hot property, attracting investors determined not to miss out.  Some were half thought-out ("How exactly does this make a profit?" was the most frequently asked skeptic question), some developed too-high overheads when they built new physical office headquarters and hired staff, and a few were later proven to be scammed by their own execs, but by the end of 2000-'01, more than two dozen new companies had joined Excite, InfoSpace and Pets.com in bankruptcy.

As we can see from examples, there are a few clear symptoms of a Bubble, and the first two are appropriately named: 
The Land of Oz refers to the new frontier that can now be invested in, and whose awe-inspiring alien novelty of a new unexplored market gives it a mystique--Whether it's Dutch trading, deregulated energy, self-driving cars, social media or Chinese websites, you don't know what it is, but dang, you want to be the one that got a piece of it, and it's so new, no one's ever failed at it yet.  (Remember when Hillary Clinton asked us to Pokemon Go to the polls?...Yeah, kinda like that.  Like she'd ever played in her life.)

The second, We're Off to See the Wizard, means that since you don't 100% know what you're buying into, you put your utter faith and trust into everything the one entrepreneur who does work in this strange new alien field told you about this new opportunity--And what he's likely telling you is that there's no possible way you CAN'T get rich off this, and a million investors who believed him can't be wrong.  And you're happy to believe him, so long as he handles the weird complicated techie stuff.  When mortgage derivatives seemed the new surefire way to get a piece of the Housing Boom, customers literally couldn't understand the bizarre formulas by which profits were "derived", and the dubious companies offering them openly bragged that their customers couldn't understand them, but who cared, as long as they were buying them anyway.
Which leads to what the computer experiment ended up demonstrating, the Billionaire's Club--If you're one of the Million Investors Who Can't Be Wrong, and it seems to be working for the moment, you're the gang ruling the playground, not like the stinky spoilsport kids who are predicting shaky longterm foundations or a possible collapse by asking "Where exactly is the real hard cash floating around in any of this?"  Other holy movers and shakers rush to the defense of the Wizard, and the burden of proof is now on the prophets of doom, to explain how and why people shouldn't be laughing all the way to the bank--Which they can't offer, since, um, the prophesied disaster hasn't happened yet.  Which means you can safely discredit any naysayers as probably Up to Something, and maybe spreading lies for a rival company or party.  In fact, profits are so clearly the bright new future, maybe it's time to start thinking Grandpa's OLD complicated investments are on the way out!

Which leads to the last stage of a bubble:  The Pin From Left Field.

Optimism can't plan for everything--in fact, it usually doesn't--and it becomes the unexpected real-world event or consequence nobody did plan for that starts demanding real debt from the imaginary profit, and pulls the Three of Clubs out the bottom of the house of cards.  Mortgage derivatives worked fine so long as people paid their mortgages, but what if a large number of those new subprime customers were laid off (by companies hit by fuel costs of an Energy Bubble), couldn't pay them and suddenly had to be foreclosed?   The Margin Stocks of those champagne-popping pre-Crash 1920's were fine so long as European countries were buying goods and steel, but what if they were buying them to shut off their borders, or were hit by their own post-WWI economic problems, and now one missing margin-call after another suddenly became due?

At the moment, we've got a craze a lot of big important movie studios are interested in.  

They don't exactly know how it works, since they don't really have the leisure time to enjoy it themselves and appreciate the subtleties of it, or understand why customers would or wouldn't be interested in it--But, hey, how about those kids glued to their cellphones, amirite?  And with one company after another jumping on, it's sure to be the next hit market, and put those failing disk companies back in the 90's where they belonged!  Hey, didja read that Important Sociologist who wrote that Millennial teens today probably hate physical Blu-ray disks, because they hate material goods and move in with their parents instead of buying houses?...That's current, y'know!
We can only call it a "craze" since it's not technically a "Bubble" yet--only in the sense that Ultraviolet isn't a traded company with investors trying to boost their price--but name any other symptom it HASN'T displayed.  There may not be any artificial manipulation of price, but there's certainly an artificial market that wasn't there yesterday.

We also have a company so determined to not be left back in Grandpa's chair, they've already set out to intertwine their format's fate with the Future:  Sony's new push for 4K UltraHD--with this summer's hits already available on 4K UHD disk--will be a two-pronged approach, with the industry still fighting among itself whether the new movies will be on the new Blu-ray disks or on-demand streaming format.  Netflix and YouTube have already began offering new platforms of their service for 4K UHD customers (once all those screens and compatible players/set-tops start selling), and Really Important People continue to question the necessity of a hard-disk based format that just incurs more unnecessary costs for movie studios and retail outlets.  With people on the go, Streaming is the new future, and 4K is the way to watch it!

Could any unexpected pin from left field pop those dreams?  Oh, I don't know...
How about, for example, if surveys happened to prove that people don't like digital movies and won't buy them?--Well, see, that's not really an event.  Something has to HAPPEN, that nobody planned for, to get the boulders rolling.  Okay, what if Internet providers started cutting back on service, to reduce clogged servers with the rise in video-binge streaming, making most average customers' bandwidth hard to manage anything complicated?--Talked about, hasn't happened yet, could someday, but still.
In that case, how about if Sony's game division suddenly went to a press event one day to announce that the expected new rollout of a mass-saturated 4K UHD hard drive designed to appeal to standalone-player non-buyers wasn't going to happen after all--except to the competition--which might later end up hurting their own home-theater division's hardware sales, crippling their new next-generation format early, and taking Digital Streaming's next new bold chapter with it, Netflix and UV included?  
Okay, if it happened, that would be an example of an "Oh, poopie!" that went out of control fast.  As "rogue economist" Steven D. Levitt theorized in his book Freakonomics, the social effects of economics are all about Cause & Effect, and you sometimes have to look in the strangest places.  And as Levitt & Dubner themselves might say, what does a Playstation video game of Grand Theft Auto V have to do with the ultimate fates of Ultraviolet, Samsung, Warner Home Entertainment and Best Buy?

Am I recommending that we movie fans all start stocking up on canned food and bottled water?...Um, don't think we need go that far.  It's just about movies, after all.
All you have to stock up on for those are DVD and Blu-ray disks.  Y'know, the ones All the Important People are so quick to tell us All Those Millennial Kids hate.

Playstation, X-Box, 4K, and the Home-Theater Thneed

It's hard to keep up with gaming news.  As a rule, I don't bother. 
I've got a Playstation 3, but only because back in 2008, they were the only affordable way of becoming a first Blu-ray disk adopter without frustration or headache...Although the fact that I used to have a Sega Genesis in college, and my parents never got me an Atari 2600 when I was a kid, didn't hurt the sales pitch either.  With the news of the latest Playstation 4 models, I'm still back a few years ago wondering whether they still catch on fire, and didn't even pay attention until they announced an upgrade for Blu3D capability.

Even last Thursday's big event for the two major game console players--timed to coincide with Apple's big iPhone 7 presentation--seems like "old news" to the core gamer community by now, but in my corner of the living-room-box industry, it still has hints of being a happening of major repercussions.
The big headline was that both Sony and Microsoft intend to roll out the "next generation" of their respective Playstation and X-Box One consoles--With the new advancement that both will now have a "regular" mass-market version, the PS4 Slim or X-Box One S, streamlined for the first-timer buyer, and an "advanced" version, the PS4 Pro or an in-development X-Box Scorpio, both now with 4K capability for ultra-high-definition UHD and high-dynamic-range HDR TV screens.
Playstation.Blog US, 9/7
With just one major difference:  Microsoft's Scorpio will be able the play the new 4K UHD Blu-ray disks.  PS4 Pro won't.

Sony stated why:  They wanted the Pro to be more efficient, without the added hardware of a UHD disk drive, to focus on its gaming capabilities and audience.
The new interest to both companies is not so much the consoles, but how each will be able to tap into the new market for virtual-reality player headsets--With Sony offering its own VR goggles, and MS hoping to be compatible with Oculus Rift's.

Most non-gamers will be asking the obvious questions about the new 4K/UHD news:  "What is that, anyway?", and "Who cares?"  To the gaming community, it's a make-or-break deal, leading to the same questions of who's going to "win the war" that's been fighting for eight years.  
Core technical gamers even point out the technical problems, such as the additional "lag" that can occur when ultra-high-definition graphics have to be translated to larger size screens.
(5 Reasons to Be Concerned About the PS4 Pro, Cinemablend 9/8)
But the real problem here lies in between:

4K UHD, a new higher-definition video format for larger-size flatscreens 48" and up (way up) has been the main central focus of the entire home-industry market at the moment, along with a new format of Blu-ray disk that will be needed to measure up to the new larger clarity--Some player/screen companies, like Samsung, even tossed over the previous push for 3D capability, quick to claim it was "dying", just to jump on the new express train.  After all, here came the new format, so time for the old to go into its dance off stage...Isn't that what's always supposed to happen?  And just wait till those VR headsets arrive, amirite, folks?
As Sony and Samsung roll out the first new lines of 4K large-size flatscreen, the picture quality clearly looks sharper and more amazing, but the public's reaction has largely been that they don't know exactly WHY they're meant to buy it.
Which has earned 4K UHD the nickname of "the Home Theater Thneed".  A word, of course, that comes from Dr. Seuss, for something that no one knows what exactly it is (it's a shirt, it's a sock, it's a glove, it's a hat!--But it has other uses, yes, far beyond that!) but good old fashioned Yankee entrepreneurship and marketing can persuade us is something that everyone, everyone, everyone needs. 

Like most formats, Blu-ray, VHS and DVD before it, UHD has to pass the three tests that any new technology has to overcome to drill and root itself into the public's mind as common:

1. It must solve a consumer problem, 
2. it needs a Killer App to hook us like bait, and 
3. it needs to be accessible with fans of an existing technology to use it.

From the looks of things, the first test isn't going very well--The public doesn't quite seem to have a grasp of exactly what 4K is or why it differs from the 3DTV sets they were persuaded to invest in a few years earlier.  3D you can explain to any low-tech layman--"Watch movies the same way you can in theaters"--but 4K is a bit of a tougher sell to hesitant, tight-fisted audiences:  "It looks better!  On bigger sets!"  
To overcome the first test is the first crucial battle of the war, namely in not making the technology look like a BMW "toy" for conspicuous-consumers with too much disposable income and free time, and trying to make it look like something that would be in every sensible home.  UHD is a format whose very concept depends on the urge to go Bigger Is Better, pretty much a First World Problem which the public can often become a little morally judgmental about.  Especially if they don't have to pay for it.

The second test has been a bit, well, embarrassing.  As a new home-video format is being readied to roll out, most of the licenses for hot, hip, happening first-release titles have to be in current negotiation to include the new-format disk rights before the movie is released, which means mostly new movies from the last year or upcoming summer blockbuster season.  
And while Warner, Sony, Paramount and Fox continue to relicense old dependable genre titles for the new format--especially ones like ID4, Star Trek and the 80's Ghostbusters that can be used to tie into their new summer-'16 followups--the new UHD consumer can already enjoy 4K-upgraded disk releases of Pan, San Andreas, Exodus: Gods & Kings and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice in never-before-seen sound and picture clarity.  Er...I pass, thanks?

As for the third test...that's where Sony may have finally tripped.  
Microsoft doesn't make standalone UHD players or 4K Blu-ray disks of the Ghostbusters remake, Sony does.

Up until now, Sony has virtually defined the idea that a format has give its low-tech users a "free taste", by cross-promoting its video software with its game hardware--In the late 90's DVD was still a struggling "toy" for home-theater nuts, until Sony included an adapter to the Playstation 2, and kids who would have never bought laserdisc in their life were snapping up any used DVD disks of Twister and Batman & Robin on discount at Software Etc. just to have something cooler to play.  In the format wars that lasted from 2006 to 2008, the battle between Blu-ray and HDDVD came down to a loyalty battle of hardcore Playstation vs. X-Box gamers (and those who adopted Microsoft's game box for HDDVD were warned of the dreaded "Red Ring of Death", X-Box's guarantee to break down within three years), while the rest of the uninterested mainstream public cracked tired jokes about which format "was sure to win because it had porn".  
Home theater fans who would never think of being associated with "gamerz" bought fast, efficient Playstation 3 consoles when Sony's own first affordable model of standalone Blu-ray hardware, the S360, seemed to have been rushed out with technical flaws and took nearly a half hour to load Blu-ray disk menus.  Had it not been for the PS3, Format War II would have been over in six months, with no winner.

But that was THEN.  Sony today is not quite as interested in giving free samples as it used to be.
As The Digital Bits speculated in its coverage of the gaming headlines, parent-company Sony may be having a bit of irreconcilable differences between two of its hardware divisions:
Sony Consumer Electronics handles the sales of standalone home-theater hardware and movies, Sony Interactive Entertainment handles the consoles and gaming, and it's SCE that's got it's money bet on the horse race.  The two divisions no longer work with an aim for cross-promotion--Hardcore gamer fans, focused on more and more technical quality for their immersive online gaming, jumped on the idea that it had been a, quote, "mistake" for Playstation 3 to be more of an all-media set-top box and Blu/3D player than the accelerated game experience they wanted, and Sony Interactive promoted the technical game speed and graphics when it first rolled out the new-generation model three years ago.  SCE, on the other side, has an entire industry riding on all three aspects of the hardware, players, software titles and screens.  Sony has its stake on consumer interest in the new standalone UHD players as the center of the market--both disk and streaming--and anything that sells one less player is an enemy to that already shaky goal.
Which puts Sony in the position of being a house divided, creating two ultra-niche divisions with no interest in the other, and neither one curious to try...That could be one reason why such houses don't usually stand.  (Or did some tall guy in a hat say that already?)

Microsoft had more than a little stake in the previous format war:  Blu-ray vs. HDDVD was not just about a fancy disk, or whether the cases would be red or blue, but were fighting over the future of the industry--HDDVD supported a MS-based code for their movies, while Blu used a more universal cross-platform variation on MP4.  Even when Sony was dropping the ball on their own Blu format, trying to sell action titles to those same gamers, Disney had the advantage of Pixar and Apple's own Steve Jobs on the board, who gave the studio a very involved interest to make sure Blu won the battle.  Had HDDVD won, Microsoft would have an almost literal monopoly on how all disks and online movies were digitized, and when they didn't get it, may have actually started the whisper-campaign that "Who cares, everyone knows disks are dying anyway!"  If they couldn't have disks, no one could.

But MS doesn't have a stake in this battle.  There's no consumer war being fought between rival developers over one format of UHD versus another, just one war of Interest vs. Apathy.   If Microsoft wins the console war over Sony for 4K customers who want a game-and-disk machine, they don't have any disk line to sell or get to enjoy any particular prize in the home-theater market beyond their usual Popeye-vs.-Bluto game-console rivalry.  
Sony, OTOH, may see the same problem that has hampered every new format:  Customers just plain don't want one more living-room machine until they can see what it does.  Hardware companies sell new formats on the players, and they sell the players on faith, hoping shininess and a big January CES demonstration alone will sell $700-1200 conspicuous purchases.  When hardware players ultimately become the lowest initially-selling item of the format, and take longer than usual to catch on (namely with the people who had to be convinced by other methods), companies usually grab the quickest explanation that will free themselves from blame:  "Guess the public wasn't interested after all!"

4K UHD is already facing its own confused schizophrenia between the hardware companies that want to sell the new movies on a disk format, and the studios that want to sell the new movies on a streaming format, and those who happen to be both trying to sell both.  If Sony has, in fact, cut off its own format to spite its face, the real question isn't about whether gamer kids or home-theater fans lost out--It's about WHERE the company ultimately decides to place the blame when a new line of hard physical-disk players didn't sell as well as the corporate heads imagined they would.  Safe bet they won't be looking in the mirror when they search for a scapegoat.
And that, friends, is no game.