Archive for the ‘NPD Analysis’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (April 23, 2017)

Sunday, April 23rd, 2017

Welcome to a brand new week on the WNR, where we bring you all* the latest news and happenings in the world of digital video, Blu-ray, gaming and everything else. It looks like I survived my wisdom teeth surgery after all, sorry about the lack of updates the week before (too busy barfing from postoperative nausea).

I’m writing this WNR a little bit later than I usually do on Saturday because I just picked up my new Samsung Galaxy S8+ and have been playing too much with it. It’s a really nice, I can’t say little but it definitely doesn’t feel too big, phone, with a gorgeous screen that doesn’t seem to end (gaming and watching movies, particularly those in the wider aspect ratio of 2.35:1, is a fantastic experience).

But no time to play time, it’s time for work, and there’s quite a bit to go through this week too, so let’s get started)

(* “All” is defined as the news stories I found interesting and/or had time to write up)

Copyright

2Dark

2Dark’s updated Denuvo protection cracked already

The cat and mouse game between anti-tampering system Denuvo (ie. DRM) and game crackers continues afoot with Denuvo releasing an updated version, dubbed v4, of their system. Unfortunately for Denuvo, it only took a month for the first game to be protected by v4, 2Dark, to be completely cracked – something that others had thought would take a lot longer.

While this does not mean all games with Denuvo v4 will be easily cracked from this point onwards – each game needs to be cracked individually – it does mean that crackers possibly have found an entry point into the system and it will make it easier to crack other games that are scheduled to use v4, including Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, Dead Rising 4, Nier: Automata, Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, and Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Of course, being protected for a month is still better than nothing and one could argue that a month is actually all that’s needed for a game, as that’s why most of the sales happen. However, it seems with each cracked game, crackers improve their technique and reduce the time needed to crack the next one. So if Denuvo v4 only manages to protect Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 for a couple of days, then perhaps publishers won’t be so keen to use Denuvo unless they can get some kind of money back provision in their contract.

High Definition

PowerDVD 17

PowerDVD 17 has UHD, VR and other cool stuff … but you’ll need the hardware to match

It’s been a long time coming, but there’s finally a way to play Ultra HD Blu-ray movies on your PC. And if you have one of those fancy PC based VR system, then you can watch your favourite movies in a VR environment too (or watch immersive 360 degrees movies).

I am talking about the latest and greatest version of PowerDVD, now in version 17 (I remember talking about it here on Digital Digest way back when the software was still in 0.x version). If you get the Ultra version, which is still at the $99 that it has almost always been, then you’ll have access to all these fancy new features.

Of course, you’ll still need the hardware, and that’s when the problem starts. The latest Kaby Lake CPU, the latest integrated Intel GPU or a GTX 970, and an Ultra HD Blu-ray reader drive are your *minimum* requirements, so it’s by no means accessible for everyone. And that’s just for Ultra HD Blu-ray – you’ll need more hardware for VR.

But if you’re rich and you already have all of these, than PowerDVD 17 Ultra is a must-buy. A must-buy mainly because it is the only thing you can buy that will play UHD discs.

While Disney is still saying away from UHD, unfortunately, Rogue One’s Blu-ray release was still a big one. Just not as big as The Force Awakens, which is not surprising. The 3D edition of the movie also sold really well despite it being a Best Buy and Target only exclusive. If it had been available on UHD, I think the UHD results would have been amazing. Not as amazing as Planet Earth II from the previous week, but still amazing. Come on Disney, pull it out!

Gaming

Nintendo Switch

The Nintendo Switch outsold the PS4 and Xbox One in March

If you’re also rich, you’re probably one of the million or so people that already have Nintendo Switch. Not to say that the Switch is expensive, it’s quite good value for what you’re getting, but you’ve either already spent a load on a Wii U and games or you’re coming from the PS4/Xbox One camp, which means the Switch is another thing you have to buy, and given what has happened with the Wii U, you might be a little bit cautious.

But there doesn’t seem to be a need, since all reviews point to the Switch as an excellent, fun system that gives you something the others can’t. And it seems a lot of you agree, as it was the best selling console in March, at least in North America, easily beating the PS4 and the Xbox One.

This may not hold up for the coming months, since the Switch’s game library is still quite small (although I found the fact that more Zelda games have been sold than the total number of consoles to be quite interesting – are people buying games before they buy the Switch?).

But poor Xbox One, relegated to third place. Scorpio can’t come soon enough for Microsoft, and even then, success is not guaranteed. It might be the most powerful console in history when it’s released, but if it’s also twice as expensive as the PS4 Slim, then you can forget about it.

======

You can also forget about me getting a lot of work done in the next few days, as I’ll be playing with my S8+ and the Gear VR. Actually, I will most likely be doing the vacuuming and house work, but that doesn’t sound very cool does it?

Weekly News Roundup (March 26, 2017)

Sunday, March 26th, 2017

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. Sorry for the little break last week, but things are back to normal now, and we actually have a bit of news to go through too.

They say that no news is good news, but sometimes having news is good news too.

Copyright

And sometimes piracy is a good things too, at least according to music superstar Ed Sheeran. In an interview with CBS, Sheeran opened up about his rise to success, and he wasn’t embarrassed to admit that piracy played a big role in his early successes.

Spotify Mobile

Legal streaming options means file sharing no longer exists, says Ed Sheeran

Sheeran says that is was university students in England, sharing his music on file sharing networks, that helped him get noticed. “I know that’s a bad thing to say, because I’m part of a music industry that doesn’t like illegal file sharing,” said Sheeran.

However, Sheeran says that musicians today may no longer need file sharing to get noticed and that fans no longer need to download illegally, all thanks to the availability of legal streaming platforms.

In other words, piracy has always been used as a discovery platform, and that’s its main redeeming feature. With legal streaming via YouTube and Spotify is taking on piracy in a big way, these platforms also now act as discovery platforms, both for musicians to get noticed and for music fans to find new artists to listen to.

=====

A little update on a story from a month ago when Google’s Chrome removed the ability to disable the controversial Widevine DRM. Thanks to “user feedback” (also known as angry and vocal complaints), Google has re-added the ability to disable Widevine, as well as other plug-ins that were made mandatory with the version 57 update. Who says complaining doesn’t work?

Gaming

With the PS4 back on top after a couple of months of Xbox One victory (thanks to the Xbox One S) in the hugely important U.S. market, the global picture still sees Sony on top, rather comfortably.

PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro

The PS4 is still comfortably beating the Xbox One

The PS4 is still enjoying almost a 2-to-1 sales margin over the Xbox One according to the latest IHS Markit report, with 53 million PS4s already sold compared to only 27.6 million Xbox Ones.

March’s NPD report will be extremely interesting, due to the introduction of the Switch. Nintendo seems to be onto a real hit with the hugely popular (and instantly out of stock) Switch, and it will give the Sony, Microsoft duopoly a real run for its money.

Will you switch to the Switch? Or keep on playing with the PS4, or keep on spending one on one time with your Xbox One?

Sorry for the lame play on words, it’s been a long week.

=====

What hasn’t been that long is the length of this WNR. But why waste words when you don’t need to. Especially when you’re not being paid by the word. See you next week!

Weekly News Roundup (October 16, 2016)

Sunday, October 16th, 2016
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Poster

Download the H.264, HEVC trailer converted from a high bitrate ProRes source

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. Hope you’ve been well, but I’ve been suffering. Some of you that are reading this will be well aware of an affliction innocuously known as “hay fever”. A more descriptive name for the condition may not be appropriate for publishing here due to the number of four letter swear words present, but suffice to say, it sucks balls. When you actually get dehydrated from a runny nose, and when your eyes are so itchy that rubbing them for 5 minutes straight does nothing to alleviate the suffering, then you know why it sucks balls.

Before we get to the news, I’ve been busy this week uploading a few trailers. First up was the ‘Rogue One’ trailer, available in both H.264 and H.265/HEVC. The next trailers, for ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ are a bit unique, in that these were sourced from a ProRes trailer (3.1GB!), and so their quality is very nice. Again, these are available in H.264 and HEVC, at much smaller file sizes for your convenience.

Anyway, on to the news for the week …

Copyright

RIAA Logo

The RIAA probably won’t apologise for seizing the wrong domain name

This week I learned that it’s not a good idea use a domain name that’s way too similar to that of another popular piracy site. Case in point, MP3Skull.onl, who have nothing to do with the more well known MP3Skull site, just had their domain name seized by the RIAA, quite illegally I might add, just because of its familiar domain name. The RIAA may have won a court case against MP3Skull, but I don’t think it gave them the right to just grab any old domain name just because it looks similar.

To be fair to the RIAA, the people that ran the MP3Skull website did contribute to this case of mistaken identity by redirecting their previous domain name to the, completely unrelated, MP3Skull.onl site – this might have given the RIAA the impression that both sites are the same, even though they’re not.

Now, I’m not saying that MP3Skull.onl was whiter than white and did not engage in activities that the RIAA might have found objectionable too, but there’s a reason why things like injunctions and court orders have to be granted before one is able to take action. The owners of MP3Skull.onl have never had any dealings with the RIAA in the courts, and so the RIAA had no right to use an unrelated court ruling to do what they did.

But don’t expect the RIAA to apologise and return the domain name any time soon – history has shown that these kind of “errors” are usually never rectified, or by the time they are, there’s usually no point in getting the domain name back.

Gaming

It can’t be long now before Nintendo officially launches the Nintendo NX, considering that it’s set to launch early next year. And as expected, the rumour mills have been working overtime and there’s more information than ever about what the NX will be like. Past experiences tell me that rumours so close to the official unveil tend to be closer to the truth than what you might expect, and the cynical side of me is convinced that some of the so called leaks are completely intentional, and used to build up hype leading up to the launch.

Wii U

The NX may take the Wii U’s “portable hybrid” concept a step further

The latest round of rumours says the NX will be 3-4 times more powerful than the Wii U, making it about as powerful as the Xbox One. More on that later. The same source also says building games on the NX will be a lot easier than before, which might be a good thing from a third party game point of view. Another source, and this one seems to be more legit, suggests that the NX will have a launch price of $299.99, and comes with the promotional slogan “Interact with your game on the go”. This would definitely line up with earlier rumours about the console being a “hybrid”, that bridges the gap between portable and home based gaming. Four (I assume, first party Nintendo) games are set to be available at launch, with at least one Mario title, another is probably ‘The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild’. The console is also set to support 4K video streaming, but not 4K gaming as the console is probably only powerful enough for 1080p gaming (and 900p for the “hybrid part of the device”).

Which brings us back to the expected processing power of the console. If the NX could be as powerful as the Xbox One, and add on top of that Nintendo’s advantages in terms of their first party franchises and their knack for bringing the fun into game, then this could be a very good combo. Or at least this was the case before both Sony and Microsoft decided to up the ante and release a mid-generation upgrade to their flagship consoles. This could make Nintendo’s console the least powerful console again, when before these moves, it could have been on par at the very least with the other two. That’s life for ya, I guess.

Xbox One S

Xbox One S helping Microsoft beat Sony in the US at least, thanks to Ultra HD Blu-ray drive?

Speaking of the updated Xbox One, it may very well be a game-changer for Microsoft, with Xbox One sales beating that of the PS4 for three months in a row now. It still has a long way to go before it can even think about catching up to the PS4, but it’s been a well made update that addresses some of the problems with the original Xbox One, and alsop gave buyers something new to think about. Even better is the fact that Sony released the PS4 Slim in September, and yet the Xbox One still managed to come out on top. This may change next month when the PS4 Slim has a whole month to sell, or if it doesn’t, then the November release of the PS4 Pro could also change things again, but I’m sure it feels nice for Microsoft to be on top, even if only temporarily.

If the Xbox One S does continue to sell well, then the inclusion of Ultra HD Blu-ray playback may be a decisive factor. The Xbox One S is great value for those already on the market for a UHD Blu-ray player, and it makes the console stand out against the competition.

======

And with that, we come to the end of another WNR. Hope you’ve enjoyed this one, see you next week.

Weekly News Roundup (September 18, 2016)

Sunday, September 18th, 2016

And I’m back! Sorry for the long hiatus, but I’m now back from vacation, refreshed and ready to give you another few hundred words every week that you probably won’t want to read. It’s good to be back!

Gonna keep it short though, still coming back from jet lag so the mind’s not so sharp.

Copyright

The Hateful Eight

Want to watch The Hateful Eight in 4K? Piracy is your answer!

This is what happens when you don’t serve market demand. With no legal way to watch Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ in 4K, pirates have stepped up to the plate and delivered. Just how exactly they did it, is a bit of a mystery. It may have been sourced from a legal Russian site, but how the encryption was broken, if it was broken, is the subject of much speculation.

In any case, fans of the film can now watch it in 4K, the way it was intended to be watched, and the powers that be that made the decision not to make it available to buy or rent in 4K have nobody to blame but themselves.

The wider implication from this release is that a widely used copy protection scheme could have been broken for the very first time, which may signal a new flood of top tier content, in top tier quality, flooding the piracy scene in the short term.

Gaming

PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro

Two new PS4s, but no Ultra HD Blu-ray for either …

So a lot has happened in gaming while I was gone. Sony has finally let the cat out of the bag, the same cat they kept hidden at E3 for (what now appears to be) no reason at all. The PS4 Slim and Pro have been officially unveiled, the former is already available, while the latter comes in November, a full year before Microsoft’s own upgraded Xbox One arrives.

Thanks to an active rumour mill, there weren’t any real surprises except for a biggie – the PS4 Pro, which has been upgraded with 4K in mind, won’t play Ultra HD Blu-ray discs. This is because the upgraded PS4 won’t have an upgraded Blu-ray drive capable of reading these higher capacity discs, even though every other part of the hardware is more than good enough for UHD playback.

The decision to leave out UHD Blu-ray playback is compounded by the fact that the Slim’s main rival, that’s already on the market for the same price, already has UHD Blu-ray playback. Microsoft has pulled off a masterstroke in deciding to go down the UHD route with the Xbox One S, something nobody expected, not when the S is marketed at a price that’s cheaper than most standalone players on the market.

Deadpool on Ultra HD Blu-ray

The Xbox One S can, but the PS4 Pro can’t – Ultra HD Blu-ray movies like Deadpool won’t work on the PS4

It’s definitely a surprising omission from a company that once risked too much to include playback of a new disc format with their brand new console. Perhaps the mistake of including Blu-ray playback with PS3 (which delayed the console’s release and led to the console’s notoriously high launch pricing) is what prevented Sony from including UHD Blu-ray playback with the PS4 Slim or Pro. Also surprisingly, Sony has shown little interest in UHD Blu-ray, with their first standalone player not even coming until next year (and it’s a premium, high-end model to boot) – the slow ramp up to UHD may also explain why Sony was just not ready to include UHD Blu-ray in the upgraded PS4s.

Also disappointing fans slightly is the fact that the PS4 Pro’s hardware upgrade, while significant, won’t be able to compete with the Xbox One “Scorpio” when it’s available in 2017. Bragging rights still count for a lot in 2016 (and 2017), and it could be the case that for the rest of this console generation, the Xbox One will bcome the more powerful console (and the one more capable of handling games in 4K).

And to make things worse for Sony fanboys, the Xbox One beat the PS4 in sales again in August – that’s two months in a row. Of course, Sony will probably reclaim the throne in September when the Slim goes sale

——

That’s all we have for the week. It’s good to get back into the swing of things, even if it means swapping the nice warm Mediterranean for wet and freezing Melbourne.

Weekly News Roundup (15 May 2016)

Sunday, May 15th, 2016

Another quiet week, so I think we can get through everything in double quick time. A late apology for last week’s wonkiness, had a server hardware problem that was compounded with a software problem, but everything was back up again after two nights of lost sleep. Ah well, these things have to happen from time to time, even if it’s just to test our redundancy and backup process (which did okay, but could be and will be improved).

Let’s get started before the server blows up again.

Copyright

The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay’s Swedish domain names will soon go offline, but nobody really cares anymore

The Pirate Bay’s Swedish domain names, you know the ones that end in .se, are in the news again as a Swedish appeals court upheld an earlier ruling that would have seen the domain names seized. To be honest, this was always likely to happen, ever since prosecutors in Sweden started making noises about domain seizures, and as a result, The Pirate Bay is no longer depending on the .se domain names.

What’s confusing now is finding out who actually owns the domain names. Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij is the designated contact for the domain names, but he denies owning them – this is not unusual, the real owners can write in anyone as the owner, as long as the domain’s administrative contact emails point to the right person. Neij is suggesting he may appeal the verdict.

While all of this will have zero effect on the operations of The Pirate Bay, what this does show is how pointless legal proceedings against piracy sites can be at times. It has already taken years, and will most likely take even more time, to just seize two domain names – domain names that aren’t even used much anymore. It’s incredibly hard, and I assume costly, to keep things off the Internet or to prevent people from accessing something, and you’ll get a better return if you address the real reasons behind piracy and reduce or eliminate the need for piracy.

The same goes for HBO’s valiant, but ultimately futile attempt to keep Game of Thrones piracy off the Internet, by warning downloaders and removing torrents. While they, as the rights-holders, have the right to do all of this and more, it’s probably just easier to ensure people can watch your shows without having to jump through hoops or to get a second mortgage – or in Australia’s case, do both.

Which is why an Australian GoT fan has offered to pay HBO $10 per episode so he can continue to download illegally, because the legal alternatives, he says, is just not good enough. With the country’s sole pay TV operator having an exclusive lock on the show, with iTunes and Google Play locked out until the end of the season, GoT fan John Hyslop would rather (over) pay for illegal downloads than be subjected to the pay TV monopoly, and being forced to pay for channels that he doesn’t want (there’s no standalone product that would grant John access to GoT or HBO shows in general – you’ll have to bundle 40+ other channels in order to be able to watch the latest episodes). So in John’s case, it’s not even about the cost, which is high, but about the unfairness of it all.

If HBO doesn’t address this by being tougher on its partners about what they can and cannot do with their programming, I’m afraid more and more people will feel justified in downloading illegally.

Gaming

Metal Gear Solid V PS4

The PS4 (and Xbox One) are so good value that sales may have reached saturation faster than any other previous generation

It may or may not have been a while since I last reported on the NPD’s US video game sales results. Mainly because nothing ever actually changes. But this week being such a light week, and I actually managed to remember reading something about the NPD results this week, so I thought I should share. The PS4 won again, but hardware sales are down on a couple of reasons. The relative cheapness of the consoles is contributing to the lower dollar sales results, and both major console’s faster adoption rate (thanks largely to lower launch prices that has continued to drop ever since) means that sales may have reached saturation faster than in previous generations.

This probably explains both Sony and Microsoft’s intent to produce a “half generation” upgrade for their respective consoles. If people are willing to upgrade much more expensive phones at yearly (or at least bi-annual) intervals, then I guess Sony and Microsoft’s thinking is that maybe the same formula could be applied to game consoles at a slightly longer interval.

I’m personally not sure it will work though. Upgrading a phone is one thing, but other consumer electronics have never been upgraded in this way and gamers may not appreciate what appears to be a cash grab mid-generation.

——

Short and sweet. Well, at least short. See you next week.