二六年十一月二十一日
By 蒂姆Siglin 特约编辑
专题文章

PS3, Zune和更多亮点这个黑色星期五

本周晚些时候, 数百万美国家庭将坐在一起, 装满火鸡, 感谢, 看足球. 后,谢谢, food, 和足球, though, 接下来是感恩节的另一个传统:黑色星期五计划.

For those who don’t do their Christmas—or bargain—shopping on the first day of the holiday season, the term Black Friday might sound like an ominous day set aside for remembering the plague. 但对美国各地的零售商来说, 黑色星期五的黑色是完全积极的, signifying the single day of the year in which all retailers traditionally set their annual one-day sales records (and on which many hope to finally go into the black).

那么，黑色星期五与流媒体世界有什么关系呢? 结果, several of the hot products on the market this year either use streaming or some other form of internet-based media delivery. 让我们来看几个例子:

PlayStation 3 (PS3). This is the product that everyone’s heard about, even if they’re not gamers. 虽然有些新闻已经臭名昭著——想想警察护送, 对ps3新用户的抢劫, and massive markups on eBay—the product actually provides a few firsts of interest to the streaming community. The biggest news is that a PS3 is the least expensive way to get a Blu-ray DVD player. 蓝光及其竞争对手, HD DVD, 已经出去快一年了吗, 每种格式的电影列表都在不断增长. Yet until the very recent introduction of the Xbox 360’s HD DVD add-on and the PlayStation 3 just before Thanksgiving, 独立玩家的成本相当高(在499- 599美元之间), the Xbox 360 with HD DVD and PS3 are still quite expensive for movie players or game machines, 而是作为多功能设备, 价值主张开始看起来更好一些). As such, demand for the high-definition formats that both discs are capable of displaying—VC1, MPEG-2, and H.264有点落后.

PS3配有蓝光播放器, 以及同时提供蓝光和附加高清DVD播放器的Xbox 360, not to mention the games and ability to surf the internet directly from the box, the reasons not to own one of the next-generation DVD formats are falling like a house of cards. 这对流媒体行业来说是个好消息, and especially companies like Inlet and Digital Rapids that focus on high-definition encoding, is that consumer adoption of these codecs will finally begin in earnest in early 2007.

1080 p的监控. In order to take full advantage of the new gaming consoles and next-generation DVD players, 消费者需要高清的LCD, plasma, 或可显示1080p高清信号的背投显示器. 1080p is a progressive display format that displays a 1920x1080-pixel resolution. 虽然这些监测仪已经问世一年多了, 今年的作物价格要低得多. 我们最近安装了四个, 范围从40到46英寸, in several office lobbies in a newly opened business for about 150% of last year’s total price for a single 1080p monitor. 一些制造商, 比如飞利浦, are also enhancing the ability of the monitors to play back video content via the use of internally mounted USB or FireWire ports that accept flash memory or external hard drives. These monitors will typically play content in all major standard-definition formats, while a few now allow playback of high-definition formats directly from the ports or from an internal 100Mbps Ethernet port.

Zune.While initial sales of this digital music and video player have been somewhat less than threatening to the iPod’s dominance (to say the least), Zune首次亮相有两个值得关注的领域. First, this newest entrant to the personal entertainment appears to be setting a new business model: sharing the profits with a music label for every device sold, 在设备上安装任何音乐之前. Universal Music Group announced last week that it is receiving an unspecified royalty for every Zune sold. The public justification is that devices like the Zune and the iPod are used to steal music—and hence revenues—from the music labels, so the labels should be compensated by the manufacturer just in case the consumer chooses to use the device to steal music.

While this might be spun by critics as just another attempt by a dying industry to extend its greedy reach into the manufacturer—in this case, 微软——而不是一次起诉一个消费者, 此举并非没有先例:在欧洲, Zune在哪个领域更有可能取代iPod, there are already several countries that tax blank CDs and DVDs as a pre-emptive compensatory measure to the music industry. France, 这里是环球音乐母公司的所在地, made headlines last year when it attempted to apply the same tax to the iPod, and Microsoft—albeit not directly—has chosen to "pay the tax" in the form of a royalty to Universal.

The Zune also introduces wireless sharing to the personal entertainment device space. This feature is certain to attract the attention of both competitors and consumers, as owners of devices are allowed to share their files with other Zune owners, who in turn are allowed to view or listen to the content a particular number of times before being prompted to purchase the content for further enjoyment. It’s unknown whether it’s this wireless sharing that prompted the royalty to Universal, but the expectation is that the social networking aspect of this ability to share music will drive up sales of content that other consumers recommend to one another.

Space doesn’t allow for detailed descriptions of several other products on the market, including low-cost HDV cameras and high-resolution still cameras with built-in networking, but rest assured the 2006 holiday season will be full of digital media delivery goodies in stockings and family rooms across the country.