This is what I was thinking. A company that is already out of business would lose money paying for licenses and paying people to oversee existing customer software upgrades.
Maybe rethinking their closure...who knows?....but hell they could have continued to make n sell oppos cuz at the end there was approximately 5000 people standing inline to buy 205 s
Well i know i was very late for the signup...i was told there was atleast 3000 people ahead of me inline...and im sure many more after me...plus all the distributor s like cruthfield n best buy who were out of stock n wanting more...so yeah they probably could have sold anothet 10,000 units perhaps
Perhaps they should have marketed their machines as a "sacd" player and competed against marantz n mcintosh rather then a "blu ray" player...most people think bluray players are $50 - $200 machines...i know i did till i found you guys and delved into multi channel music Thanks guys...love quad n surround sound music...but damn my wallet is becoming very empty
Or continuing to support/maintain the platform while looking for a different company to handle the manufacturing, sale/distribution, and customer support?
It's not dead while there are still customers wanting to buy it. I'm not interested in using up my monthly data limits for video streaming (and in lower quality than BD/UHD), or juggling streaming subscriptions to retain access to "my" content. But that's not the topic of this thread.
It's dead if manufacturers can't make any real money from selling players.. doesn't matter how if there are (a relative few) customers willing to buy And yes, it kinda is the topic of this thread. OPPO is (effectively) gone because the market has changed. Not enough people willing to pay a premium for devices that put an emphasis on physical media playback. If you had $800,000 to invest, would you put it towards manufacturing $500-$1000+ Blu-ray players in 2019?
You are probably correct in regard to the decline of physical media. Oppo could still be selling all the players they produced without any issues at all. That is evident by the huge demand of Oppo players at the end of production. I'm sure much of that demand was from those that wanted players due to there being no more produced. So if it's such a losing proposition why did the demand for Oppo players far exceed the amount of players being produced? Since Oppo's inception did they ever have trouble selling all the players they produced in a product run?
This doesn't change the fact that many people have big collections of CDs and SACDs and they need something to play them on. The Oppo's do have nice USB and digital inputs for other sources.
For many people, this may be true. For others, not so much. With the story of Apple deleting some purchased/downloaded movies a few months ago, some people may reconsider their decision to ditch physical Media. I know I like having mine.
When streaming has the same picture quality and, most particularly, the same sound quality as the physical disc, then I will give up the disc. I realize that this is the niche position, but almost all of the activities on this forum are the niche position. Where else do people casually talk about $5000 speakers as if it's perfectly normal? If you mentioned $5000 speakers to your neighbors or co-workers, wouldn't they think you were some kind of nut?
Nope. FUD. Didn't really happen. Some bloke moved to a different country and realized a handful of movies didn't have the correct license. I don't see anyone trying to set up their own Kickstarter to keep the legacy players going? I'm not saying we won't have UHD players going forward, they'll just be more disposable/mass market, for the foreseeable future.
What if streaming was better than what's available on a disc? There are an increasing number of 4K streaming titles with HDR/Dolby Vision that don't have 4K disc equivalences. Some of these 4K streaming titles don't even have Blu-ray versions! So you can literally watch a new 4K scan streaming, or pop in your tired DVD from 15 years ago... I know which one I choose.
I think there are two opposing factors/trends at play here: As @Tullman and others note, there's still a market for machines with disc playback capability - and given that a piece of higher-end gear can potentially be considered successful if it sells only 5-10,000 units, the size of the audiophile disc player market still is plenty large for a few players to be active in it. However, @SamS also identifies the key counterpoint: if you remove SACD (super-niche format) and DVD-A (dead format) from the equation, then the disc spinner market is increasingly a transport/digital-source only market. The mass market relies on AV receivers with sophisticated DACs and video processors built-in to them, and the audiophile market increasingly is dominated by "DAC rolling," aka outboard DACs, the variety and market for which has expanded massively in recent years. So the disc-player market is primarily a "video discs with oh-by-the-way legacy support for CDs if I ever decide to bring those out of the closet" market. And no matter what some folks say about some digital transports sounding better than others, the market for premium DAC-less transports is far smaller than the market for premium full-on players, meaning that for many folks a disc transport can be a cheap commodity purchase, simply to feed the 1s and 0s into their expensive DAC and/or AV gear. On balance I'd say that the 2nd factor outweighs the 1st: Oppo certainly could have made a good deal more money by producing 5-10k more 205s and 203s before shutting down production; but beyond that, I don't know that the market would have supported them continuing as an ongoing concern. And I stress that I say this as the prior owner of an Oppo 105, and current owner of two 205s, all of which I love.
But vinyl did come back...with a vengeance i might add...disc spinning has atleast 5-10 years left imho...and who knows could even have a major comeback in the years ahead. Oppo pioneer marantz etc should have demand for atleast another 5 years minimum just with current demand for players ...look at ALL the discs boxsets etc being released just this year 2018.
Even when streaming IS better (resolution wise) you will, in all likelihood, be left with the most recent, brickwalled, master of you favourite album or the new Star Wars etc. Physical media will die slowly but it ain't dead yet and will be here for decades for a small, niche market. Yes the masses who don't care what master/version of an album they listen to then physical media will be killed when streaming is the same or better quality (and we are close to that stage now because those that don't care about which version, generally, don't care too much about the quality).
You’re not speaking from experience right. We have lots of 4K titles that are Blu-ray (or worse) in physical media. If you want quality, you have a mix of physical and streaming. If you only have physical, you’re not getting the absolute best for every title.
I think you missed the point. It's not the resolution that will be the ultimate issue for those that will keep physical media alive, it's the choice of versions. Can you get the original undoctored Star Wars trilogy by streaming (it's still there on DVD)? With music it's 10 times as important than for film as sound quality is not all about the latest and greatest masterings that are streaming. I much prefer some early mastering over later ones no matter what the resolution and what is available for steaming is, generally, the latest and greatest brickwalled of sound (you can't chose, for instance, the Steve Hoffman master for Parallel Lines)? My argument here does not say that CD's/Blu rays/DVD's/Records should still be produced, just that much of what we already have is not available for streaming and people will still want to play these in 10/20 years time because they will still sound better than what is available for streaming.
