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April 2nd 2018 will always be remembered as the day we as enthusiasts lost a giant - many would have seen the news and thought it was a poor taste late April fools joke. I think Oppo knew no-one would have believed the news had they released it a day earlier. In a way that would have been an incredible PR stunt, even if in poor taste but a company that is withdrawing from a market are not looking for PR.
So what happened to Oppo and why did they withdraw - I am sure some people know exactly. Rumours are they are making far more money from mobile phones sales in China and India and want to focus their manufacturing facilities on that. This makes a lot of sense considering we are slowly moving into a full streaming world and the disc player definitely has a limited time span left in terms of mass market sales potential. I personally think Oppo couldn't see a route to market for any further products which is a shame. The problem with the AV world is the majority believe dgital is digital and nothing makes a difference to it. That would make it hard for a company to develop and sell a high end Video streamer as their next big product, although that in my view is the next big product we need to see. A high end video streaming playback solution with internal or access to storage so a user can rip all their existing BD and UHD discs easily.
When all content is available via streamed service its makes piracy very hard so surely they can lapse the copyright laws on ripping discs - who knows what the future will hold in this regard.
What I fear is a change in the market focus and a race to the bottom - who can bring us the cheapest service and when a service goal is intended to be the cheapest quality suffers. What I hope is we see the opposite and streaming services up the game and start offering full UHD disc bandwidth content with the full sound codecs. Until we start to see this we need the disc and we need the disc spinners if we want to ensure the best quality experience at home - after all that is what as enthusiasts are all about creating.
If you think enthusiasts wont shift their mindset and accept a lesser quality for the sake of convenience and opportunity for a larger content selection think again and look at Spotify. There are many hifi enthusiasts that have spent a small fortune on their systems and yet listen to MP3 quality music from Spotify due to its fantastic library.
So what happened to Oppo and why did they withdraw - I am sure some people know exactly. Rumours are they are making far more money from mobile phones sales in China and India and want to focus their manufacturing facilities on that. This makes a lot of sense considering we are slowly moving into a full streaming world and the disc player definitely has a limited time span left in terms of mass market sales potential. I personally think Oppo couldn't see a route to market for any further products which is a shame. The problem with the AV world is the majority believe dgital is digital and nothing makes a difference to it. That would make it hard for a company to develop and sell a high end Video streamer as their next big product, although that in my view is the next big product we need to see. A high end video streaming playback solution with internal or access to storage so a user can rip all their existing BD and UHD discs easily.
When all content is available via streamed service its makes piracy very hard so surely they can lapse the copyright laws on ripping discs - who knows what the future will hold in this regard.
What I fear is a change in the market focus and a race to the bottom - who can bring us the cheapest service and when a service goal is intended to be the cheapest quality suffers. What I hope is we see the opposite and streaming services up the game and start offering full UHD disc bandwidth content with the full sound codecs. Until we start to see this we need the disc and we need the disc spinners if we want to ensure the best quality experience at home - after all that is what as enthusiasts are all about creating.
If you think enthusiasts wont shift their mindset and accept a lesser quality for the sake of convenience and opportunity for a larger content selection think again and look at Spotify. There are many hifi enthusiasts that have spent a small fortune on their systems and yet listen to MP3 quality music from Spotify due to its fantastic library.
In the wake of such terrible news what can an enthusiast do to improve their mood and turn a negative into a positive, well they can upgrade their Oppo. When Oppo is the king of the Disc Spinning world what possible product could you buy that is an upgrade. You dont buy another product you upgrade the Oppo.