Blu-ray Movies in the Philippines

My wife and I watch a lot of movies. It’s one of the things we’ve done from the beginning, when I would visit the Philippines to visit her. We go to the sinehan (movie house) on occasion, such as tonight to see Alice in Wonderland in IMAX 3D, but for the most part we watch movies at home.

During my visits to the Philippines we would often buy movies to watch at the apartment my wife lived at. It was SMALL, and there wasn’t much else to do in that little space. We would buy a few DVDs but mostly we got VCDs as they were very cheap. Some of these were obviously legal releases and others probably not. The quality left a lot to be desired in either case. We just had a small television and inexpensive dvd/cd/vcd player, but it was still fun for those times when we didn’t want to go out.

Now that my wife resides in the states we still watch movies together several times a week. The set up is quite different than the apartment set up, though. Blu-ray movies are our first choice for movie watching, though we also have the high def cable channels, and Netflix streaming movies. The later two are really nice for the selection available, and while the quality is very good it doesn’t reach the quality of the blu-ray disc.

Blu-ray offers much better sound quality, something that I didn’t care that much about initially. Now that I have a better home theater system I have learned to appreciate that much more. DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD are really great. The picture quality is also better, but I wouldn’t complain at all about the high def quality of most of the channels from my cable company.

My current setup includes a 5 year old Samsung 50″ DLP LCD which is only 720p – not that great by current standards. I’m happy with the picture quality at this point, and I’d be real happy if it serves us until I retire and we move to the Philippines. I’m not convinced that it’s going to make it. They don’t seem to make things to last like they used to.

My guess is that by the time we have moved and set up residence on Samal Island we will have easy access to blu-ray discs in the Philippines. From what I understand they are available there now, increasingly so, but are still pretty expensive. The real problem would be that we don’t buy many. We generally rent from Netflix and as far as I know there is no similar service available there.

Streaming will undoubtably continue to improve. Many believe that streaming and/or downloads will completely replace physical media. I’m not so sure that is likely to happen any time soon. Unless the bandwidth improves dramatically in the Philippines, I don’t think that is really going to be off much value. Not for the size files that we’d be talking about for the quality of blu-ray.

Like everything else, by the time we get there much of this will have changed and I’ll probably be looking at different circumstances. It gives me something to consider in the meantime.