basically ignores the fact that there are a lot of people who simply don't want to bother with downloading movies. It's time-consuming and fiddly, while a DVD disc is easy. And what about people who have film collections? The whole back-up issue is very relevant to them, since a good-sized movie collection would take literally thousands of dollars just to backup on drives. One of my friends has about 800 films in his collection; given the prices for drives that have been quoted here, how much would he have to spend, as opposed to the $10-$40 per film that regular DVD's cost?

And what is this about consumers "demanding" HD DVD's? I keep hearing this from the MSM and media companies, but I'll be damned if I can find any actual consumer who demands anything of the kind. Most of us don't give a rat's ass about such bells and whistles - we just want discs with reasonable quality that we can afford. I don't know anybody willing to pay what will undoubtedly be inflated prices just so the details on some movie prop will be a bit clearer. DVD's are already fine, and all this "demand" nonsense is just industry hype designed to stir up an artificial anticipation in people who normally wouldn't care. Talk about transparent manipulation!

It won't be and everyone knows that. Even a few years ago Lackluster stocked movies that were marginally interesting. I bet the selection has gone down by 80% at least. 2 dozen major studio releases. A few foreign language films, a few gay titles and quarter of the store is Television shows. Movies on demand won't be any different. And of course they'll edit the shit out of them and soccermommy them down, for the children.

I have Comcast, and On Demand pretty much sucks. As is typically the case with cable companies, the infrastructure is simply not robust enough to support the demands of the users. The first 20 minutes or so of any movie will be shown in black and white as the load balancers try to adjust to the terrible strain of one additional feed. Failure to connect at all and getting booted out in the middle of a show are not uncommon occurrences. Someone needs to tell these guys that servers are cheap.

And they are still better than BellSouth. With something like 11 different network topologies in place, the bandwidth and services available in a particular location are a complete crapshoot. And no upgrades are being implemented becase everything will be replaced by 10Gb fiber, which is going to take an extremely long time. So downloading that movie is going to take 6 - 8 hours while someone in the next neighborhood over only takes 20 minutes, but you can be happy with the knowledge that you will have real-time streaming video in only 6 years.

Time Warner cable is already offering HD on-demand downloads to many of its customers. They'll be rolling it out to the rest over the next couple of years. These downloads don't go thru your computer but thru your cable box - Time Warner (and the other cable providers) prioritize that content, so it downloads much faster than your computer can, and you don't have to wait for the whole file to download before you begin viewing the content.

The current high-def disc formats are all doomed. They'll be squeezed by cable and PC downloaded content from below, and by higher-capacity disc formats from above.

2 hrs to download a DVD sorry.

That's more than 12 minutes for an average movie under 100% saturated optimal conditions. Granted it's faster than hoping in the car and going to Lackluster Video. But it's not a magic bullet. And then I have to store it a-la Tivo and struggle with Windows Media Edition Hell on my local network. As opposed to picking up a DVD and flipping it into the player and pressing one button......

I used to be firmly in the "Downloadable movies will replace Blu-Ray/HD-DVD anyway". But now I'm not sure. For one thing, as Farhad said, broadband in the US is not that great. Hard drives are still not big and cheap enough to support huge libraries (cheap enough = less than a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player), and draconian copyright protections still turn off large segments of users. All this has to be worked though.

While it is, though, people are still going to demand high definition content. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are here now, they look great, and anyone who has an HDTV (with or without broadband) can enjoy it. They might be dead ends but DVD is even more of one. The high definition disc will have at least 5 more years as the premiere way to get high definition movies. And that is good enough.

We already have a blue ray player in the form of a PS3, but beyond that, we're not likely to invest anything more, and we're not about to start building up a library of Blue Ray disks. Media technology is still very much in flux, and likely to remain that way for at least another 10-15 years, before things start to plateau. So our household has no intention of deciding on either format when both will almost certainly be obsolete in a few year's time.

I didn't do much shopping around before I posted, but it seems to me that $350 is between $300 and $400. As it happens, I also saw a 2 terabyte array offered for about $1,000, which makes me think that $300 in two years might be a stretch.

And that still doesn't solve the download speed problem or the backup problem. The download speed problem is a real one, because the best common DSL speed is something like 3 Mbps (although our friends at the telephone companies relentlessly market 1.5 Mbps and 768 kbps services as high speed) and the best common cable modem speed is something like 5 Mbps (which at least is becoming more or less the standard cable offering). At these rates, a standard definition (actually more like VCR-quality) half hour TV program takes something like half an hour to download according to Apple, which probably is a touch optimistic, while a half-hour full-blown HDTV widescreen program would take hours (and never mind how long a movie would take). Even if you assume that download speeds will increase four-fold in two years, it still would take an awfully long time to get an HD program of whatever sort, and you couldn't watch it in real time. That's a much more serious problem than the storage issue.