Now that its over, Blu will not fail. If the format war had gone on for another year or 2 then I'd agree. Digital downloads will be the future after Blu. A lot of people want something tangable for their money and the internet speeds and the majority of the public is simply not ready to replace physical discs for movies yet.
Downloads are at least a decade away, and probably longer than that. You have a lot of barriers to downloads taking off.
First, the bandwidth isn't there. Look at what American ISPs are doing over Bittorrent already. And in some parts of the world (Australia comes to mind) you have a hard bandwidth cap which isn't very high.
Second, the compression isn't there. In order to move to downloads, the quality has to be better than BD or else we'd have no reason to switch. Until you can get 1440p video and lossless audio into about 10GB then it's not even worth discussing.
My mom likes those big TVs, but doesn't know what a download is. Also... I can't hold a download in my hand, so it makes a crappy present... presents being about my entire DVD collection. I think discs will be around for a good while.
HA! I love all these ignorant comments about downloads... Now if you live in Europe/Australia/Asia You can stop reading, but if you live in AMERICA, this will absolutely not happen for at least 5 years, probably 10. The broadband infrastructure in this country is pathetic. There is NO WAY in hell that cable ISPS are going to let every customer regularly download 10-20GB H264 files. That's just crazy talk, especially with how they freak out over minor bittorrent downloading from a tiny percentage of their customers. Anyone that doesn't belive me, go do some research on the state of our broadband infrastructure, especially the level of oversold bandwidth in this country, then come back here and tell me downloads are going to take over for HD media. In the short term, I'm sure some small percentage will use downloaded media for low-quality HD rentals ala XBox live/Tivo Unbox/Apple TV.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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deathwatch needs to be for both formats as blu will fall to downloads (xstreamHD:)
Pathetic
Now that its over, Blu will not fail. If the format war had gone on for another year or 2 then I'd agree.
Digital downloads will be the future after Blu.
A lot of people want something tangable for their money and the internet speeds and the majority of the public is simply not ready to replace physical discs for movies yet.
Downloads are at least a decade away, and probably longer than that. You have a lot of barriers to downloads taking off.
First, the bandwidth isn't there. Look at what American ISPs are doing over Bittorrent already. And in some parts of the world (Australia comes to mind) you have a hard bandwidth cap which isn't very high.
Second, the compression isn't there. In order to move to downloads, the quality has to be better than BD or else we'd have no reason to switch. Until you can get 1440p video and lossless audio into about 10GB then it's not even worth discussing.
My mom likes those big TVs, but doesn't know what a download is. Also... I can't hold a download in my hand, so it makes a crappy present... presents being about my entire DVD collection. I think discs will be around for a good while.
Dan S, yeah, those iTunes gift cards are a total flop. Horrible present.
HA! I love all these ignorant comments about downloads... Now if you live in Europe/Australia/Asia You can stop reading, but if you live in AMERICA, this will absolutely not happen for at least 5 years, probably 10. The broadband infrastructure in this country is pathetic. There is NO WAY in hell that cable ISPS are going to let every customer regularly download 10-20GB H264 files. That's just crazy talk, especially with how they freak out over minor bittorrent downloading from a tiny percentage of their customers. Anyone that doesn't belive me, go do some research on the state of our broadband infrastructure, especially the level of oversold bandwidth in this country, then come back here and tell me downloads are going to take over for HD media. In the short term, I'm sure some small percentage will use downloaded media for low-quality HD rentals ala XBox live/Tivo Unbox/Apple TV.