Nfinity: HD digital distribution has many hoops to jump through before it can take over anything.
1) Price: the majority of people don't want to pay full price for a non-physical copy. That's just silly. The requirement for a lower price is made stronger by the next two points: quality and DRM.
2) Quality/Bandwidth: these two go together. People need a fat internet pipe to download lots of HD-quality video. The US still sucks for real broadband penetration and speeds. So, *legal* HD-downloads will likely be lower-quality for quite some time until bandwidth is easily available and cheap. Why would anybody want to spend $100/month for top-notch internet and $25 per lower-quality movie when they could just buy the true 1080p movie for $25 at the local store?
3) DRM must be gotten rid of. There have been enough situations already in which DRM'ed music has been killed because somebody decided to turn off the servers that validate the DRM. Even big companies like Microsoft, apparently, aren't reliable enough to let DRM'ed purchases actually be purchases. If I'm spending $25 on a movie, I want to know its mine forever. With a disk, that's guaranteed as long as I don't lose it...with DRM'ed electronic copies, there is no guarantee of anything.
4) Multi-device friendliness: They need to make it fast and easy for me to take a downloaded copy and play it on my computer, in my living room home theater, on my bedroom TV, etc. Disks do that now. Downloads do not unless you're significantly tech-savvy and willing to break some rules.
“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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Nfinity: HD digital distribution has many hoops to jump through before it can take over anything.
1) Price: the majority of people don't want to pay full price for a non-physical copy. That's just silly. The requirement for a lower price is made stronger by the next two points: quality and DRM.
2) Quality/Bandwidth: these two go together. People need a fat internet pipe to download lots of HD-quality video. The US still sucks for real broadband penetration and speeds. So, *legal* HD-downloads will likely be lower-quality for quite some time until bandwidth is easily available and cheap. Why would anybody want to spend $100/month for top-notch internet and $25 per lower-quality movie when they could just buy the true 1080p movie for $25 at the local store?
3) DRM must be gotten rid of. There have been enough situations already in which DRM'ed music has been killed because somebody decided to turn off the servers that validate the DRM. Even big companies like Microsoft, apparently, aren't reliable enough to let DRM'ed purchases actually be purchases. If I'm spending $25 on a movie, I want to know its mine forever. With a disk, that's guaranteed as long as I don't lose it...with DRM'ed electronic copies, there is no guarantee of anything.
4) Multi-device friendliness: They need to make it fast and easy for me to take a downloaded copy and play it on my computer, in my living room home theater, on my bedroom TV, etc. Disks do that now. Downloads do not unless you're significantly tech-savvy and willing to break some rules.