I don't think there are necessarily obvious answers to your questions, but my guess right now is that in the longer term, solutions will be put in place at least for the idea of using a portable player. If a household is subscribed to an all-you-can-eat service, there's theoretically no problem with them making local copies of movies as long as they're managed copies on devices that are able to check for the validity of the subscription. You and I can probably speculate as to numerous ways in which that could be enforced.
Over all though, the point is more "There are concepts so compelling people would buy into it even though they don't necessarily get all they got from the thing that's being replaced." For example, when DVD took over from VHS, it wasn't a perfect fit. DVD recorders took nearly a decade to become available in anything resembling a cheap-and-cheerful VHS-like form, and even before that, I remember being shocked at the prices of DVD-Rs back in the early part of this decade.
But people went out and bought DVD anyway because it was so much better than VHS it was worth overlooking the flaws. For the medium term, people would have both. For the long term, VHS's remaining functionality was eventually replaced not by improvements to DVD but by entirely separate products, notably the DVR.
So we move forward. Systems come about allowing people to have access to libraries larger than they could ever have dreamed of. But people lose the ability in the short term to watch these titles on portable devices or take them over to friend's houses. In the short term, they continue to buy DVDs for that kind of thing - but obviously buy fewer. In the medium term, well, we might see an entirely new type of "download", allowing people to store movies to own permanently on SD card, or we might see portable devices that can connect to cellular networks to get "Subscription OK" messages, or any number of other possibilities. It'll depend on how big that market is and whether everyone's prepared to either live without it, or if it's deemed profitable enough to work with.
One thing to watch is managed copy. If "unlimited downloads" includes managed copy support, then the concept of "download to burn" or "download to put on an SD card" is there. You'd pay extra to do it, but, hey that'll encourage Hollywood to take an interest.
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I don't think there are necessarily obvious answers to your questions, but my guess right now is that in the longer term, solutions will be put in place at least for the idea of using a portable player. If a household is subscribed to an all-you-can-eat service, there's theoretically no problem with them making local copies of movies as long as they're managed copies on devices that are able to check for the validity of the subscription. You and I can probably speculate as to numerous ways in which that could be enforced.
Over all though, the point is more "There are concepts so compelling people would buy into it even though they don't necessarily get all they got from the thing that's being replaced." For example, when DVD took over from VHS, it wasn't a perfect fit. DVD recorders took nearly a decade to become available in anything resembling a cheap-and-cheerful VHS-like form, and even before that, I remember being shocked at the prices of DVD-Rs back in the early part of this decade.
But people went out and bought DVD anyway because it was so much better than VHS it was worth overlooking the flaws. For the medium term, people would have both. For the long term, VHS's remaining functionality was eventually replaced not by improvements to DVD but by entirely separate products, notably the DVR.
So we move forward. Systems come about allowing people to have access to libraries larger than they could ever have dreamed of. But people lose the ability in the short term to watch these titles on portable devices or take them over to friend's houses. In the short term, they continue to buy DVDs for that kind of thing - but obviously buy fewer. In the medium term, well, we might see an entirely new type of "download", allowing people to store movies to own permanently on SD card, or we might see portable devices that can connect to cellular networks to get "Subscription OK" messages, or any number of other possibilities. It'll depend on how big that market is and whether everyone's prepared to either live without it, or if it's deemed profitable enough to work with.
One thing to watch is managed copy. If "unlimited downloads" includes managed copy support, then the concept of "download to burn" or "download to put on an SD card" is there. You'd pay extra to do it, but, hey that'll encourage Hollywood to take an interest.