You people low rank me if you want. If you believe streaming true HD content over the Internet is possible with a 5Mbps connection, you're delusional (or paid MS shills).

@Godfail:

The HD movies you download on the 360 "all the time" must look like crap then. Let's assume you have a run-of-the-mill cable internet connection of 5 Mbps. When you subtract out the overheads such as TCP/IP headers, checksumming, etc... you're left with 3 Mbps for raw data. For streaming to be achievable, the download speed needs to be faster than or equal to the playback speed. Therefore this limits movies to 3 Mbps or less.

Considering a generic standard DVD with resolution of 720x480 has bitrates in the range of 6 to 10 Mbps, a 720p or 1080p movie with a 3 Mbps bitrate is severely constrained. Considering that an OTA 1080p broadcast has a bitrate upwards of 20 Mbps, 3 Mbps is a joke.

MS has two options to fix this and both aren't possible within the generous 10 year lifespan of the XBOX 360.

1: Increase the network speed. Upgrading the Internet infrastructure to increase the speed 6X within the next 10 years is beyond MS's reach.

2. Come up with better compression techniques for a 6X reduction in filesize. This solution might be possible in 15+ years but not within the lifespan of the XBOX 360.

@John:
It seems to me your logic is bogged down in a few areas. It generally takes me 4 hours to download a 4 Gig DVD ISO. So allowing ~15 hours for a 16 Gig movie seems reasonable. Assuming it takes ~15 hours to download a movie, if the movie is 2 hours in length you need to allow more than 30 minutes of buffering before you begin to watch it. (30 minutes of buffering + 2 hours gives you 2.5 hours... not even close to the 15 hour mark). With this approach you better start downloading the day before you plan to watch it.

@Rob78:
You say 25GB is overkill using modern encoding techniques... the 25GB is only achievable with modern encoding techniques such MPEG-4 compression. I also don't consider MPEG-4 to be dated compression. You can compress it more but at the expense of losing higher frequency frame information. A company could possibly create their own encoding scheme to get better compression ratio's with quality equal to MPEG-4. This is very unlikely and comes with expensive R&D costs; but even then the format would be propriety and not compatible with anything else. If the company goes under and stops selling players, your invested movie collection could be in jeopardy.

Personally in the U.S. I don't see point to point HD streaming as being practicable given the current Internet infrastructure. MS is only kidding themselves. Plus if they expect the XBOX 360 to outlast the PS3, they may want to rethink that position.

@MHT_PRO3: Your post cracked me up. Thanks for the laugh!

What's up with the Best Buy employee grabbing the lady's arm in the picture?