Michael Pachter predicts PS3 will win this round of console wars

[bdbdbd]

rocketpig said:
While DLC won't kill physical media, expect it to start taking a healthy bite out of the marketplace.

Most analysts say that HDTV adoption won't even reach 50% until 2011. That means that Apple, MS, and others have at least four years to start squaring away their codecs and waiting for connection speeds to improve. Besides, downloadable HD will probably be in 720p for quite some time and while that is lower than what you get from Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, it's still good enough for most people out there and they would probably never notice the difference.

Ultimately, there will always be physical media. But its market is going to continue to dwindle as time passes. I don't even buy DVDs anymore. I use HBO On-Demand, my 360, and iTunes to get almost all of the content I want in my home. I used to use Netflix but ran out of movies to watch (after about 5000 rated). This is from someone who used to purchase at least one DVD a month, often times several in a month. I last purchased one about six months ago and have purchased maybe three in the past year and a half.

Downloadable HD will be 720p for a while, just like most HD broadcasts. But also the majority of HDTV:s will be 720p (/1080i) for a while. 720p TV:s are a lot cheaper than 1080p TV:s. A 720p (usually resolution is 768) TV without a digital tuner is 35-50% from the price of cheapest 1080p TV:s. With digital tuners 720p TV has about 50% price compared to 1080p. But don't forget on-demand (which was what i was meaning when mentioning pay per view) broadcasts, they may be a serious competitor for BD or HD-DVD in a couple of years. Of course this doesn't mean that physical media would vanish, but this could eventually have bigger market penetration than physical HD medias. At least as long as there is no clear winner between BD and HD-DVD, this competition plays from day by day for DLC/streaming distribution.