Sony giving in to digital movie distribution = acknowledging MS was right?

[quaiky]

i don't think that digital distribution will replace optical media for films in the next few years.
for rental its a nice option as you can stream the data, but for buying you would need a lot disk space if you want to store your whole movie library in hd with full 7.1 sound. (with good compressions you are still speaking about 15-20gb for the movie only without any special features).
also another problem at least here in europe are still the data limits on nearly all internet access contracts which are usually set in the 10-20gb per month range which would just allow one hd movie per month.

so while i think that over time digital download has a chance as a distribution medium for movies too (but it will depend on drm and such things too), i don't think it will be the dominant movie distribution in the next 5 years at least not here in europe.
So it will depend on how fast people move on to hd movies if blu ray will reach such a big status like dvd did, if it reaches a big standard status then it might slow down success of downloads.
But i also think that blu ray is the last optical media based standard that has a chance for movie distribution. (quality cannot increase that much anymore, and with 10-15 years between optical media standard downloads will be big enough to take over after a more or less successfull bluray period)