HappySqurriel on 14 November 2008
| dbot said: @Happy Squrriel - Digital downloads would be a lot more successful right now if they offered the same benefits as MP3s. MP3s are great because they are portable, permanent, and allow you to buy the best parts of an album without paying full price. Unfortunately with digital downloads, you need to watch it on the device you purchased it, it is a rental with an extremely limited viewing window, and you need to buy the whole movie. Digital downloads are great, I have been doing it for years via pay per view. Whenever I want to actually own the content, I buy it on DVD or now I will buy it on Blu-ray. Also the quality of a digital download is noticeably less than a Blu-ray movie. So if download providers are able to resolve the issues with quality, portability, and ownership we would be able to discuss bigger picture issues like bandwidth. |
I agree that there are lots of problems holding back digital downloads at the moment, and finding the hot product (in terms of a decent download service as well as hardware) will hold them back for awhile ...
The quality of the video is a much smaller consideration than many people think though ... Back in the day people were happy to download 128kbs to 196kbs MP3 audio (which are dramatically worse than CD audio) and people have not really bought into any HD content at the moment. Regardless of what Blu-Ray backers think, I wouldn't be surprised if the average person watched upscaled DVD video (or possibly a higher resolution than DVD like 854x640 or 1024x576) and didn't care if it was HD or not.
