Digital Distribution is going to be the way of the future, that's for sure. The question is when? Will it be within 5 years? 10? or more?
What digital distribution really needs to take off is a Portable Movie player (500gb min), lasts 15 hours at the least AND can be plugged into ANY HD tv (or TV for that matter) and play the movie in DVD, DVD Upscalled or HD quality on that TV...
They would then need to offer the movie in multi-formats: DVD or HD, Eglish or french, 5.1 or 7.1, subtitles, extra contect or just the movie ... and so on so forth.
Currently, DVD quality movies can be downloaded at well under 2GB with NO video degradation. (those 700Mb movies to fit on CD loose quality)...
HD movies are as low as 2GB with some degridation (still HD though) and 4 Gb for a standard movie with minimul to no degridation... I would say 6Gb would be optimum to have virtually full quality (Not including the extra content, just the movie), Even for a 60" screen.
ATM for me to download a 6 GB movie would take a little over an hour and a half. This is in Australia and is virtually becoming the standard speed for all metropolitan area's.
NOW, if they took advantage of the Peer to peer network, they could save on bandwidth. What I mean is, if they had their own Private peer to peer servers/program, sold a movie and the person who downloads it keeps his connection sharing and when they sell that same movie, the first person helps to upload to the second person, then they offer the first person a $x amount discount for helping with bandwidth. Of course it would need to be done on a larger scale and the saving would not be all that much but I recon it wold be a Viable thing for people to want to share. And a leagal way too. As long as the movies downloaded are locked and can not be used on another player... somehow...
Anyway, that's enough of me.
It's me... no really, it IS me!!!
