@ dclKeeL,
Where are you getting these estimates from for digital distribution market share?
I disagree with Joeorce on quite a bit, but he's absolutely 100% dead-on for digital download adoption rate. It's going to be VERY slow, and probably won't compete with physical media for movies for another decade. Keep in mind that to truly enjoy the benefits of digital distribution you would want ALL of your movies/games on a single device or service. Correct? For a long while, people will resist moving to totally digital due to the cost involved. For instance, I have upwards of 500 DVD movies, not counting 100+ TV seasons, so for me to get a digital copy of those on a HDD (legally) is entirely cost prohibitive. At $5-7 per disk (which is cheaper than I'm sure they'll charge), I'm looking at an investment of $5,000 easy. Also, keep in mind how long it would take to download an entire catalog of movies. Let's say you want a 1080p movie that takes up 20gigs. Let's assume your bandwidth is like mine, at 10Mbps (yeah, I hate that they quote bits instead of bytes too). That's equivalent to about 1 megabyte per second at optimum real-world conditions. So 20,000,000,000 divided by 1,000,000 is about 20,000 seconds, or 333 minutes, or 5.6 hours. So, in a 24 hour day, you could theoretically download about 4 movies if you kept up nonstop. So for my collection of about 900 discs (500 movies plus 100 TV seasons with about 4 discs avg per season), it would take me 225 days of nonstop downloading and $5K. Please note, that a lot of people don't have a 10Mbps connection, and that you often get a lot less than advertised, and that you're basically preventing yourself from doing much of anything on the internet during those days in which you download movies. Do you still think it's practical?
For small games, sure, I love it. I download PC and WiiWare games all the time. For movies and large 'core' games, it doesn't make sense. Also note that I was assuming only 20 gigs for a movie. BR movies can hit 50 gigs... so I'm assuming that some of the larger digital downloads will be that large, which brings your total to only 2 movies per day.
Hardware is only a means to enjoy great games!
