| Zappykins said: Well, I don't know if Google will ever go to your town. But someone else will - and because fibre, once it is down, is so much easier to upgrade and less prone to interference, you could have might much higher bandwidths that you have today. The pressure from Google with force Verizion, Comcast, Time Warner, ATT and others to improve their services and expand or get rid of caps. (Data caps are just a way for them to make money.) As far as commercials. We have them already on many services: Hulu Plus and Crackle, have commercials while Zune, Amazon Video, and Netflix all do not - and you can fast-forward, rewind, skip head to your heart's desire. Even Netflix has 5.1 surround now, and Zune always did at 1080P (if you have enough data speed.) You often can get Some extras, but yes, that is sometimes and advantage of a disc. My buddy can come over - we log into his account, and we can watch from his entire purchased library. Nothing to carry, nothing to break or get scratched. It is super convenient. |
Same as Archer said, the cable company has a firm hold over their own cable and are not willing to share unless the government jumps in. The streets have to be dug up for fibre, it's estimated at 12 to 14 billion dollars to do this for the whole of Ontario. Fibre penetration atm is just 2%. By the time it becomes commercially viable for a private company to bring fibre out here I'll have grand children.
Netflix is probably better in the states but here 5.1 (at heavily compressed DD) is a rarity. So are HD versions and even those only run at 5mbps at max. Only Zune offers 10-12gb downloads for some movies, still only 10mbps. In comparison a lossless DTS-HD MA sountrack already uses 5mbps on blu-ray, Akira's supurb lossless compressed soundtrack runs at 16mbps. Video can go up to 48mbps in bursts for action scenes. As a videophile digital downloads don't do it for me. I'll gladly sit for a minute to skip through commercials and wait for the mandatory screens to get the best version possible.
I don't expect quality to go up soon either. It's more likely to go down first as streaming becomes more popular. Same as with HDTV service, it started with crispy 1080p at 16-18mbps. Now we have 5 times as many hd channels, but 8-9mbps is considered high end and most channels operate at 3-4mbps to cram more through the same pipe. Without slow motion replays the Olympics would look better on analog over the air broadcast.
And you still can't lend your movies to your friends, unless you give them your login password. Plus they need a good internet connection and the correct equipment or app installed. Same problem as with blu-ray really.
In the end I still prefer a physical product over access to a server. Even if I had google fibre internet with full access to actual blu-ray masters I would still be buying blu-ray disks and looking forward to the possibility of movies released on HVD in the future.
I'll cave in when digital downloads exceed the quality of physical media. Fibre with access to the 500mbps 4K cinema version, yum.
