| kn said: Too much fanboy in here. Look at Itunes as a model. It is put a serious dent in physical media sales for music. Period. No matter how you look at it, the days of walking into a music store for a CD are numbered as pretty much every home PC sold these days has at least a CD burner if not a DVD burner. Video will follow. Soon. As long as I can download a movie to watch and keep it long enough to go back to it if I want -- say a couple of weeks or so -- I'll be interested in D/L the movie. If I want to keep it, I want the option to burn it and keep it. That, of course, will require some DRM facility... As mentioned above, this thread isn't about MS. The 360 isn't capable of beating blu-ray on it's own. Media Center (or similar media management software), plus high-speed internet, plus available content do have the ability to kill or seriously dent the growth of HD physical media sales. Those that don't believe this is in the very near term are delusional. |
Okay, let's look at music downloads in the US (the largest and one of the most developed markets).
In 2007, digital downloads made up less than a third of total music sales. That sounds fairly significant, but you have to take into consideration that these are mostly singles sales. Album sales are the most profitable for the industry, and currently digital downloads only represent about 10% of album sales in the US. You also have to bear in mind that despite people constantly talking about the decline of the industry, sales have actually increased since Napster made music downloads popular. Physical album sales have not seen any significant decline at all over the last decade, only single sales.
Let's say an album is about 100MB and HD movie about 5GB. That means that if movie downloads follow the pattern of album downloads AND internet speeds increase by 50x in the next 5 years, HD movie downloads may make up about 10% of movie sales by that time. This is an extremely optimistic view from the POV of DD.
Of course, the popularity of music downloads has largely been facilitated by the integration of the leading download service with a little fashion accessory you may have heard of called the iPod.
Therefore, I think it's safe to say that people expecting digital downloads to cripple Blu-ray are the ones that are delusional.
As for the fanboy comment, I should point out that I do not own a PS3, a Blu-ray player or an HDTV and that I already download most of my movies. Of course, after I have downloaded them, I burn them onto a DVD. In 5 years time I will be downloading them and burning them to Blu-ray. DD will not trump optical media in the near future, if ever.
