as a result of the increased likelyhood of blu-ray probably winning the HD formar war, i've been hearing alot of people saying that blu-ray will fail due to the future of "download only" content.

 am i the only the only person that thinks that this is a bad idea?

 what if my friend wanted to borrow a game? or i wanted to take a game or movie to a friends house to watch/play? do i have to take the whole console or media unit with me? what if i bought a 80gb hdd, but needed more space? do i need to buy a bigger hdd and have to switch drives or the time?

also i dont like the idea of all my content being in the same place at the same time. hard drives can fail, and if my console's hdd fails, then so do i, because i dont have anymore games. what if my console or video device gets stolen? one stolen device means ALL my media is gone. i think thieves will be motivated by the fact they can steal a games console and a set of games, all in one device.

i think downloads replacing discs are a terrible idea in my opinion. it has so many flaws and risks that i dont think its "safe" enough to make it mainstream. i would rather have my games on separate media, it decreases the risk of....anything really. of course this is just my opinion. but who here thinks it's good and who here thinks it's bad?

Downloadable movies will always have it's place but will never replace disc media, a majority of people simply want a physical object when they buy a movie and these same people like the fact that they own the media, downloadable content with it's DRM makes owning such content feel more like renting it.

Fanboy's need to  ease up their pain somehow. Downloadable content isn't a threat at all for physical medium simply because people like to collect stuff. You can easily buy music online right now for half price and CD albums still sell great. Shit, you don't have to pay at all for music (and keep in mind files are much, much smaller than HD movies). If CD business goes on even though "free" stuff is so easy to find and pick up I can say one thing - BS.

Digital download could edge out physical media, but it is unlikely to happen in the next 10 years.

You make a good point, kber.  Why did you have to tarnish it with that bit of flamebait up front? 

Why does downloads = DRM?

Why not just downloads?

downloads = DRM because sharing = a big no no

Thanks. I've started with "flamebait" because I honestly believe people search for some red herring to belittle this obvious success of BR. There are three big topics now - downloadable content, affordability of standard dvd's and meaningless penetration of HD. Not because it matters but because it blurs the trend.

It'll be 10 years minimum until that would be even remotely possible. About 85% of people WW with broadband connections, have DSL, which has a lousy upspeed. So sharing HD content P2P is simply no use at this point. And it'll be a looooong time till any distributor starts selling or renting HD movies in a large scale, especially since the cinema is doing better than ever.
Also, even if someone were to offer it, only a small percentage would have the speed required to download the sheer amount of information contained within HD files with uncompressed content.
Another major issue is; broadband, as far as I know, is availiable and/or in use for roughly 15% of the earth's population, while cinemas and/or movie retailers are available for over 70%, so it would make no sense to give cinema and optical media a cold shoulder for a very long time until thess statistics change.
in conclusion; whichever format (allthough it's 95% sure that BluRay takes it home) wins the "format wars", is here to stay.

 Yes, for every one person trying to burst the Wii bubble, there's five saying that BluRay is either unneccessary or that it's simply doomed for no specific reason at all... Yet it goes almost unnoticed, despite being every bit as lame as an argument.