Thanks for speaking for the people. Guys, the people have spoken...

Seriously, do you know how downloads on networks like xbox live work? You download a game/movie/whatever and you own it. When you come home and find your xbox 360 RRod-ing you go and buy another one. Recover your account tag and everything you downloaded is still there, free, waiting for you to download it again. You own it after you paid for it... This topic is not talking about some illegal torrent movie downloads but a proper pay to play service.

Besides, there are many more people living in the real world outside this site, who want to see a movie, enjoy it and then never watch it again. If a service has the ability to start downloading the movie and let you watch it while it downloads, you could be watching an 720p movie within 30 minutes of starting the download with an average interenet connection here in Canada(500K/second). Way more convinient than renting or buying movies. Cheaper as well as no physical materials are wasted.

If Netflix does come to console(s) it could literally be the foot in the door the company needs to make digital downloads to people's televisions far more easier.

If I own something then I should be able sell it to other people if I don't want it anymore. If I can't sell it away then it's only renting, not owning.

 you are missing the fact that as broadband speeds and computer hardware gets better the general quality of audio and video will increase dragging file size up. Truly I download files of FileFront at 1.3MBs but if I'm downloading a high-quality ogg formatted movie that ends up with a file size of over 4GBs that download will still take forever. Think aboutVista killed off the general resolution of 640 by 480 for PCs and with the transfer to digital 480p TV will slowly die. 

Even if we had 50MBs connection speed there will be new levels of quality in audio and video that will double or triple the file sizes. Storage space isn't the issue. It is the general fact that the ability to download the files at a good speed is a moving target.

 Exactly ... and in 5 years , if the BRD realy takes off , who knows how much longer will we have to wait untill online sales will realy be big . IMO that will probably never happen , mainly because of retailers and customer need to have a hard proof that he owns the software ...

I love how everyone thinks that digital downloading is ready for mass distribution as of today. Sure, its available right now but the Internet speeds aren't ready yet. I have people come into my store all the time who don't even know what a DVD is. There is no chance that they will know how to download a movie.

@ssj12:

I don't think file sizes will get bigger than Blu-Ray for a while, do you?

And your 1.3MBs(Megabytes I presume) connection would be enough to stream the movie.

Good point. Somewhere down the line this may be possible with digital downloads as well.

I own over 300 DVDs and I am a Netflix customers. Basically I buy any good title that comes out ( I hit bestBuy every Friday) and my wifes rents anything she wants that I didn't buy and that she wants to watch.

It works out so well, there's only 4-5 titles in my collection that I wished I had never bought ( Tomb Raider 2 : Craddle of Life being one of them, that is like one of the worse movie ever!).

Anyway both renting and buying have their space, but you tend to buy those movies you like more or that are generally considered as better so I would guess most people are more likely to try to get those in higher quality( Blue Ray) 

I find anyone thinking that over 10% of america will have the the braodband capable of downloading an HD movie on the fly. The infrastructure is not there. What do you think ISPs will charge people when they are all crunching this much bandwidth. That cost will be mch more than buying bigger hardrives.

In two years we will be seeing Blu-Ray players at $99 with new movies costing $19. No way digital distribution beats that.

The only thing Netflix has proven so far is people like discs, just not going to the store. When I can get a Blu-Ray movie downloaded faster than the 1 day it takes Netflix to send it to me let me know. That upped the digital usage to unlimited because no one was using it so a cap was irrelevent.