48% of U.S teens haven't purchased a single C.D, up from 38% a year before.

HDD - 1-2TB of data = 33-66 movies @ 30gb a movie. Furthermore you can pick up your whole collection in one hand and take it anywhere. It will be big in Japan - no space, and it will possibly be big with smart families. No broken disks!

The biggest problem is PRICE! They charge more to us, yet they pay nothing to deliver the content compared to retail, no inventory! Netflix should not be cheaper than this, they have to post the damn disks!

 Bad math much?

First off, that's 1 megabit per second. Not bytes, and not minutes.

Doing the math properly, you're going to multiply 1*1024*1024 to get the amount of bits. Then you're going to divide by 8 to get an accurate number of bytes per second. It translates to 131072 bytes - about 130kB/sec.

 Then, to continue doing the math properly, you're going to figure out exactly how many bytes 5GB is. To do that, you multiply 5*1024*1024*1024. That comes out to 5368709120 total bytes. 

To figure out how much time that takes, you divide 5368709120 by 131072. That will get you the number of seconds it takes. 40960. Divide that by sixty, and that's the number of minutes. 682 (and 40 seconds). Divide that by another 60 and you get the number of hour.

 You find that it finishes at under twelve hours at 1mbps speeds (to be precise, 11 hours, 22 minutes, 40 seconds).

Hardly 3.5 days.

And if you ARE getting 1 megabyte per second (which is written MBps, not mbps, as the capitalization is how you denote whether it's byte or bit), then that download will be complete in 1 hour, 25 minutes, 20 seconds.

 Capitalization is also how you denote between "Mega" and "milli", but it's at least a given that people are talking megas and not millis when talking data amounts, so that's one error that's usually forgiven. However, since download speeds are typically given to us by our ISPs (and the lot) as megabits per second (usually because that sounds better than megabytes, since it's a bigger number), the mistake differentiating between bits and bytes cannot be made. 

Blu-Ray movies just got a firmware update with BD LIVE so blu-ray will win over hd downloads cause you can take them anywhere to let them borrow it or watch em,cause who wants to carry their laptop download them on their computer and /or transfer to a dvd so everybody can watch it on the tv screen. People were wrong about hd dvds winning versus blu-ray and the same will happen with hd downloads versus blu-ray movies.

Actually, you don't have to take your laptop around with you either. Just download all your movies onto an external harddrive or a flash card and you're good to go.

*neither are financially reasonable... yet... nor 100% compatible with systems across the board... yet... But the point still stands that it can be just as easy, and the across-the-board compatibility issues are slowly becoming less an issue.

Dude, did you not read the some? Not every ISP offers that kind of speed. And even then, the ones that do charge a crap load for that kind of connection. Out of everybody in the world that has a highspeed connection...which speed do you think the average person choses. I'd assume the 768k connection...but that's just assuming since that appears to be a basic package for most highspeed providers.

I agree that it is something to compete against...but I don't think it's going to be something major, really limited to the people that actually have that connection. 9 million seems like a lot, but it's not. And it's further limited by the amount of people that actually go for that connection.

Think about the average connection, it isn't going to suddenly only take 15 minutes for people now.

 Uh....DVD is a physical format :)

I dont believe anything significant will happen this generation. I do believe Bluray will be the *last*, dominant physical media. By the end of Blurays lifespan (which should be a loong time) its likely consumers will all have access to connections fast enough to download a full uncompressed high def movie in a convenient timeframe.

Only when this happens will movies on discs go the way of music cd's. People will store their movie collections the way they store music on a current Ipod.

It will happen, but not anytime soon.

Right now, Apple TV is not nearly as good as XBox Live.

AppleTV has lower quality video (4 Mbps vs 6.8 Mbps), less SD and HD titles available, very few titles have surround sound, no TV shows in HD, no TV show purchases, no NBC...

Nowhere close to reaching Steve Jobs' empty promise of 1000 movies in March... and all this for the same prices as XBoxLive.

It doesn't really have any advantages over XBox Live at all.

 Now, this post I agree with. I can see downloads taking over after Blu-ray...the internet is growing fast, but hasn't grown to that point already. But in the last decade or so, the internet has grown drastically. In maybe 10-15 years, the average joe will have a fast enough internet connection to download uncompressed high-def movies...but now is not the case. I just simply can't see fiber-optic cables being put in the ground in the majority of every country in just 3-5 years. 10+ years will probably need to be given to make it possible for the majority to have a top-notch 20+ mbps connection at a cheap price. For like a 15 minute download at least.

Hell...the most I can get is 6mbps, which is really good for living in the sticks...but I don't see myself being able to get anything higher than 10mbps for at least 10 years if not longer. Connections like this are really only good if you live in a big city or huge urban areas. Technology and connections are accelerating fast, but not that fast. 

I can remember owning a 2400bps modem and then everyone drooling over the 3Khz voice-band saturating 9600bps modems.  There wasn't going to be anything faster until about 2 years later companies began to release 56Kbps modems.  And then *that* was the ceiling.  Now I have EVDO wireless, tend to average about 1.3 mbps while other guys at work have 6mbps connections and are talking about upgrading to 12 mpbs connections.

So... the moral of the story is, don't get trapped by the buggy-whips-will-always-be-important thinking.  My brother works for AT&T and they're installing FIOS like mad.  Talk about a huge jump in bandwidth.  Also, network-edge-cache companies are growing as other companies such as Apple, MS, etc. decide that they need to get the files cached closer to the user instead of having a bazillion servers to deliver content.