Video on Demand and Pay Per View Movies have been out for years. How is that affecting DVD sales and rentals now?

1) Forget MS/Xbox Live.. replace with Apple TV and every Cable Provider who wants to cash in on Video on demand rentals

2) Blu Ray is not the dominant format yet, and while HD downloads may not kill it ( I pretty sure I wrote that in my OP), it will take market share away and stop it from being as dominant as the DVD.

3) Costs will be high at first, they always are

4) Wait waht??? @SSJ12??

Itunes alone accounted for 4 BILLION songs downloads as of Jan 2008!! and at least 2 MILLION movies!

Blu Ray won't die period.  I have 300 DVD's.  Assuming all HD downloads are single layered (25 gig, dumb assumption too) it would take 7.5 TB just in storage to hold these.  Additionally, if I had that much money in downloads, I would have backups of everything.  So at least 15 TB just to hold movies.  Not withstanding if downloadable CD's were all 9.99 and included the entire CD, they wouldn't be nearly as popular. 

Wow...either your math is seriously wrong here or you are getting really shitty connection. 1mbps thats is about 100 -125K. At that rate you get 1 MB every 8 seconds. 5000 MB would equal 666 minutes which is 11 hours. Not 5000 hours, 3.5 days...lol.

I have a simple 8 mbps connection from rogers in canada...pay 60 bucks with tax...and I get 500K per soecond on most torrents and up to 700 K on good dedicated servers.

So 1 minute - 30 MB downloaded, 10 minutes - 300 MB, an hour - 1.8 GB, 3 hours - my 5GB movie is done :)

first to kill Blu ray it needs to be alive..... it's a shadow right now... I can already tell you you have more movies downloaded everyday than blu ray disc sold...

the blu ray is right about as alive as the laser disc was back then....

download is not a problem come on I have a 3 mbps here and I DL more than 3 movies a day if I want to.... and that's not on official servers... so the speed is a non issue.... in france for 20€ you can get a 20 mbps with free telephone and TNT....

now talking about having a material support... come on people the optical disc might be one of the shittiest data storage support ever invented..... it's fragile and doesn't last for shit without talking about the BD which even more sensible than a DVD.... I have a high speed connection since 1997 I might have bought 5 DVD since then... those DVD are in worst condition than anything I DL and is still on my HDD....

VOD is the future everybody knows that.... and 50 mbps is not a dream come on... I hope having full optical connection in my city in france by the end of 2010.... so if the french can do it... at least all the most important country on that market should be able to do it....

 Exactly.  People have had the instant start movie rentals from their cable company for a while now.  I don't know why people suddenly think everyone wants to rent HD dowloads from Apple/MS over a cheaper Netflix or buying a disk.

I still don't find them comparable.

It's like comparing  McDonald's to a 5-star Steakhouse.  There is something called "Quality" to take into consideration.  Of course, some are content with McDonald's, but others like me, won't eat that shit. 

oh and about storage.... the other day I found external HDD in RAID of 1Tb total for tless than 180$ so please don't tell me that's an issue too..... if apple sells a HD movie at 4,99 and the TB of storage is that cheap the VOD is definately the cheapest and most reliable way to go.... no discution possible on that...

Wait a minute, you have a 30 meg connection and you only download at 1? ...

Regarding prices, here you have what you can typically get in Portugal:

- ADSL internet up to 24 Mbps (speed dependant on the distance to your central)
- phone service with unlimited phone calls to EU / USA / Canada 24h a day
- 25 TV channels

You can get all of that for 40 € a month. After two years you get some traffic caps, at which point you change operator if you want to. If you threaten you'll change operator, they'll usually give you a better contract to keep you (yes, some operators work like that).

Sort of out of the norm, but true in many cases....I know a guy from work that is 36 years old. He doesn't even have dial-up Internet at his house because he's not willing to pay even $15 a month for the Internet!

Yet, he owns over 300 dvd's. He is willing to buy physical media, but won't even pay $15 a month for Internet.

Yes, downloading media seems like a grand and swell idea to forum junkies, Internet nerds, and tech geeks.

But not to your run of the mill casual that didn't grow up with the Internet and technology. Lol, I can't picture my grandma downloading flicks--let alone my mom or dad. My mom doens't even know how to turn a computer on or off.