Uh, blue, you know that you american movies are on both legit and pirate DVD's in china dont you?  Whether they burn our stuff or not makes no difference. They rest of the world loves our culture, and the movie makers want more $$$ so they'll jump to be able to market to the highest populated country in the world.

Why is the internet distribution too crappy? I'm assuming you're refering to bandwith, because digital distribution will most likely come over the same or better video and audio codecs that are available on Blu-ray and HD-DVD. In two years, bandwith will reach the point where you can download faster then you can view. This will allow for streaming video while downloading. Thats better then TV currently offers. You don't have to leave your house. You that the format is a bad choice especially for the US. What is the basis for that as opposed ot other countries?

Digital distribution will also cater to markets that want HD or SD.  It's not about the format, it's about the convenience.  Think about what happened to CD's.  It wasn't the SACD, or the Minidisc.  It was the MP3.  It's actually lower quality, but it is easy and convenient.

I'm not knocking Blu-ray. Ever since they began using the same codecs as HD-DVD(VC-1?)as opposed to MPEG-4, they've made up for their mistakes. I think they are going to win the format war, at the expense of a significant portion of the console war.

First and foremost.

http://www.eproductwars.com/dvd/ 

That is a good example of how how BluRay and HD-DVD are doing in sales at amazon.com

BluRay and HD-DVD are nearly identical in terms of the formats. The media is the biggest diffrence. BluRay... if I'm not mistaken, is cheaper to make, more storage, and faster read speeds. More options for writeable media, required scratch protection. And quite a few other things. That's why I like BluRay.

In all honesty, looking at what moves are comming out from who here lately, it's really starting to look like 9/10 blockbuster movies are exclusive to BluRay.

For those of you who say HD-DVD is like PS3, and will catch up. Actually, HD-DVD had the early start, and sold 4x better than BluRay, BluRay did the turn-around, and the gap between BluRay and HD-DVD is growing more every day. HD-DVD has nothing that I am aware of to turn those numbers around, other than the 'cheap' players. But most people who have a HDTV, would be willing to pay more for a high quality player that can play more movies, than a cheapass low quality player, that cant play many blockbuster movies. With Pirates comming out on BluRay recently, and Spidey coming soon. People are gonna see that they cant buy the movies they want on HD-DVD, but they can on BluRay. People will buy BluRay, at a higher cost because of that. And when the BluRay price drop comes later in the year HD-DVD wont have that big of an advantage over BluRay in price.

Yup. Hope you enjoyed the read you anti-sony tards. HD-DVD is doomed... doomed... doomed... Hell, even the x-box guys are saying their home player is doomed. Everyone who says HD-DVD has a chance are from the nintendo group... haha. Also, on the subject of doom, digital download formats will not take over BluRay. In america it will be at least 4-8 years before a new broadband network will become mainstream. A BluRay movie is around 30gb in size. I can download at around 300k/s.  That's about 24 hours to download that. If I were to somehow get a 10x faster internet connection, it would still take 2.5 hours. Unable to stream it. However the drain on the server to do that would be quite intensive. I dont see digital distribution of HD content for the next 10-20 years. Hell, I'd be happy with digital distribution of DVD quality. Screw something 10x larger than DVD quality. DVD is barely 10 years old. BluRay will be supreme when HD-download content is out.

btw, i'm sending my resume as I speak for a market research analyst position so that I can do this for a living ...in fact i'm mentioning this board but i'm kinda full of it.....saying that this is a "market research club" at my college.

Ok, pizza hut.....here's lookin at you, kid. Crust plus team, here I come.

Also, for those of you who think internet is that super fast. Unless your willing to pay a few hundred a month, it's no-where near that fast.

10mbps is about as fast as I know of. And that is about fast enough to 'stream' a BluRay video over 8 hours... Or to translate. Stream a 2 hour video over 8 hours. So for every 1 second of video you get, you wait 3 seconds.

Sure you can stream and download. Half that speed. So 1 second of video for 6 seconds of waiting. Still fine for streaming. Quality never mattered anyways. Content matters.

Ok seriously tho. 30mbit connections are not on the horizion for most people. Shit, I'd be happy with a 3mbit that works 99% of the time. And I would fear the kind of server that could have 10,000 open connections streaming 30mbit speeds.  That would be a small service. Itunes would be more likely in the ballpark of 100,000 or more, on a friday night for the stream/download fest. That would require a internet BACKBONE connection, and a total re-design of the internet structure to allow for such bandwidths. full 1080p streaming/download video is years down the road. BluRay will have a strong foothold by that time.

"In america it will be at least 4-8 years before a new broadband network will become mainstream. A BluRay movie is around 30gb in size. I can download at around 300k/s. That's about 24 hours to download that. If I were to somehow get a 10x faster internet connection, it would still take 2.5 hours. "

I've been downloading HD south parks and it only takes about 1 1/2 hour. 22 minutes of 1080 video and sound. I'm using comcasts 4 Mb/sec. They offer 8 mb/sec. Faster services will be available within a year and a half (in my non-major metro area). A full (2 hr. )HD movie should take 5 hours using existing technology. This is a bottleneck and needs to be improved upon, but will be very quickly. IT kind of touches on the Net neutrality debate.


"Unable to stream it. However the drain on the server to do that would be quite intensive. "
This is totally wrong. Your just downloading the file, not running it off of their server. Xbox live is already doing this.

"I dont see digital distribution of HD content for the next 10-20 years. Hell, I'd be happy with digital distribution of DVD quality. Screw something 10x larger than DVD quality. DVD is barely 10 years old. BluRay will be supreme when HD-download content is out."

A lot can happen in 10-20 years. The WWW has only been around for about 15. Why would it take 10-20 years when it only took 1 1/2 for music. Given the MP3 model, I'm sure that the distributers are already looking at how that played out. Call me crazy, but if I can buy something without actually leaving my house and its cheaper, Im in!

If you assume that 1080p and 7.1 surround sound will be the major motivation for people to switch to a new movie format then it may be awhile before people switch to a downloadable format. After watching CD survive through DVD-A and SACD only to be replaced by MP3, and VHS survive through Laserdisc and DivX only to be replaced by DVD, I'm not sure that higher-quality is the main motivating factor for people to adopt a format. It is possible that you could capture people's interest with 480p content today, 1080i/720p content in 18 months to 2 years and 1080p content in 5 years; the beauty of this is that people wouldn't need to upgrade their hardware to take advantage of these improvements unlike a Disc based format.

Dude, you just totally knocked your knowledge of codecs.

I could compress a hour of 1080p video of south park into about 200-400megs.

A hour of 1080p Spiderman3 would be around 4-8gb.

Only 20-40x bigger. Seriously. learn how video compression works.

I can compress 24 minutes of anime into around 200megs of 1080p. And anime has a hell of a lot more detail than South Park.

4 minute trailers at 1080p are over 200 megs.

And where the hell do you find HD South-park?

I'm just saying, it's gonna be 2-4 years before it's an option for the elite. 6-12 for the every-day internet user. 6 years, is AGES when it comes to technology. And actually in america, I dont think internet is going to progress as much as you guys seem to think. Like I said earlier. I would be happy with a stable 3mbit. Screw 10mbit, screw 20mbit. I'd be happy with a STABLE 3mbit. 

Personally I prefer to have movies stored on physical media coming supplied in a nice box. Some people brought forth some good points with regard to internet access, even in countries with high internet penetration internet usage is far from 100%. Anothier issue is harddrive storage capacity, I think most people won't like the idea of having to delete movies from their harddrive to be able to download more movies. In full quality high definition movies may take up between 20 and 40 GB worth of storage.

Even if you would have the bandwidth and servers to stream all that content in realtime, negating the need to store content on your harddrive but instead have it stored on remote servers this would still be far from ideal from my perspective. Sometimes things go wrong at internet provider's end and if this would become a success it's not unthinkable servers may get overloaded during the weekend when overyone starts to stream huge amounts of data to their home system simultaneously.

I don't see this happening on a mass scale for many years to come, IMO the reason why Microsoft's mouth is currently pointing towards this direction has everything to do with them seeing HD-DVD is in a pretty bad position right now.

Digital Content Deliver != Internet.