@skeeuk, i was looking at your sig, did you really buy into the old circuit city divx movie rental program, or do you just use the divex codec that is popular for downlaoding ripped movies

You are right about quality but that is not the point.

It is way too expensive for having the superior quality for now...

Mass market would enjoy digital ditribution rather than blowing money on a high-tech installation.

Remember also that hardware = low margin ; digital content = high margin.

They want to sell movies and content, not expensive piece of hardware... quality is something relative for the moment I guess.

I think people prefer buying a Bluray player and spend some money on it once, than having to pay more for faster internet connections,  And you have to think that there are countries where internet speed is not to great. I think most people woudnt be able to download a lot of HD movies, and it would just be tiresome to watch a movie.

With phisical media, you just buy the hardware and buy or rent the  movies, no problem in that.

Mmmh not so sure .... fast internet connections are cheap commodities now...

what exactly do you call cheap?

Am I the only one who remember that many DVDs were selling for $30 at this point in the format's life span? Those that didn't had squat for special features.

Black Friday will be bringing us our first sub-$200 players.

December will bring us The Dark Knight, the biggest film phenomenon in a decade.

Already the adpotion rate has been faster than normal DVD. Within 2 years, players will be readily available for under $150, and increased production will reduce the cost of BR discs to DVD levels.

The only reason to panic over this is if you thought BR would be an overnight success. That's foolish. BR is slowly cutting into the market.

Movies will go to the cloud, so back-ups are unnecessary and streaming will be king. Purchase a movie once, watch as many times as you would like, whenever you like, for however long you like. This could possibly cripple the current broadband infrastructure here in the US, but there are ways to improve networking algorithms and charge ultra bandwidth hoggers for their excessiveness. It is the future. I will get a glimpse of this future with Netflix HD streaming on the 19th. The quality will not be as good as blu-ray, but the ability to browse through 300 movies and watch them almost instantly is a VERY big plus for me. Hopefully my connection will be able to handle it.

I'm always curious why so many people take extreme views such as its all about downloads or physical will always be king.

For the foreseeable future both are going to be viable, which is why you're seeing Sony and others get behind both continued physical media sales as well as downloads and streaming.

Rarely in our history has anything switched overnight and its highly unlikey this will be the case here.

Even if Western infrastructures improve to support a mainly download/stream approach its likely that physical media will still be dominant in many, many other countries that simply won't have the infrastructure to support downloads for the mass market.