yer advertising means shit.

That Australia at 12mbit/s is total BS. Most people have 1.5mbit or 512kbit here.

plus few monitors and no tvs go up to 1920p so it is gonna be quite exclusive and expensive to upgrade...

Apparently noone followed up on my question so I spent an entire afternoon trying to find out what this is all about. This proved to be a rather frustrating day as of all the 4-500 links checked, pretty much every link fell back to the press release itself. There was no single independent link with substance I could locate or even a picture of what it is all about (and a domain name search apparently ended in Tennesse swampland as somebody else found out)... makes you go hmmmm.. vapourware anyone?

At least I can guess what the magical cheap 100GByte disc will turn out to be. The only interesting guy in the dreamstream troupe who has the required knowledge in the field is a Dr E. Levich who has been a proponent for every multilayer optical disc system proposed in the past 20 years. He did push (still pushes?) HD VMD which is a four layer DVD disc holding 20GByte data (a working system apparently was shown at a (Blu-ray) conference). So without any further leads I conclude they pepped up the system to read an about 20 layer standard DVD disc. Such a device could be built on (slightly modified) DVD manufacturing lines and read by common (but modified) red laser DVD readers as promised in the ad blurbs.

If this is really what dreamstream is trying to sell against Blu-ray?  hahahahahahahahahahaha

Also Italy has high average advertised speed, but reality is very different: if you live in towns you can consider you very lucky with 2Mbps, and I couldn't believe my eyes when they decided to upgrade my line in Genoa to 7Mbps (but I don't really reach that speed, as the last mile wirings are quite rotten, in ideal conditions of humidity, with lower dispersion, I reach little more than 6Mbps), but if you live in the country, you can consider yourself incredibly lucky if you can get a 512-640kbps anti-digital divide line, but at my cottage in Umbria I still have 56kbps nominal, 48kbps real speed. And Italy is the 7th developed country in the world regarding GDP, and in the past reached even 5th rank.  This to say that there is still a big market for physical media.

I remember reading an article that stated the human eye can't really differentiate anything higher than 1080p. If that's true then what's the point of going any higher?

I have noticed a couple of comments like this from you... another one was claiming the the X360 didn't use HD discs.

I hope you realise a Blu-Ray disc on it's own is not HD, because HD is a range of pixel resolution, not a storage medium.

You could put HD content onto a CD if you wished, never mind a DVD or Blur Ray, so no, Holographic discs are not HD unless you store HD content on them... which I think bardc said they hold terrabytes, which means they hold a damn site more HD data than Blu Ray discs do.

Not so simple, it depends on the distance from which you look and the dimensions of the single pixel. It depends on the context, at the cinema 1080p would look grainy, particularly from the front rows, on a 32" to 50" or even more TV watched in the living room and not standing too close it's fine.

Edit: to be more precise, the absolute measure of maximum eye resolution is an angle (*), its chord at a given radius is its spatial resolution at a distance from the eye equal to the radius.

(*) to make things less simple, eye resolution isn't constant, it varies and it's higher in the inner zone of visual field.

Does the large majority of the population have a 1Gbps connection?

And it's probably capped.

^^Do the majority of households have blu ray players? More households have access to broadband than bluray. I dont have any problems with HD disc formats but I can see countries with high speed connections benefiting from Down loadable HD content. japan have had 1080i for over a decade now.

Current situation, yes, potential no, when BD players price drop, telcos will still be unwilling to bring broadband to scarcely populated areas, so physical media will be the only hope for a very large share of world population living with 56k, or 512k if very lucky, connection.

The only broadband alternative for them, satellite, is costly and having ridiculous upload speed compared to download and horrible lag, it's a connection practical only for non interactive massive downloads and nothing else, it's just more interactive than plain old satellite TV.

OTOH, if we think about households with broadband, you're right, but in a way similar to what happens with DVD and VHS: most people watches TV programs mostly live, as they are broadcast, records a few of them, and buy even less of them, those they really love and want to keep, on physical media, it happened in the past and it will keep on happening, I fully agree. BD can thrive on this small share of watched contents just as DVD did.