it would be good if it replaced those external drives for moving Data, as for movies it would take some time but its sure better than DVD but i cant see any movie to have 50 GB space, unless its a series of all movies released that year (Lol) , but as for games of course it will be a replacment as seeing how Ps3 exclusives are, and the fact that Blu-Ray doesnt spin as fast as a DVD , which means less overheating which leads to less worrying about console repairs =]

You all talk about downloads being the future, well I don't think so... There are much more advantages with physical media. I wouldn't like buying a movie online because I would only be able to watch it where I downloaded it, what if I want to take a movie to my girlfriend's house? Well that was just an example and there are a lot more...

blu-ray will be standard in time....apr 2008 BD sale percentage compared to that of dvd were at 5% area...if you look at the last 3 months...not so much anymore...BD having up to 17% market share against dvd as we saw on last week of jan of 2009

http://www.blu-raystats.com/MarketShare/index.php

damn it i couldn't find that article about downloadable/streaming data market share...well anyways...if i remember correctly it's only 0.6% of the market share....it's not a big thing yet...and there are people out there who want the physical format...it just has more value to them having the physical form...physical formats will probably stick around for a while.....especially with that kinda of market share....

It took until recently for PC's to stop using CD's, I don't think blu ray will become the standard media for PC's, sure you can have a blu ray drive, but 99% of whatever you put in it will be DVD's or CD's.

So here is the reason why Blu-Ray will always have a place as far as a storage medium; Not everyone lives in a city. I don't know how many people of you have lived outside a city but your internet options are fairly horrible. You have 56k which would take somewhere around a few years to download 30 gigs (no real numbers used, I don't feel like calculating it). Your other option is satellite which is also really really bad. You can get reasonable transfer rates but you have a ridiculous cap at somewhere around 10 Gigs a months. There is going to have to be a lot that has to change in order to get them up to speed. There can't be a standard of direct download when its not possible for 40% of the population

Currently, rewritable blu-rays are 1.3GB for $1 and external drives 10GB for $1. If rewritable blu-rays would want to compete(in current situation) with external drives in price they would have to cost something like $2.3(Currently rwbd is $18 and rewritable dvds are ~$5). Not to mention that in the near future theres usb 3 coming, which makes external drives damn fast(600MB/s, which means that 50GB can be read in 1.5minutes, if drives just can handle such speed. :) ).

(Sure there are 50GB rewritable blu-rays too, but they cost just way too much atm.)

And Blu-Rays in laptops are currently more or less stupid as they eat way too much power and you can't have that happen with laptops. :P

It will actually be 4.8 Gbps, or so they expect. I think they said Vista loaded in 28 seconds.

I hate discs personally, but we both know that when diode prices come down you won't be able to get a laptop with a dvd drive. Just bought an asus (no BD) and I noticed in my searches that the readers have already purcolated down to the 1200-1300 range laptops.

Also, I remain skeptical of those usb 3 numbers. Usb 2 operates nowhere near it's theoretical limit thanks to crappy controllers on pretty much every system. Poor latency, long waits for the cpu to intervene after the buffer is full, and universally crappy drivers make it a horrible choice compared to firewire or eSata. A month ago I dd'ed 750 gigs to one of my usb 2 movie drives...... days

I think Blu-Ray will become a standard when a marginal difference in price justifies the marginal difference in quality between Blu-Ray and DVD.

If watching a Blu-Ray was 3 times better than watching a DVD, well maybe then most people would be willing to pay three times the price. Unfortunately it isn't!!

I was at Frys buying computer components last week.

Sony Blu Ray Drive, 70 dollars
Cheap ass Chinese DVD drive (cheapest they had there) 40 dollars

So yah A) I got the Blu Ray Drive and B) I don't think the switch will take as long as some people think (and yes it will happen).