Replies

There are two video markets. The rental market will be taken over by downloads, but the purchase market will continue to use discs.

Full quality HD movies run anywhere from 20 - 50 gigs. That means that a 500 gig drive will hold somewhere from 10 - 25 movies — assuming the drive doesn’t crash and you lose all your heavily DRM’d movies. Optical disks are cheap, can be purchased at stores and don’t take any special technical knowledge.

There are two video markets. The rental market will be taken over by downloads, but the purchase market will continue to use discs.

I don't believe so - as download speeds increase, there is no rational reason for people to pay for packaging and media. The only real difference between recording industry distribution and video industry distribution is file size.

Full quality HD movies run anywhere from 20 - 50 gigs. That means that a 500 gig drive will hold somewhere from 10 - 25 movies — assuming the drive doesn’t crash and you lose all your heavily DRM’d movies. Optical disks are cheap, can be purchased at stores and don’t take any special technical knowledge.

Oh, optical disks and other archival formats are going to be popular consumer items. But that won't be how we get the content in the first place. And if the DRM is too heavy to allow for easy consumer archival or if it interferes with portability, the consumer will turn to other options. This is no longer guess-work - we've already seen the entire scenario played out in the recording industry.

Full quality HD movies run anywhere from 20 - 50 gigs. That means that a 500 gig drive will hold somewhere from 10 - 25 movies — assuming the drive doesn’t crash and you lose all your heavily DRM’d movies. Optical disks are cheap, can be purchased at stores and don’t take any special technical knowledge.

Right now, today, a 500 GB hard drive can be had for $120. If it holds 20 movies, that is $6 each. Any bets on what a bigger drive will cost next year?

Those optical discs have to be pretty cheap to beat that. My bet is that the wave of the future is downloading both sales and rentals.

As far as losing DRM'd movies goes, I know people who have hundreds of VHS tapes. That "investment" is going to be worthless in a couple of years when VHS players go the way of the dodo.

At least with movies on a hard drive, your kids won't get peanut butter on it and let the dog lick it off.

Any bets on when real 3-D technology becomes available? Not the kind with hokey special glasses, but some kind of a miniature stage in your living room with 3-D actors in 3-D settings. That will make all previous video players and formats obsolete overnight.