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it seems more and more likely that Blu-ray will be the movie disc format of the future.

This is like saying that Acme brand buggy whips will be the horse drawn carriage accessory of the future. Digital downloads will be the viewing format of the future, no matter how hard the studios work to lock down content - the era of big media controlling viewing formats is drawing to a close.

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.

Digital downloads will be the viewing format of the future

Just because CES believes that doesn't make it so. Physical media will be with us for a long, long time.

A more correct statement is that optical discs are on their way out. HD-DVD/Blu-Ray will probably be the last generation of consumer-grade optical media for purposes of movies.

I can see movies being distributed on Flash cards just as soon as either compression formats improve significantly or the per-GB cost of a Flash chip comes down a few dozen bucks.

Large-scale digital streaming is a fantasy. Hard drives don't have the storage space and no one has the bandwidth to run a truly mass-scale operation like that. Not to mention that not "everything" will be streaming. What if I like the movies of an independent Icelandic director? Will Comcast offer his movies? I highly doubt it.