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You are confusing and combining rental with buying. I have yet to read where ANY studio is allowing downloading of their movies in FULL High Definition for PURCHASE. And assuming that is allowed, and consumers have the bandwidth and speed for HD movies (not yet), and at an affordable rate... how will these multi-gigabyte movies be stored and accessed on any TV in the house? Better yet, how can COPIES be made as backups for when that hard drive fails? I can't see studios allowing copies.
If any of this is ever worked out, we'll be many, many years down the road with HD (Blu-ray) discs well entrenched. So, at that point, how are you going to sell a downloaded version of a movie to someone who already has the 1080 HD version on disc??
Too many "researchers" are asking the wrong questions, and jumping to wrong conclusions.

Pay attention: There are no "HD" download services. None. There is no way to download 20 gigs of data over the internet. So where is this b.s. coming from? There seems to be a deliberate scheme to fool people into believing that a 16x9 low bit-rate movie is "HD", to sell people crap and call it caviar.
It won't work for long.

High speed internet isn't available to everybody in this country. Running down to the corner video store pretty much is. I prefer holding a movie in my hands then management gigs worth of data on a hard drive.

Funny you have heard og MPEG-4 encoding right? I download HD content all the time via directv or my 360. My TV recognizes it as HD and it looks fantastic. I think you are missing the authors point. In the future do you really think we will be carrying around little disks? Although Blu Ray has a niche right now (due mainly to ditching the idea of profits with the PS3) i too do not think the media it will last more than 5 years and be totally gone in 10. Now while this seems like far off just think about how long it will take for Sony to make back all the money it is losing ion the PS3

on demand hd is out there. I know comcast has hd on demand and soon they will have some free on demand movies in hd. I was told if you don't want all the extra stuff they put on the blu-ray disk you could get a movie in a 4 - 8 gig file at 720p.

HD downloads for making them portable or some old show that isn't floating in on ON Demand. The bad ones we use to download were a GB on avg. HD (1080 or 720) would have to be humongus. My ISP limits me to 10 GB a month. Comcast doing the same would effect 10s of millions. My PS3 was able to download 13 GB OVER my 10 GB limit in 1 day just downloading 8 HD movie trailers and 7 game demos in my first month of using my ISP. That was a long 2 weeks of them throttleling me down to less than dialup speed for violating the small print of the contract. At my 10 GB limit, there is no way I will waste any bandwidth on this. Imagine buy/renting 2 movies and the 1st comes in and the 2nd makes it to 20% before I get "caught". It would take weeks at less than 1kps to get the rest. Email would only take a day to process incoming and outgoing after that. As long as there aren't any baby pictures....
Oh well, yall have fun with this and missing out on the DVD extras/Deleted scenes.

o wow a 10 gig that is crazy. I watch tv and download some shows and i think I do that in to weeks. I have to say thank you to verizon for not hitting me with any limits. ( i do miss comcast even faster downloands but they don't have comcast in my part of town.)

I don't understand how Mr. Nystedt can confuse a low quality download with a HD movie. Even if you were to download in HD you will still need a way to back it up unless you're rich and willing to pay to download every time.

So until we have cheap 10 Terabyte hard drives available we need HD movies on a disc of some kind. I think most consumers will agree with me that we don't care if that disc is an HD DVD, Blu-ray or even something else.

We simply what a format that doesn't change and will do the job.

Until downloading the same quality is just as fast and easy as popping a disc in a player, there's no real competition. Also, there are home movies. I don't think youtube will ever hold 50 GB of info per upload. And permanent (non-dvr) TV/video recording to consider.

"We simply what a format that doesn't change and will do the job." Amen to that! I've a DVD player in three differnt rooms and a couple of hundred DVDs and really don't have the money or interest in replacing any of 'em. VHS to DVD was worth it, DVD to BD, I don't think so much so...

I agree. The media is not that important.
To paraphrase a comment - it's the image guys! Newer movies (and even cable TV) now aimed at the HD market is recorded with high image cameras. This improved image when put on DVD's and played on a standard DVD player attached to an HD TV looks great. We can use the standard DVD players already in the house (counting computers, I only have 7).
For example, watching re-runs of good old CSI on my Sharp Aquos TV hooked to DirecTV HD receiver, the older episodes look like they did on the old tube TV, but the newer episodes (2006, 7 & 8) are great. And that's only at 720.
Besides after the rootkit episode and another last year, I don't trust Sony.

I know people have their opinions but they are very closed minded. Not everyone has fiber internet or internet at all. There is no way that blu-ray is going away. I think that blu-ray will last until the Ultra High Definition Discs are released (resolutions up to 7,680 × 4,320 pixels). I think by then we will be able to easily download 30GB worth of movie but on the other hand we will still have to go buy the Ultra High Def discs because they are supposed to be terabytes long. Discs will never be completely gone unless the whole world is connected with fiber and used to the full potential. There are a couple of people that will take the lazy route and use on-demand and not experience the full potential of HD. But those people are a small percentage so Blu-ray will stand strong.

Well, I happen to own an HDTV and computer with tv tuner,bluray etc...I also have a ps3.When it comes down to it BD is by far better on the eyes wether it is on the tv or computer..As far as consumers buying online and only online, it will never be the demise of the disc. Most people dont have the money or time to download movies and watch them on a pc screen (most are 19inch and smaller). THe average household cant afford to have all the requirements to be able to 1.download 2.have a pc capable 3. be able to transfer to a tv 3.OR HAVE INTERNET!!!. Come on people wake up and see whats out there.Until sony or whomever comes out with direct download to a tv without exceeding bandwith limits and copyright laws there shall always be a demand for discs, now what kind is the question???

My prediction is that Blu-Ray will become the standard DVD of the near future. Sony is including PSP versions of the movies on many Blu-Ray 2.0 discs for portable use for extra value.

I hate downloading content since it fills up my hard drive (computer or PS3) and takes too long. A HD movie might take an hour or more and it tends to slow my email / Internet.

It could hurt rentals but to say it will hurt Blu-Ray is like saying HD downloads will put movie theatres out of business.

Blockbuster/Netflix/Amazon/ext. make money if they send out a DVD, Blu-Ray or HD Download. They will still rent/sell DVD's to those without fast internet connections or the computer to download/play the movies.

I buy Blu-Ray to play on my TV. I also get it for all the extras like deleted scenes, commentary, games, internet links, photo albums, etc.

Pete

I belive its still a LONGGGGGGGG way to get there, At least if when everybody could have speeds of 1Gb/ps, Till then....Dream on...

If you download a standard two hour movie, you are talking about 4GB+, if you were able to download a HD movie it would be at lease 8GB and maybe as much as 16GB. Not very many networks can handle that load. PC World recently had an article about people being kicked off their DSL or Cable connections because of "heavy" downloading. One was downloading over 8GB per week.

My wimpy satellite connection limits me to 200MB a day! (Except from 3AM to 6AM Eastern when it doesn't count, but my download speed only allows a max of 450MB in that three hour window). There are still a lot of people out there who are still on dial up. Those in metropolitan areas sometimes forget about those of us in the boonies with no DSL and no Cable. It will be a long time before movie downloading will replace discs.

I still order Service Packs on Disc.

I still think the main competition for Blue-Ray is the standard DVD discs and players. We have them, they work, and the movies look much better on HD TV's than on a standard TV. Granted not as good as it would if it were a Blue Ray disc, but with standard DVD we don't have the connection hassles. I will be interested to see what happens with the prices for the discs. Right now they are reasonable, but with the demise of HD DVD, who knows. And then there is the trust factor with Sony after the root-kit fiasco.

Hi rgreen4 . I didn't know we can order SP on disc? My DSL from Embark is dragging (only 50kbps If i'm lucky or in off hours limit)
I'd appreciate if you can show me how to order SP1 on disc for Vista (coming up) .
Thanks.(Have a good Friday)

(BTW. Should I turn off Auto/Update,so I can update by the disc ? If I could have the disc.) Since U know, It might take LONGGGGGGGGGGTIME.

You can't - Yet. When it becomes generally available there will be a place to order it on their website. The last one I ordered was the XP SP2. That time there was a blurb in PC World about how to order it, and I would expect it again. It will probably be several months.

And ad this person said about Directv's Download's, But DishNetwork also has this service of downloading HD Movies also now with there two new Receivers the 622 & 722. The only difference in these two models is the Hard Drive Recording time and both you can add a External Hard Drive to record even more movies and time. Just for your information. M. Thomas. :)