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.

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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.

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Thanks to Solar Wings for the special siggy.

People seem to be missing the point on both sides of this issue.

There is too much support industry wide for Blu-Ray that any other
alternative format succeeding is a near impossibility. To all those who hate
Sony or were for HD-DVD, sorry but Blu-Ray will probably have the dominant
force in the movie market for the next ten to fifth teen years. And everybody
has seemed to forgotten how long it took to go from VHS to DVD. It is going to
take a year or more for the infrastructure asserting Blu-Ray universally to be
molded and fine-tuned. More importantly you must realize that the movie
industry hates the downloading of movies legal or not. It creates a higher risk
of pirating when a Movie is streamed online or downloaded on a hard drive.
There is simply too big a force apposing piracy right now to make downloading
movies on a wide basis in any form to be allowed or universally accepted by any
industry. The exception may have happened with Netflix and possibly in the near
future may happen with Blockbuster Online but that is probably as far as it is
going to go for a long time. The industry loves the idea of effective DRM in
movies and that is what Blu-Ray offers, at least in the short term.

On the other side however, we already have a reliable and effective means of
viewing movies in decent definition, the regular DVD. Until Blu-Ray is well
established there is absolutely no reason to assume that new movies won't be
produced in standard DVD's. For many people the quality of standard DVD
has been perfectly fine for years and the only reason to make the jump to
Blu-Ray is when movies are no longer produced on DVD's. Even when that happens,
the new equipment will allow up converting your DVD's no matter what brand of
Blu-Ray Player you buy. This feature will have to be used as a marketing tool
to attract more business. So buying standard DVD's is the best solution for the
rest of the year, because you will be able use them for years to come.

HD-DVD player owners, the format is dead. As time goes on you will simply
run out of options. In the short term I can see some sort of accommodation with dual format players and possibly an add on to Blu-Ray Players. But when
standard DVD's go away, so will any support for anything HD-DVD. Why buy dual
disks with DVD when you can buy cheaper only Standard DVD right now. The only
alternative later on is piracy. Converting those HD-DVD discs onto a Blu-Ray
disc may be a viable option but its pirating and would take time to do, not to
mention the extra costs.

The focus of Satellite and Cable providers is and will be on HD viewing.
Once Blu-Ray is entrenched HDTV sales will go up drastically and cause more
demand for HD service packages. There will be no viable On Demand or Movie Downloads on
a wide scale when they are pumping more Bandwidth for regular viewing. Even if
there is On Demand on a wider scale, Your DVR already can already record movies
being watch or scheduled. On Demand Movies will not be more of a factor than it
is now.

In the end the main reason Blu-Ray has no competition is bandwidth. The
ISP's are going to drastically cut down on heavy bandwidth users in the next
couple of years. They have been making huge profits for years on the same
networks and still believe those profits don't justify updating of those
networks. The U.S. has
fallen to 15th in bandwidth (although we are still 1 ahead of Japan). Our
country invented then popularized the internet, which makes this so screwed up and may
need government intervention in the end to resolve this issue. Until then don't
expect to watch too many movies online in any given month. Even the Netflix
users will see that effect and be pissed when it happens or their service
charges go up. However Verizon is consistently adding new areas to thier ISP Network and they may make all the other ISP's eventually update their networks. The one light at the end of the long tunnel.

First, the ISP's have to update their networks. Second, I believe wireless
standard speeds will also have to be updated. Third, the piracy war will have
to be resolved. And Fourth, newer more efficient codec’s will have to be
introduced to make HD viable online. Those who think you are streaming HD
online now are delusional. Online movies may replace Blu-Ray when its life cycle
starts dying. That day is long off and has no real consideration in today’s
world.

I would venture to say that most people who care or own a hd dvd player or blu ray player care about having the best movie viewing quality.

I would bet that all the services you mentioned further compress the data, making the quality, at best, slightly more noticably inferior to watching on disc.

Again, like stated before in this discussion, when people want to own a movie, they are going to buy it on disc. When they want to rent it, or watch it once, they are more likely to download it, even though most will still rent from the store.

lets not forget that the dvd player just got the vcr put on the self with being able to recored. A lot of people are not going to go to bd till it can recored there tv shows. I have a very hi tech friend who till this x-mass when he got his dvr used vhs and he has a 3 month old dvd recorder/player.

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alspaintballmods.com

coastie65, I know they do make one and it would be cheaper to buy a pc with a drive that rights but here is the kicker the blu-ray disk are not rw they are a one time right disk

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alspaintballmods.com

The question posted by the auther, isn't will blu-ray go under today, the question is, will it last. Having watched the battle go on and Sony doing everything it could to win, even lie to people about how good it's product is (let's see who's all crying in 8 months, when version 2.0 comes out with all the features that HD had, and blu-ray does not. Tell me how you feel with being told you have to buy a new player, to get any of the extra features blu-ray will offer, and having to pay Sony's 800 or more to get it, after already spending the min it cost when the battle ended of 400, go to be mad). I think you'll find that people will get mad and want something else to replace the Blu-ray player that they already spend a lot of money to get, and be told to get another one, if they want to see the extras and such. With Hi-speed getting faster all the time (Comcast is going to be testing a new product this year that has speeds of 130 meg, to complete with verizon's 35 meg and up speeds). It is true that there will always be video rental places around, and yes there are alot of people that wont be able to afford hi-speed internet that will allow them to download HD movies, but most of those same people will most likely keep buying dvd's as it's more in thier price range then Blu-ray. If you look at the stores, they are still carrying DVD's, cause it's a profitable business and I don't see that changing anytime soon. So, with all this in mind, will Sony, I mean Blu-ray really take off, will to a degree, but I think you'll find that other media or downloads will replace that. If you look at the fact that Amazon is stepping up it's storage, to keep track of digital media for it's customers and other companies doing the same. With services like Hulu and others offering people to watch tv and movies online, I think Blu-ray will have it's place for abit, bit I doubt anything long term. (Look at some of thier partners, Disney just released 101 dalmatians in standard def only, tells you how little these companies are investing in reformatting thier movies to make them HD).