If you were up to date with current technologies, you can easily say DD is way ahead of our time. With the internet infrastructure we have now, we will never see a 1080p or even a true 720p equivalent to Bluray. Well, if you can wait a couple days downloading then yeah no problem. This is NOT the ideal replacement for the mass consumers. Majority of the consumers will just go out to the store and buy a physical copy. Whats wrong with that? Would you rather wait a couple days, or simply drive to the store and purchase a movie or a couple in the highest possible form of quality all within an hour or so. You get all the benefits and freedom of physical ownership. Sell, trade, borrow, collect, or bring them to whatever and whenever you wish.

you know what the funniest part about those articles is? they didn't start to surface until it was clear that hddvd was going to lose.

its a common pattern that all soar losers follow. when they lose, which is always innevitable of course, they start comming up with crazy statements like: "at this rate, it's going to take x amount of years to catch up" or things like: "pretty soon, digital downloads are going to take over, so blu ray ultimately lose."

no Id!ots, so according to your logics, all these industry analyst and owners and investors are just so stupid and shortsighted, given their years of experience in their respectable field, that they just can't see how meaningless it truly is that blu ray is now the standard format. and of course that's why Microsoft had an HD DVD add on for the 360, because Digital downlaod is just around the corner, and they just wanted to lose some money, so they went right ahead with the add on.

you know USA is a country with 300+ million people, and any normal thinking person knows that they actually dont know one person in the country that doesnt own a dvd player, unless they're homeless of course. and they know very very few people with access to a computer, even less with broaband connection. so you're looking at a ration of of like 100:1 100 being dvd players and 1 broadband connection.

keep telling yourselves that digital download is going to somehow eat into blu rays market share,to a point where it compromises the format's momemtum in the near future, when the profits the companies are making from digital download can't even fuel their private jets for a year. and im not even going to get into internet piracy and other factors.

Man a lot of HD DVD lovers butt hurt. How else do you explain the amount of these articles?

Another one of these articles...

expect moar

I bought Hitman and Blade Runner today, cost me over $70.

For at least another ten to fifteen years. Even then they will only hold the larger portion of market share and not the entire market itself. There will be room for hard copies for many more years to come. Anybody that says a 6 to 8 mbps tranfer rate "digital HD download" is anything acceptable when compared to the better looking true 24 to 36 mbps transfer rate for a BD disc is kidding themselves. As HD gets more and more popular so will the standards that people want to see their hardware perform and at the moment digital downloaded movies are not up to speed.

Is the complete lack of a standard. Right now you have competing standards, which means that you are stuck locked into one vendor's implementation.

For example, if you download a movie using the XBox Live movie service, will you be able to play it back on your friend's Apple TV box? Will you be able to play it back on another 360? Nope, and Nope...

Where with Blu-Ray, I can play it back on my PS3, or a buddy's Samsung Blu-Ray player, or on a PC with a Blu-Ray drive, etc. Digital distribution currently lacks this ability.

Ironically, the only method of digital distribution that is standardized is PIRATED movie formats (DiVX, MKV, etc.)

Until there is a standardized format for digital distribution, I don't really see if taking off. Unless Apple can pull a rabbit out of their hat and pull off an iTunes music style success out of their video service. And honestly, I can see Apple pulling it off before Microsoft does... ;-)

These are the same people that were out buying HD-DVD players and HD-DVD movies. These are the same people who are holding on to their XBOX360 and claiming it is a better console than the PS3.

These are the people.. that lack any sort of long-term insight. Digital Downloads have been blown out of proportion because of i-tunes and what not, but that doesn't mean that is where we are headed.

Fanaticism from i-pods (and one hell of a marketing and ad campaign) is what led to the rise of i-tunes. The same will not happen with movies. Mark my word, Blu-Ray will become the primary high-definition media for the future.

Do you think people with a 5mbps cable or 2.5mbps DSL will be patient enough to download 10+ gigabyte movies? You have to be kidding me.

I'm sick of seeing these articles as well. They're often written by complete clods with no real understanding of how much else needs to happen with respect to infrastructure requirements before everyone can download anything they want. Also, there seems to be a growing number of people out there who are collecting movies these days, and for that a disc is preferable. When I sit down to watch a movie, I want to watch it today, not two days from now. Take a look at the movies that are available for rent on the XBL Video Marketplace: The 720p versions are about four times larger than 480p versions, so don't even think about 1080p, and don't even think about special features, either.

As strange as it may seem, it looks like Sony may have finally won a format battle. Provided that they don't get stupid from here on in with respect to pricing for movies and players, then I'm all for the format from now on.

One other quick thing: Does anyone think that the Xbox 720 won't have an internal Blu-ray drive? I bet that it will. We may even see an add-on drive for the current Xbox.

1. ISPs aren't ready to let you download 10-20gb HD movies...heck I have a 20gb cap on my downloads.

2. If I buy a movie I want to have a digital/physical backup...with DRM, I'm not sure they'd let me make copies.

3. Portability...I can easily bring a disc to a friend's house...I doubt they'll let me copy/move a downloaded movie.

4. Movie studios don't want DD right now...they're not ready.

5. There is no reason why they cannot co-exist.

6. Music works because it gives you the advantage to just pay for the songs that you want...this dosen't exist with movies.

only for the people that want the blu ray format to die will say that DD will replace blu ray - the video rentals are way ahead of the DD - blu ray is the next dvd face it

Instead of talking about a better format, to out do the Blu-Ray. Everyone speculates downloading will be kill the disc. LMFAO!! Has Sony made that great of a format???

Plastic discs are dead?

It's funny, I needed to format my parents PC recently and rebuild. At one point I needed a FLOPPY DISK. If you think plastic discs are dead or soon will be, you're brain dead.

DD is the future, but it's not the near future.

I personally like having a disc but then again i am not supporting blu-ray because it is too expensive right now. The problem with this type of article is that there are lots of PS3 supporters on this site so a conversation on digital downloads vs. blu-ray will be the same as the conversations about HD DVD vs. Blu-ray, both conversations are going no where in a hurry.

I work for a major telecom company, and let me state something that should be obvious. . . HD on demand is compressed as hell! It is barely 720p, and it usually tiles up during action scenes. . .

this is so cute, cry cry cry

Another butthurt HD DVD fanboy, who resorts to the last tactic and almost laughable presentation of Digital Distribution, go right ahead, download that 15gb movie, I mean it's only gonna take 3-5 days.

Don't use the argument of downloading songs,FLAC, or MP3 are only 3-11 MB's of data, which can be downloaded in only a couple seconds, using this logic, downloading a movie over 10GB movie is retarded, please the infrastructure and society isn't near ready because of the cost of installation, and maintenance, a complete overhaul would be needed it just isn't tangible, anyone who thinks otherwise that it can work with the next 5 years needs help.

Physical data, like discs, don't corrupt, they don't delete the information on themselves, while errors are only normal for digital media/data.

BR is a great format but dvd's are the norm. Most will not spend the money to upgrade for years. In 5yrs on demand HD will be up to par and BR will be forgotten.

Another?

As i have said countless times before, downloads are far from being the normal way people will access HD content. I say, when we reach 2012, Blu-ray will still be there flying high, only, downloads will play a bigger role than they do now. But Blu-ray disc will still have the biggest chunk.

Say 65% 35%

Maybe when the PS4 and Xbox 720 comes out maybe that will be the big thing.
Digital Downloads have been around since the DVD.
So, why haven't have they replaced DVD?
It's because there not perfected.
In 8 years DD will be the only format to get but not anytime soon.
iTunes, XBL, Net Flix, Lime Wire, Rhapsody, etc. are good but they lack in many areas to developers.
ex.) Space, Native Resolution settings, Bit rate size, and frame rate issues.
Until these issues are fixed and perfected I don't see DD as being the main thing to buy and use in the future.
Not to mention it not only has to compete w/ these issues but also has to be valid with the new TV's coming out OLED.
1,000,000:1 Contraction (100X Better color)- compared to 10,000:1
Resolution of 4080P (40X Better)- compared to 1080P
Better Sound 8.1 or 10.1 Surround Sound - compared to 7.1 Surround Sound
Seriously now they have to do a lot before people will accept it.
I'll admit for games and movie rentals yeah hands down that's the future but to replace something as complex as a Blu-ray movie will take time to master.

How many of these articles are going to get approved? It's really starting to get sad. It's also funny that the same number of people that were all over HD-DVD are now saying DD is the future. Even the Studios have said that it is not even close to being a viable mainstream solution. And please stop bringing up CDs and MP3s, you're only embarassing yourself. DD for movies and DD for music are two different things. Music: people got tired of buying CDs with one or two good songs; also, even with a dial-up modem, it doesn't take too long to download a song and storage size isn't a problem. Movies: size and download speeds are nowhere near where they need to be for this to be feasible. Storage is a problem due to the very large size of HD quality video files. Portability is a problem, you can load 1000's of songs on an Ipod, but you can only put a few hours of video on one. Lastly, people like the WHOLE movie, not individual parts. No one says, "Hey, I love Superbad, but I only want the parts with McLovin in it. F*** the rest of the movies." It doesn't happen. DD needs at least 10 years before it is a viable solution.

for as long as hdd's can just die off, theres no way most of us are going to digital downloads, takes too freakin long anyway, will people just shut up as stop bringing in all these stupid articles of the same old "digital downloads is gonn kill bluray" crap, anyone who believes that is completely out of their mind!

Article after article come along and say "bluray has already lost to Digital Distribution" and the same gaggle of zealots spend there time with their fingers in their ears saying "no no no!".

How about you provide some kind of rational argument instead? Digital Download is *already* a massive part of how people get their media.

People wanted mp3s instead of CD. Why? Price and convenience.
People want On-Demand and Download movies over BluRay. For the same reason.

I'd be very happy to skip a little quality for the price and convenience of having *every movie available on demand at all times* as opposed to a stack of discs and having to drive to the store.

I'd be very interested to see some growth numbers comparing bluray vs. Digital Distribution of Video.

... no one even CARED about these things when it was just Blu-ray vs HD-DVD.

good luck making money hahahah