[QUOTE="saturndust"] Do you realize what you're talking about? digital distribution? not really a great one, blue ray add on? not gonna happen, paying for movies overrated? good movies ae not to be seen just one time.
Going back to the topic... Blue Ray on the 360 won't be announced...there are many factors to keep this away from happening so why bother thinking on some bizarre thing like that?
Apillow
You don't think digital distribution is going to take over? Then why are people downloading music like crazy and listening to podcasts? Movies are next on that list. With fiber being rolled out it's only a matter of time.
Oh.... I'm talking about owning the movies you download. Itunes already has tv shows on it and Netflix already has on-demand rentals. Then there's Vongo, Movielink and many more.
The amount of compression that is necessary in digital distribution is what bothers me. The maximum resolution of a movie off LIVE Marketplace is 720p, right? With 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound? Those weigh in at a half-dozen gigs easily, no special features included. Now take a movie that's encoded at 1080p with DTS-HD sound, and include several hours of bonus material, all encoded in 1080p as well. Filling a Blu-Ray disc's 50 gig storage capacity is not out of the question.
How soon is it going to be feasible to download EVERY movie you wish to own at 50 gigs a shot? And what are you going to store them on? A hard-drive disk with moving parts that will eventually wear out? And when that drive eventually fails, are you going to download your entire movie collection again? I own several dozen movies, and a couple television series. Do I want to be downloading several terabytes?
The entire idealof Blu-Ray and HD-DVD was to enhance the fidelity of presentation, but are people going to prefer more convenient yet compressed movies? It's likely. Digital distribution set music fidelity back at least adecade. The masses considered compressed mp3s to be good enough. People walk around with their iPod earbuds, listening to horrendously compressed music through completely inferior audio equipment, but they're oblivious to quality presentation it seems. Heck, we're still stuck with CDs while SACDs and DVD-A discs offer superior quality and have been available for years now. Are we going to see another victory of convenience over quality yet again? I hope not.
I realize that bandwidth will theoretically become nigh infinite at some point, but how long before true Blu-Ray quality downloads will be available to the same number of people who currently buy DVDs? I'm waiting, but not holding my breath.
Log in to comment