CHUD.com - Done With Discs

[Banjo]

By Devin Faraci

Last week the big news, or so it seemed, was that Warner Bros announced they would go all Blu-Ray. The format war is over, was the consensus, and Blu-Ray has Betamaxed HD-DVD. But to me this was a minor skirmish in a bigger conflict, one whose eventual victor has barely begun to enter the fight. While everybody was paying lots of attention to already-archaic disc based physical storage media, the future winner - digital downloads - gained some ground as Netflix announced a new set-top box that would allow subscribers to download movies from the internet and watch them on their TVs.

Digital download is where this is all going. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are distractions along the way; the truth is that anyone who replaces their entire DVD catalog with hi-def discs is going to feel like a major schmuck in about a decade or less. There are a few hurdles standing in the way of a world where all of our entertainment is streamed to us on demand, but they're all relatively minor, and they're all obstacles that are going to be surmounted by the inexorable forward march of technology anyway.

http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=13101

People still just don't get it. It's not happening in the near future, not if the internet providers are unable to keep up with the demands if it goes mainstream within a few years.