The future of the home video market with a streaming download rental model?

[Elandyll]

The anouncement of Netflix in HD on 360, Tivo and other set top boxes (Roku? - hopefully the PS3 will follow) make me wonder about the futur of the Home Video market in fact.

What is happening:

Netflix is a great service most of the time. For a price between 8 and 16 bucks a month, you have access to virtually an unlimited quantity of movies (physically, 3 at a time in the most popular plan).
Much more so if you get the Online Streaming plan (not available at the $4/month sub if memory serves).

Ok.

Right now, clearly, the quality suffers quite a bit due to the technology, and the HD (waiting to see what's going to happen on new releses with those) is probably going to be a tough one to stream.


Fast forward in 3-4 years.

By then, HD streaming would work probably pretty good, with increased quality thanks to new codecs / larger bandwidth. Still not quite Blu Ray quality of course, and Audio probably only DTS or maybe DTS-HD. The catalogue available (300 films at first) is now pretty large.

BUT now ... for -$9- a month (ok, by then probably $12 with inflation), you'd get -ALL- the movies you could ever want to see, and all new releases available on time, just with a click on your TV, no limitations (except you don't own them, but you can watch em at any time)?

Uh, am I the only one wondering : how would the Home Video market survive a business model like that? (visibly , it sounds great for consumers though) I mean, how would studio ever make any money if they get a fraction of a cent per stream? What would happen of all the brick and mortar stores? Let alone rental, it would die quickly with something like that, except in the most rural of America where you'd still find Red Box kiosks due to the lack of reliable online services, but what of all the Best Buy and co? Would they only sell TVs and Appliances now ?
Everybody gets to be a new Spencers?
Also, how would studios justify financing risky projects, which used to recoup some or all of their cost on Video if they failed, with something like that?


Just some speculative Fiction that make me wonder

Feel free to add your 2cps about this...