Why there will always be a need for a Physical Medium for Movies/Games

[RAILERSWIM]

I live in the country, where I'm getting the best internet that I can. 5 mbps. Which compared to the bandwidth I get at my house in the town where I go to college I get 50 mbps.

My ISP uses RF to unicast information to subscribers. We have an antenna that points to a tower 4 miles away. This is the only choice of internet we have (excluding Hughesnet, we tried them out for a year and we canceled but faced a cancelation fee of a couple hundred dollars which was refunded after they lost a lawsuit over false advertising (they are scammers)). So I'm happy to have internet most of the time out here where it's better than Hughesnet.

At home (in the country), we used to get 2.5 mbps where we could either play an online game, or watch Netflix, or all of us browse the web at the same time whilst using ad block. Then we upgraded to 5 mbps. Now we can watch Netflix and browse the web without need of ad blocking or anything to prevent excessive bandwidth use.

Still this isn't enough for good quality streaming. ESPECIALLY if streaming dominates the 4k media market. A 4k movie will be hundreds of gigabytes in size and will have an extremely high bit-rate. At best at my home in the country I will be able to get 2k quality if no one is using the internet and it's 3 in the morning. Still this would be quite taxing on my internet at my college house. I could get the file in at great quality but I would need all the bandwidth and none of my roommates would have any decent download speeds.

If worse comes to worse and a 4k medium doesn't actually happen; I will be skipping 4k movies and will just be upscaling or sticking with 1080p. If 4k is streaming only, 4k will only reach people who have ridiculous fast download speeds and so 4k will miss half of the customers wanting to go up to that resolution.

Last week I went into one of the local Best Buys, I asked an associate if they were getting any steelbooks for some of the upcoming titles. He told me that he wasn't sure but not to get my hopes up (and to just order online). His reason being is that he was told they are posibly phasing out BLU-RAY and that they are moving more into selling digital copy vouchers. I went on the same rant I did here (but I was polite) and I made the point that most people don't have the internet to go 100% streaming/digital especially if that is the main source for 4k content in the future. He agreed in the fact that he can barely support gaming and web surfing at the same time. When look at the movie section of this Best Buy... it was unfortunately dwindling. Yet I'm ok with that because my girlfriend works at Hastings so she gets discounts on movies and they will never not sell Blu-rays (they make way too much money off of used ones to not have a section whether new or used).

So there you have it my rant on why there will always be a physical medium for content. Take the CD for instance, it still exists today in the wold of streaming music, iTunes, etc. Granted CD's have diminished as well.