fundamental flaw in downloads as replacement of physical media

[zor]

There are about a dozen reasons why downloads will not work. But here's one that I can expand on that people often talk about. Hard drive crashes. Digitally storing all one's movies on a single hard drive (or, for the most part, an array), introduces a single point of failure for your entire movie collection. You could have a backup hard drive assuming any DRM would allow it, but even then you would just be having two single points of failure. Whereas, with BDs -- say you have a collection of 100 films -- if a failure occurs, it will be for a single disc, 99% of your collection will be safe and you just need to repurchase that single movie.

The only advantage is physical space, assuming you store backup hard drives raw. But once physical media evolves to things resembling tiny USB flash sticks, digital downloads would have lost all their appeal.