I could make digital downloads work.

[katharsis]

Originally Posted by jsteinhauer

You need to have the right model. An you can't rely on streaming. Streaming will never work. AND, I won't argue that it could replace optical media. Some individuals get too much satisfaction from the activity of visiting the movie section of the store or the rental shop. That part of human nature can't be eliminated. For instance, Amazon.com is highly successful, but millions still enjoy a Saturday afternoon at the mall, socializing, trying on clothes and shoes and having lunch.

There are some important features of a successful model.

First, you have to allow the end use to make a single hard copy, if so desired. You would otherwise have to have a tremendous amount of storage with full reliability. One of the media servers in the recent Home Theater issue does automatic backups if a drive fails. This is an option.

Second, it's got to be full 1080p/24 with lossless audio. And before you get all in a bunch about how it would take many hours to download the whole thing, there is a way to make this okay. Like I said, for those who want to go to the store, buy a disk, take it home and play it, this won't satisfy your needs. But for those who order them from Amazon, it will.

The release of Movie A for home viewing is announced three months in advance, and goes on sale for preorder. If you want it on the release date, it's going to cost a premium, like it does now. The provider than has three months to stream the content to your hardware, in the background, off peak, whatever, in a slow or piecemeal way, with the guarantee that it will be available for play on the release date. Bandwidth is no longer an issue with this model.

If you buy a catalog title, since there is lower demand, it shouldn't take as long to download, say two days (in the offpeak hours). Similar amount of time as it takes to have one shipped.

It could also include options to download only 2.0 audio, 5.1 audio, 720p video, for lower prices or faster rates, to match your equipment.

Why won't this work?

I just got a Roku player for netflix yesterday and this thing streams in 720p with 5.1 audio. Picture quality is excellent (for what it is). I tried a few TV shows and 2 movies, load time was 20sec for the tv shows and about a minute for the movies. I have a 8MB/1MB cable line. You can also set it to regular 16:9 or full screen streams. So I don't see a problem there.

The whole thing with VOD is that it is just a rental. If you would offer a hardcopy or the digital download to keep, this will definitely be more expensive, as the studio wants to make more money on it.

Then the whole download it first thing... I don't think too many people would want to wait, a day or two for a movie to finish. I might be in the mood to watch a certain movie right there and then, but when it finished downloading, I might not want to watch it any longer.

There are ways to get this downloaded a lot faster, if they can implement some kind of P2P system, where not only the company providing the VOD service is uploading to you alone, but where other users who want to watch the same movie are uploading/downloading/sharing with each other at the same time. This will speed things up significantly (see torrents).

Just my 2c...