No ceasefire in DVD format battle

[Shadowself]

For the sake of arguement assume...
You have PLENTY of storage in your home storage network (personal NAS or SAN).
You don't mind NOT having the physical media or the inserts or such.
You don't mind NOT having any of the "extras" that come with most movies these days.
The average data rate for the for the video and sound is 22 Mbps (including a great PQ for video and a great AQ for audio).
The average movie length in you "library" is (or will be) two hours.
That the movie can start playing as soon as it has buffered enough to complete playing before it is completed downloading.

How long do you have to wait to buffer?
(Some VERY QUICK "back of the envelope" calculations... precision not guaranteed, but you'll get the idea.)
If your home connection throughput is (Mbps)... then you need to wait (minutes)
1 ... 115
2 ... 110
3 ... 104
4 ... 99
5 ... 93
6 ... 88
7 ... 82
8 ... 77
9 ... 71
10 ... 66
11 ... 60
etc.

For most of us it takes well under an hour to go to the brick and morter store to get the physical disk (and all the other nicities it has with it).

Until average download speeds exceed 11 Mbps or so then I don't see downloading movies replacing buying Blu-ray disks.

And remember, even if your home line is rated at 10 Mbps you rarely get that full bandwidth for two or more hours continuously. You might only average 5 Mbps over those two hours which would significantly increase that buffering time. Also your buffering has to take into account this variability while it continues to download as you are watching it so you have to buffer more than the absolute minimum (or risk having the movie stop during a critical scene!).

Bottom line: I don't see online downloading replacing Blu-ray for the average household for at least 10 years or more.