Why downloadable music & movies are not comparable

[Gremal]

Originally Posted by Blu-Ray Buckeye

1) Seeing trumps hearing: People download music despite the imperfect quality because people are visual creatures moreso than audio. Some people are audiophiles, but seeing the difference is a bigger deal than hearing it. It's just true.

First of all, Joe Public isn't particularly quality conscious in audio or video. Sure, he can see the difference between NTSC and HD, but as for 1080p vs 1080i, that's less of an issue for him. The danger is that, as soon as the technology exists to support downloads of movies in 1080i or 720p, it could hurt the adoption of an optical format like blu-ray unless it is far more entrenched than it is now.

2) Portability for music doesn't compromise quality as greatly as it does for movies: Music downloads are important because listening to music while on the go is far more critical & viable than watching a movie on the go on a tiny screen. People want their iPod for jogging, at the gym or while working or whatever. The consumer gets close to the same quality as the CD. However for movies the "on-to-go" experience is infinitely inferior.

That's a good point, but consumers are increasingly accustomed to downloading content of interest to them and if we're not careful it will happen with movies, just like it did for music.

3) People download hit singles... can they download individual movies scenes for a quarter?: Music downloads have taken off because people like to buy the singles for pop so they can avoid buying the full crappy CD. This is a nonfactor for movies where you obviously buy the entire thing. All these geniuses greatly underestimate this effect. I think it's a driving force in downloaded music.

No doubt technology needs to change and improve to support downloadable HD movies. But companies like Microsoft and Cisco are throwing a lot of cash around to try to make this happen in the near future. Technology is not static.

4) Disposable content: Downloadable music is meant to be fairly disposable. You can pick up the latest big hit pop garbage single for under a buck and when you're sick of it who cares... it was meant to be disposable anyway. The same is not true of movies that people buy.

But this is the direction software availability is headed in our society. I don't know exactly what model for HD video companies like MS and Apple have kicked around. Maybe you download a movie for free and it stores itself on your hard drive and each time you want to watch it, you pay a fee. This model will be pushed HARD by some content providers and studios. I don't want that, but if we're not careful, that's what we could end up with.

5) Infrastructure: The hardware & S/W backbone to even make mainstream HD movie downloading viable is at least 10+ years away, and that's being kind. I don't need to go into details on this.

That is probably true, unless compression schemes get a lot better. Let's just hope that Blu-ray reall takes off by the time the industry can support HD video downloads.