Why downloadable content may not be the next big thing....

[jon s]

A lot of analysts have been saying that Blu-Ray will be a short lived format. Why? They say that downloads will be the next big thing. I disagree with that for a number of reasons...

1. The biggest reason is bandwidth. Time Warner is planning to charge users by the amount of bandwidth used. They are about to use this model in Texas if it has not been in place by now. The reason? Most of the bandwidth is being used by video downloads, 5% of the users use up 50% of the bandwidth. users exceeding the cap will be charged a higher rate. if successful, they will probably go nationwide with this plan. All of the other ISPs will probably jump on the bandwagon as well

2. Downloadable content may be hi-res but it ain't high def. Compression is so high on the content, they look like SD-DVDs or worse.

3. on a rental basis, you have 30 days to view the content. Once you start it, you have 24 hours to complete it.

4. you don't have any special features.

5. i don't believe the download will support high def audio to reduce file size.

6. most users want something in your hand if you gonna want to watch it in the future. If you download 10GB of data for each movie and you eventually run out of space, what then? A 500GB hard drive is only 50 movies at that rate. And 10GB is not much better than SD-DVD which is 8.5GB.

7. download speed. My download speed tops out at 5 Mbps. That's megaBITS per second, not megabytes. It takes 30 minutes to download a gigabyte. A 10GB movie wud take 5 hours!

So it may be awhile before download really takes off. For me, a long while. If the internet providers start charging by bandwidth usage... downloads will never happen for me.