meh. we're a long ways from that.

Our infrastructure is partially to blame. Most people don't pay attention to download/upload rates, accept maybe gamers. But the average hi-speed connections, rarely ever touch the speed they are sold at. I have a "hi speed" cable connection, and my download rate sucks and is often affected by activity of other users.

I download at about 4Mb per second, 8,192 megabytes = 1 gigabyte. A standard Blu Ray movie is about 20 Gigs. That's assuming the cable companies would operate on their own cable service, and not make people work through dial-up or DSL.

Time Warner, Comcast, Cox Communications and other digital cables aren't built to interact to that extent with their customers. The cable connections often lag because there are too many internet users, now add downloading movies through digital cable boxes, and i am pretty sure the download rate would be about an hour a movie.

Until these companies adopt fiber optics the fastest and most secure data transfer at the moment, we are far from having a device that downloads movies onto a flash device. On top of that, the cable companies would have to dump tons of money into their private infrastructure. They would require enormous storage servers, to store every single movie made, and make it readily available for download.

I like the idea, but a lot of change would have to happen in order for it to occur, not just a drop in price of Hardware to store the movie.

The cost of hardware is not what will drive the long-term success of a format (see HD-DVD). Media will.

Why are you focused on downloading? Expect internet search set top boxes, like this, to be pushed by providers.

First, video on demand/internet boxes will appear and then downloads will follow.

Again, service providers have no incentive to provide you with a DVD player of any kind, but quite a bit of incentive to provide you with a box that helps them bundle their services.

Video on demand is doable now, it will greatly impact DVD sales.

So far the only Cable company that i have read about even thinking of doing that is Comcast, and they're still only thinking about it, and if they did move forward with it, from what i have read, only 20% of their subscribers would have access to it, even at that, they are going to pay higher surcharges for it.

The technology is almost there, just a bunch of politics behind it

Last time I checked, the cost of hardware is exactly what has kept next-gen disc media from high levels of consumer adoption.

I thought Comcast has already tested DOCSIS 3.0 and was moving to deploy it in areas where Verizon has deployed FiOS.

The estimates I've read were DOCSIS 3.9 in 40% of homes by 2011. Who knows how many will have FiOS.

Both DOCSIS 1.0 and 2.0 support speeds up to 38Mbps, so DOCSIS 3.0 isn't really the problem. The bandwidth is there and it's cheap. The problem is that the equipment required to support and deliver such speeds is cost-prohibitive when you look at the overall ROI.

But then you factor in companies like Verizon and their FiOS product. Obviously, someone at Verizon said fuck it.

It's like if there was a war between companies that produce ejaculating vibrators.

because there is still information to be transferred, that little set top box interacts with an ethernet/WAN and a host server. You have to download information to it, that process sucks up a lot of bandwith.

With that set-top box, you're only accessing a database that currently exists and that still only offers what is available, not so much exactly what you want.

If i want to watch "Strange Brew", i have to search for it, if one of the databases doesn't have it, i have to move to DVD or blu ray format.

In order to have interactive television, in which you choose to watch, what you want, at what time you want, the show would need to be stored somewhere and accessible for download.

I don't want to pay $400 for a new player, $50 for new discs and $2000 for a new television. HD discs have zero appeal to me. Sure they look pretty but nowhere near enough to make me spend that kind of money.

I don't really care about it myself. Neither does America, apparently. Last I read 32% of homes had a HD TV, but only 17% had signed up for HD service.

People care about content over how it looks. By the time prices drop to an acceptable level, the next thing will be here.

Really? Well, you're not better than me.

Those are my feelings exactly. DVD currently has a better catalog, is more widely available and is much more affordable. Why would I want to pay more for less content?

That's the issue I see. Increased picture quality and storage don't seem to count for much with a consumer base that still doesn't grasp the difference between widescreen and formatted for tv releases. My buddy, who manages a Suncoast video, still bitches constantly about customers who skip widescreen because "Those stupid black bars cut off part of the picture".

VHS to DVD was a major change, with obvious advantages. The advantages to switching from DVD to Blu-ray are far less so obvious, especially in the face of services like On Demand and the like.