Digital downloads will be Blu-ray's downfall
By Erica Ogg, CNET News.comFeb 26, 2008
Perhaps most importantly, consumers will continue to get more and more comfortable with the idea of their library being digital. We're already there with music, and it's a relatively easy transition to make to one's movie collection. But it's also true of other things like Fandango's digital movie tickets, or even airline tickets and gift cards. We live in a world where oftentimes the value is not in the object itself, but in the digital information stored on a computer somewhere. (It's an attitude that's anathema to the likes of Disney and its studio cohorts who have always pushed the concept of personal movie collections, hence the push to upgrade to the "special edition" of older films.)
"The challenge for studios is really about convincing consumers to upgrade their libraries, (and) upconverting to 1080p (the highest resolution currently available) doesn't necessitate buying a whole new format," said Josh Martin, HD and video analyst for The Yankee Group.
People will get tired of replacing their favorite films to the trendy format of the moment. The price of the software ranging from US$20 to US$30 for Blu-ray discs right now will eventually drop. But digital copies costing less than US$5 a pop, it's an easy decision for many.
The biggest roadblock is, of course, bandwidth which causes the process to be long, painful, and ultimately not worth it for many. But that will change. Consider this scenario: Using Fios from Verizon, it's possible to currently download several episodes of a TV show at approximately 5 megabits per second, or 625 kilobytes per second.
A 44-minute 640 x 360 (not high-definition) episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles that our colleague Declan McCullagh downloaded via iTunes is 510MB.
"It requires 193 kilobytes per second to watch live, which is easily doable on Fios barring network congestion," McCullagh points out. (Levels of compression or a change from the H.264 video codec will have different results, of course.)
Comcast customers--and there are far more of them than Fios customers--have speeds today that vary widely, but 187 kilobytes per second in real-world tests is a good estimate. Assuming a 1-hour high-definition TV show (with commercials) is around 5GB, that requires 1,388,888 kilobytes per second or 1.38 megabytes per second to watch.
So Fios is about halfway there at best, and Comcast's 100 megabit per second connection, which it promised at CES would be a reality by 2009, could pull it off.
