I'm not complaining (well actually the XBLM selection does suck, but that has nothing to do with download speed)
I'm just giving a reality check. All these breathless predictions on blogs of how faster pipes are going to be the holy grail of digital downloads look like a whole lot of wishful thinking to me. Look at music. It's been 9 years since Napster and 5 years since the iTunes store began and we STILL sell 75% of all music in physical form. Video downloads are in their infancy at best. How is video going to take over its physical counterpoint in just a few years if music has not been able to do it in almost 10?
The issue is a lot more complex than the downloads-have-already-made-physical-media-irrelavent evangelists will admit. The pesky details are what make or break a new format. And there are a lot of pesky details to solve with video downloads.
Movie studios have to be willing license ALL their media (not just 400 or 500 movies) to make the service be attractive. Then we have nasty DRM issues to deal with. Not to mention bandwidth problems, even with the advent of more people having high speed internet. And to top it off we have storage and backup issues if people are supposed to buy HD content over the web. Even if TB drives become the norm will mainstream consumers bother with all that mess? And how can you convince consumers to buy a movie from iTunes or Vudu, etc if that movie is tied to one manufacturer's hardware? A disc you buy will play on dozens of manufacturer's boxes. If vudu goes out of business you can't use your expensive box to buy any more movies.
Video downloads will be the norm someday but its not going to happen in 2 years. I bet it will take at least 10-12 years for it to dominate physical delivery systems.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
minimalist @ Mar 10th 2008 12:19PM
I'm not complaining (well actually the XBLM selection does suck, but that has nothing to do with download speed)
I'm just giving a reality check. All these breathless predictions on blogs of how faster pipes are going to be the holy grail of digital downloads look like a whole lot of wishful thinking to me. Look at music. It's been 9 years since Napster and 5 years since the iTunes store began and we STILL sell 75% of all music in physical form. Video downloads are in their infancy at best. How is video going to take over its physical counterpoint in just a few years if music has not been able to do it in almost 10?
The issue is a lot more complex than the downloads-have-already-made-physical-media-irrelavent evangelists will admit. The pesky details are what make or break a new format. And there are a lot of pesky details to solve with video downloads.
Movie studios have to be willing license ALL their media (not just 400 or 500 movies) to make the service be attractive. Then we have nasty DRM issues to deal with. Not to mention bandwidth problems, even with the advent of more people having high speed internet. And to top it off we have storage and backup issues if people are supposed to buy HD content over the web. Even if TB drives become the norm will mainstream consumers bother with all that mess? And how can you convince consumers to buy a movie from iTunes or Vudu, etc if that movie is tied to one manufacturer's hardware? A disc you buy will play on dozens of manufacturer's boxes. If vudu goes out of business you can't use your expensive box to buy any more movies.
Video downloads will be the norm someday but its not going to happen in 2 years. I bet it will take at least 10-12 years for it to dominate physical delivery systems.