well, don't look for these titles at your local Borders book store. I was at mine today and they pulled ALL the HDDVD titles to make room for more BRD stock. Not so much as a fire sale, dang it. Maybe they are shipping them off to Amazon for fulfillment in that half-price sale.

I had a similar experience watching Lost on RCN in Chi-town. Blurry, iffy, Bleh. certainly not what I am paying out the yin-yang for ...

@haixin:

oh, yeah. I mean, right now the quickest and most reliable way to send 50 or 80 gigs of video data to a consumer in the US is Netflix mailing someone a HDDVD or BRD.

@haixin

I have no doubt that the studios' deal with Apple is non-exclusive. if someone else can come up with a good set top box, they will have content for it.

If the cable companies had any interest in this field, they could market a cable box that included an integral router, so anyone with a set top box could connect with an ethernet patch cord. but they aren't - they would much rather have their customers going to their walled garden of VOD than have them use their bandwidth to download movies from someone else.

@Truth Teller

I am not going to be missing out for long. I can get the HD DVDs on Netflix and, if I like 'em well enough to buy, they will probably be on blu next year.

and when someone puts an 'open garden' real download service on a cable box, with unlimited backup for failed HDD, and easy transfers to $100 portable players, then I will believe downloads can compete with physical media.

@Truth Teller -

I am dual format myself (A2 and PS3) and when the Warner announcement came, I had no thought of discarding my HD player or content since it is not like either will be broken somehow because HDDVD is tanking.

I am not going to buy any more HDDVD disks (except maybe BSG miniseries and season one and even that is iffy b/c I have heard bad things about the quality), unless and until there is an end of format fire sale.

@Truth Teller -

a DVR is not on-demand movie downloading by any stretch of the imagination any more than existing VOD offerings by the cable companies are.

I do think that cable companies may integrate actual on-line movie rental into set-top boxes, charging their customers for access to other companies' on-line services (perhaps the FCC will mandate openness), but it simply does not exist now.

a couple of things:

(1) there's no seamless download solution for the minimally-technical or non-technical people. in other words, to play DVDs, all you need is the ability to plug a box into your TV. to do downloads, you need significant technical ability to get the thing running on a wireless or wired network.

that may be easy for anyone on this forum, but it can be a non-trivial task for others. think about the people struggling to work the self-checkout scanner at the grocery store. now picture them trying to get a HTPC configured.

Apple TV is probably the closest to a no-brainer system, but it still requires some technical ability. I can see cable companies integrating this sort of delivery into the cable box DVR if we go to IPTV, but that's a way off.

(2) as others have commented, there are the matters of DRM and HDD failure. people who purchased google and MLB videos learned the hard way the perils of being dependent upon someone else's DRM server. suppose your HDD conks - the DRM has prevented you from making backups and do you think the studios are going to give you new copies for free?

(3) bandwidth. broadband penetration is still not total, and a lot of people in the US have 512 mbs "broadband." that aint enough to be downloading the gigs you need for HD content.

(4) picture quality. you KNOW that the online providers are going to try to save on their own bandwidth costs by compressing the living daylights out of the content. this means compression artifacts, like the ones on current iTunes content. no problem if you are watching on your iPhone, but pretty unsatisfactory if you are on your 42" HDTV.

(5) portability. you can, with ease, watch your DVDs and HD disks wherever you have a player. that means your car, your laptop, your el-cheapo portable player, your office PC, and so forth. you can also lend them to others. the DRM that comes with downloads will prevent this for downloads - or at least make you buy DRM-compatable hardware and jump through registration hoops.

so, I don't think that downloads are going to be replacing physical media in the foreseeable future. where could they make inroads?

(1) movie rentals. Apple TV will probably be a reasonable success and will spawn imitating set-top boxes from others.

(2) TV shows. lots of these are not archive worthy and people are willing to pay rather than watch commercials and catch shows that their DVRs missed. I figure this is going to be a big item for the newly PC-independent Apple TV 2.0. hopefully, NBC and Apple will kiss and make up, so we can get Sci-Fi network content back onto iTunes.

most of mine have been covered, but here goes:

(1) touch screen. turn the page with a swipe. this gets rid of both the keyboard and forward/back keys, which everyone complains about.

(2) built-in access to project Gutenberg, as noted above, for all the free books you can eat.

(3) better support for loading your own documents.

(4) GPS is probably out, for battery life and price reasons, but they could import that cell-tower, wi-fi triangulation thing that the iPhone does.

(5) offer the cell-phone pricing model alternative to the up-front big-bucks outlay. sell it for, say $149-199 with an Audible-type monthly subscription for two years.

iTunes downloads at "near-HD quality"? Not exactly. oI had the opportunity to watc a 'Lost' (Season 3) I downloaded from iTunes and then a 'Heroes' on HDDVD. no comparison - the Lost looked good, but with an abundance of compression artifacts. The Heroes looked ... incredible.

I think downloads will be a big player in HD content rental - especially TV shows - but I think physical media have a long future when it comes to building a movie library.