I was contemplating when would be the right time to move to Blu-ray as my preferred format over the weekend and I wondered about the supposition that Apple is trying to encourage everyone to skip physical media and go to digital downloads.
While I think there is a lot of merit to downloads, ease of access, no physical storage problems, no issue with needing a physical player, which should guarantee playback well into the future. There are also limitation, a normal DVD comes in at 4-8Gb, an HD version nearly double that. I have somewhere north of 250 DVDs, assume they’re all single disks and 4Gb and you’re still talking about over a terabyte of data, and that’s before you consider the stuff I have recorded from TV. I’d put the total in excess of 3Tb.
That’s a lot of storage, costly to build and maintain on its own, let alone attempt to back-up in anyway, which you would need to do, if a drive failed you could lose a large chunk of your movie collection. Movie downloads are starting to take off, but again, that’s just downloading to your drive, even if you don’t replace your current collection it’ll still build, although possibly more slowly, therefore keeping pace with advances in storage (although we’re not as well served in the UK as the US market yet). There’s also issue with bandwidth if you have to pay for that, downloading too many movies may mean you get charged.
Then I started wondering why I want to own the movies at all. Yes, I like having the physical media, access to the movie whenever I want, the latest movies rather than waiting several years for it to appear on TV, but that’s an old view, why should I need all this if I can access a library of movies, larger than mine, any time I want to watch something, for a flat rate monthly fee, somewhat like Napster and others have been offering with music. You decide what’s on, whenever, for the monthly cost of what a DVD would set you back.
Sure, having the media on my shelf is faster, easier to access, portable and isn’t likely to be deleted accidentally or disappear if a hard drive fails. Why bother if I could visit a site, type in any movie released, download and watch (ideally while it downloads)? The future of movie watching in the home?
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