Quote:
Originally Posted by MooglePorn
More to the point, I'm still in college and the vast majority of young people I talk to agree with me.
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I don't think college students are a valid barometer, especially those who live in dorms and pay nothing for a big fat pipe to the internets. Their tune on downloads probably change on lot when they get out of school and realize that they have to pay a pretty penny for a lot less bandwidth than they had in school.
The biggest obstacle to downloads as a non-niche market for distribution is the simple fact that a wired home entertainment center is not the norm and probably won't be for years (among normal people, not us). The CE companies have been pretty slow in rolling out connected media players (and most of the downloading is still done by the computer, requiring networking skills the average person doesn't possess). Most of these gadgets come from game consoles and networking companies like D-link or Linksys. It will be a while before such devices are sufficiently ubiquitous to be a major thread to physical media.
Blu-ray's biggest advantage is that it continues a familiar paradigm. People are used to getting movies this way. To capitalize on this, I think Blu-ray needs to position itself as simply the next generation of DVD players. Once the prices come down far enough, people looking to replace an old player need to think of Blu-ray as the logical next step.
Maybe downloads are the future (or maybe the people who think so are the same people who thought flash RAM would have replaced hard drives five years ago.