Savage Popcorn

When the recent, and rather pointless, format war between Sony’s Blu-Ray and Toshiba’s HD-DVD was at its height, several commentators started predicting the imminent death of the shiny disk in favour of digital downloads across the *cough* unlimited *cough* bandwidth now available across the internet.

The New York Times’ David Pogue (via) lists four reasons why these predictions are premature:

First, downloadable movies require high-speed Internet connections - and only about half of American households have them. That number won’t change much for years.

Second, downloaded movies don’t include the director’s commentaries, deleted scenes, alternate endings, alternate language soundtracks or other DVD goodies. It’s just not as rich an experience.

Third, movie downloads don’t deliver the audio and video quality of DVD discs - even standard-def ones. Internet movies are compressed to download faster, which affects picture quality, and offer older, more compressed audio soundtracks than modern DVDs. (Check out the astounding quality-comparison photos at http://tinyurl.com/3e488m for details.)

Finally, today’s movie-download services bear the greasy policy fingerprints of the movie studio executives - and when it comes to the new age of digital movies, these people are not, ahem, known for their vision.

I don’t doubt that digital delivery of films has a future and may even become the norm. But this isn’t going to happen any time soon.

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