Blu-ray and Digital Download – Let’s be friends!

Before reading this from cnet news. I really thought it would either be digital download or Blu-ray, never once I thought they could co-exist. But now I think its possible because we are not dealing with two similar formats here like the HD war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Blu-ray is a physical storage medium while digital download is well, digital where data is stored in say, a hard drive.

There will always be people that prefer to buying the actual DVDs instead of downloading even when broadband Internet access becomes widely popular and fast. One reason being is that a lot of people, including me, are not comfortable downloading everything off from the Internet. Another reason will be the hard drive space you need to purchase in an on-going basis. And in the very near future, almost everything will be in HD format, we will be dealing with large files (think of a Blu-ray disc which holds either 25/50 GB). There are two questions you have to ask yourself before going the digital path.

- Are you willing to wait for a while in order to download such large files?
- Are you willing to constantly buy hard drives to store your data?

Of course, these two questions are irrelevant if broadband Internet access becomes extremely fast and that the price of hard drive space is like buying candies. But still, would you rather have a collection of DVDs on your shelf or a collection of hard drives instead?

I think in the end, the two WILL co-exist where people will use both depending on the situation. For movies, most likely people will continue to buy physical DVDs and download things that take up less storage space such as games and trailers (which is a common thing already on xBox Live and PSN).

Looks like there won’t be a war, at least not so soon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 10:04 am