Digital Question Man

By Scott Hettrick -- Video Business, 1/13/2006

JAN. 13 | If we’re going to start talking about a future of video downloads (apparently the new cool thing instead of streaming video) and electronic delivery and storage of movies versus physical media, I have a few questions:

• Will my computer store the same number of movies and TV shows I have on DVD right now? I know anything is possible, and I can buy a PC with a mega-gigabyte hard drive, but in the real consumer world, how much storage will the computers of most people really be able to handle? Sure, some of this will be resolved when the industry starts implanting the technology to transfer downloaded movies from a hard drive to a DVD in the coming months, but will the average person go to all this trouble only to wind up with the same disc he could have simply bought at the store for a few bucks?

• How does high-def figure into the downloading equation? There are few, if any, viable options for downloading high-def movies and TV shows from the Internet. Even when more high-def content becomes available from major studios, how long will it be before I can expect to have a fast enough connection available that allows me to download a high-def movie in less than a day? Once that happens, doesn’t my computer storage capacity become an even bigger issue? How many high-def movies could the average person’s computer possibly hold?

• How secure can I be with the collection of movies I have on my PC? It seems like I have to buy a new PC and/or laptop every three years or so. Transferring everything from my old one to my new one is usually problematic. Also, desktops and laptops tend to crash from time to time, discomfortingly often rendering the content on the hard drive unrecoverable. Assuming that, like most people, I haven’t created a back-up of every file, this means that when the computer crashes, I will lose all the videos I took so much time and trouble to store on there. And guess what? If I have to download them again, I will have to pay a fee again to do so.

• How convenient will it be to watch a downloaded movie in other rooms and on portable devices? Certainly this will become easier as technology being introduced now allows efficient networking of in-home devices, but it will always require me to take some sort of action to move the file from one location or device to another. And I’m guessing that for the foreseeable future that process will always be at least a little more time-consuming and troublesome than simply carrying the DVD to the next room or on the airplane, right?

Digital delivery will not become a mass market medium until the industry can give comfort to the average consumer about some of these basic issues.

On the other hand, maybe no single delivery system will be mass market anymore.

We appear to be headed rapidly toward a future in which every consumer will create their own unique viewing experience with every program.

That would mean DVD would be a part of such a future, albeit only a percentage of the current market, and high-def digital discs could offer an even more viable alternative to downloading and storage issues for high-def programming for awhile.