Costa on the Format War

The June 26 issue of PC Magazine had a good column by Dan Costa, on the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD format war for video on optical discs. I'll admit I don't know very much about this battle, other than it exists. And that's because a while ago I came to the same conclusion that Costa states in this column: that it really doesn't matter, in the long-run, what wins this "format war". Once we can reliably download movies from massive and reasonably priced media libraries, why would very many people want to buy them on physical media (of any format)? To be sure, when that day comes, the existing media formats will linger for a long time, just as music CDs are lingering and will continue to for some time. But I agree with Costa that the long-term media distribution solution is downloading/streaming, not physical media. (Well, at least not single-movie discs, as I suppose if someone could purchase a single piece of physical media/hardware that had tens of thousands of movies already stored on it, that might be appealing if priced reasonably. But that doesn't seem like a viable approach, since it would presumably come with a hefty price tag.)

I'll go even farther than Costa, by just noting that I've even stopped buying regular DVDs. Since I switched from VHS to DVD relatively late, I never really acquired very many DVDs -- two dozen or so. But a while back I decided there was little reason to own many more movies on DVD. If I can get a great movie on DVD for 50 cents or a dollar, then I might do it. But any more than that it just isn't worth owning it. Presumably, one day in the not-too-distant-future we'll be able to access pretty much any movies we could want to see, from massive media libraries, at reasonably per-movie or subscription prices. For now, I use and really like our Blockbuster Access membership to see new movies, but I really have no need to own movies on physical media.