i am recently reading up a bit on downloads. just to set the stage, i am one of the guys who waited on the sidelines for over a year then finally decided the HD Disk war was never going to end and bought an HDDVD player within 60 days of them throwing in the towel. it is a part of my whole "buy high/sell low" strategy. i am like bob cringley who once said that he joined apple when they were a startup and although they tried to give him stock options he held out for the cash.

anyway, i really love the idea of video downloads but it seems like i have to choose today:

- vudu - has BD quality but almost no tv content and seems to have minimal market share
- apple tv - has good critical mass, great interface and tons of tv show content but quality is lacking for movies.
- blockbuster - no hd and minimal selection

i know the list is much longer but they all seem to be lacking something. at some point in the future it seems that 2 things will happen:

1 - someone will own most of the market share with a simple set top box, BD quality movies, tons of TV content and a pay by the month service like we evolved to with netflix and blockbuster.
2 - i will have purchased someone who will be driven out of business by #1.

is that about how it stacks up today?

greg

Depends on how you look at things.

At this point, it seems like rental/subscription is the way to go until the studios and providers get things figured out.

I think that eventually the studios will have to make a decision on whether they want to make video downloads a pure rental market, or remove all DRM (like the music industry has today) and encourage the purchase market to grow.

VUDU - I love the hardware and interface. Being almost entirely a movie service that doesn't rent the latest movies for at least 30-days was the deal breaker for me.

Apple TV - Hardware is nice although the interface and remote are so-so. For TV size viewing I think their HD rentals are pretty good. They looked fine on my 110 inch screen.

Both of the game consoles offer downloadable movies along with Netflix with several Blu-ray players and a stand-alone box. My guess is Netflix will win the streaming business with its content but today it's only good for older content.

The Apple TV does so many other things like streaming iTunes and iPhoto that you can't go too wrong. My personal favorite is VUDU which I found similar to TiVo in the early years. Of course TiVo still isn't in the clear and VUDU wants to be a content provider but if you can live without the latest releases it's a treat and not a major investment.

yeah i really like the apple tv from what i have seen but lack of high quality HD movies makes it good for everything except movies. we watch a few tv shows and we like to go to the beginning and watch them all the way through rather than watch the current episodes (we are on season 2 of 24). atv seems perfect for that and for photos, home movies, etc. i just got my son an xbox and i looked at that but it didn't seem to have as many tv shows plus the hd is not hdx quality so it kind of loses on both fronts.

oh well. i guess i will keep doing disks for a while and see if anyone sorts it out.

greg

Torrid, "torrent"-ial, torro, am i getting a "bit" too close for comfort?

I usually get On-Demand movies from my cable service but Im kind of surprised at the lack of HD content & lack of titles itself. I think this might have a better chance to take-off with the average homeowner since it wouldnt confuse them with needing a internet connection.

Hey, if you have cable service just use the Red Button PVR to record all the HD as SD video you want!! The package is free! just Google "Red Button PVR".