Looks like the tech landscape will start to get a little clearer in the home video market. The battle for physical format is now over: and the winner is ..............
Netflix Sides With Blu-ray In HD Format War - The Channel Wire - IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness
...... the winner is Sony's BluRay disc format. Its clearly technologically superior, and would be more useful when used in a PC then the Toshiba backed HD-DVD format. Look for this to have an impact on the availability of your favorite rentals in Blockbuster as well, now that there will be more movies titles available, but alas, more competition for those movies (when renting). Thats just a short term hiccup of the Netflix announcement. Other market effects will include a big increase in Sony's Playstation 3 sales as it has an embedded BluRay player in its game console. And soon, BRdiscs will be available in rental stores. But for now, people will start to slow down in buying movies in physical format as these discs are quite expensive to make (thus to sell). Look for the movie industry to follow the path of the music industry - which is shrinking overall sales volumes and a move to online downloading.
The next battle on the homefront will be with the increasing the downloadable movie content that is secure and relatively copy protected. And this will unfortunately follow like Apple did with its proprietary technology the iPod, movie distrubution companies will introduce more and more very specific (non-transferrable) content distribution (at home) kiosks. These boxes will allow you to download, pause, rent, replay (for a ltd time) movies as much as you like over the internet. Problem is that you can't take it with you, nor transfer it from one box to another. Oh well, at least you'll have the content you want (even though you'll be married to the technology you eventually choose).
