Digital vs Hard Media

*Originally published on 2/24/09

When movies started to make the upgrade to high definition, consumers were presented with two different options, Blu-ray and HD-DVD. It was a long battle, but one by one, studios started to abandon HD-DVD and exclusively support Blu-ray. A few months ago, HD-DVD was declared dead, distribution stopped and Blu-ray remained victorious.

The fight wasn't (and still isn't) over for the emerging format. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have said that they sincerely believe that downloads are the future of film distribution. They want to do for movies what iTunes has done for music. Microsoft wants to use Xbox Live to accomplish the same goal, even going so far as to team up with Netflix to stream movies.

At face value, this would seem to make sense, both companies have had great success with their respective download services. I, myself, have downloaded the entire third season of Venture Bros. in addition to the Fleischer Superman cartoons from decades ago. The only problem is that all the movies Xbox Live offers are rentals, there is no purchase option on any of the available films. If you really expect people to ditch discs and go to downloads, not having any movies available to purchase does not seem like a good strategy to encourage the switch.

iTunes isn't much better off. There's a huge difference between offering songs and movies for download. Downloading a song that is only 5 MB (megabytes) on average is a simple matter. DVD quality movies are usually about 700 MB. If you upgrade to high def, then it will probably be about twice that much. The convenience of downloads is negated by the fact that it will take a long time for files that large to finish downloading.

Another problem with going the way of the download is the fact that consumers are limited by hard drive space. iTunes has an advantage here as there are external hard drives available that hold up to 2 TB (terrabytes). Xbox doesn't have that luxury. It's true that the 360 comes with a 120 GB hard drive, which is plenty for most things. With high definition films, however, that space is going to fill up quickly. What is the consumer supposed to do then?

All electronic devices encounter problems. If your computer crashes or your Xbox burns out, you lose everything. This is another problem with going entirely digital.

Hard media has another advantage in that it offers special features. With DVD's and Blu-rays, you get not only the movie, but extras. These extras come in the form of deleted scenes, commentary, interviews and behind the scenes footage among other things. In addition to getting a movie with great sound and picture quality, you get a little extra bang for your buck. These things are not available with downloads.

I'm not saying that these companies should stop offering downloads. It is a way of distributing media that does, in fact, have its pros. It saves space as you don't need to worry about shelves or cases and you can download the newest movies while you play Halo or finish that presentation for work. As I said before, I use Xbox Live to download things all the time. A lot of people use iTunes for music and tv shows as well. If they want to start offering movies available for purchase through these services, that's fine. However, I would suggest that you don't rely solely on that. Having a folder filled with video files of movies is nice, but I'd rather have a shelf filled with movie cases to show off my collection. My suggestion would be to keep this option open, but not to expect it to act as "the future of film distribution" because I find it unlikely that that is the case.