College Times

Issue date: 3/27/08 Section: Daily Buzz

Media Credit: MCT

To all you HDDVD owners, it must hurt to know that the $600 piece of technology you bought has now been reduced to something you'd use to balance out the legs on a table. As a consolation, Best Buy is offering $50 gift cards for people who bought HDDVD players as a way of saying "Sorry!"

Fortunately, you can take solace in the fact that it doesn't really matter. In five years, Sony's Blu Ray will be outdated and replaced by the next wave of the future: digital downloads.

By definition, digital downloads, also known as digital distribution, is the next step in distributing movies and other video content directly to your PC or TV, and it completely removes the need for physical media like a DVD. Studios and technology developers want to find the easiest way to deliver content to you while still making a buck.

The origin of digital downloads traces back to the first incarnation of iTunes. While it might not have been the first option to find movies and TV shows for download, it was certainly the most successful.

When I got the new iPod Nano for Christmas, the $15 iTunes gift card pretty much sold me on the realities of what we can do with this technology. For $7, I bought "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" on iTunes, downloaded the full-length film to my iPod and then plugged the iPod into the dock that came with my home speaker system so I could watch the movie on TV in HD quality. It's a phenomenal process, and one that I think I will take advantage of further after I find a better internet service.

Because of the dodgy corporate scheme that Apple operates under, meaning they've just barely started allowing movies for rent, many studios are finding alternative places to put their films up for digital distribution. That still didn't stop Apple from releasing Apple TV last year, a download portal that allows you to surf their catalog from your TV, download the shows into the system's hard drive and watch them directly on your TV.

The X-Box 360 offers the option to download movies and TV shows directly to the game system's hard drive, but requires a subscription service and a damn fast connection. Other alternatives like Vudu, a newer service on the market, have their pros and cons, but it's going to be a while before someone can lock down the marketing, technology, speed of service and market acceptance.

By the time that the internet reaches blazing fast levels and is available to an even greater part of the population, the business model for digital downloads should be settled. Similar to how ordering DVDs online began replacing video stores, I expect digital downloads to replace Blu Ray.

Netflix recently announced development of a TV box that will connect to Netflix's entire catalog and make films available for download. They're basically replacing the already easy process of going to your mailbox and picking up a DVD. We're all really that lazy.

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