Also playing into my decision to go without streaming is that I kind of like having the days when no discs are at home to spend time on other things like family, friends, reading, etc. Not sure what I’m going to do when everything’s available immediately. It will take a lot of discipline to unplug!

It’s definitely an infrastructure issue (not something I wanted to get into in the post). But it’s also a Hollywood issue. I don’t mind a less-than-pristine picture, and I’m all for paying for content. I just want the new releases when they are, you know, new.

“Good enough” is a powerful argument, as is “you’ll never see the difference,” but while that worked for itunes, I don’t think that will work with films. The difference is that most people buying a music device were spending 100 bucks or so (there were outliers but I said “most”) but most people buying TVs are spending 500-2.5k dollars on something sold under the guise of quality, not convenience. Walkman and iPod? Convenience. Sony’s not advertising the “most convenient” Bravia set on the market though, they’re advertising the “absolute highest quality, full HD, etc” set on the market. That’s a very powerful reason to feed it the highest quality material as well, if not to “show off” then to self-justify.

I’m not familiar with Chris’arsenal of audio/visual gear, but I can sympathize with the desire to have fewer devices that do more. I have a wii, a PS3, and my cable box (plus the requisite 5.1 system.) With those three devices I can watch Blu-rays, stream netflix, watch youtube, or stream almost any video on my computer direct to the TV. When I really care about a film though, there’s no question that the Blu-Ray is the format I’m choosing. It’s just…better.

I’ll concede that I might be the minority (I like director’s commentary too, and went to film school) but there’s a reason HDTVs are selling well, and there’s a reason DirecTV and Dish argue over who’s got the highest quality stream: people care about it.

I also forsee digital video the same way you do: “as soon as it’s easy enough to connect to a service like Netflix or buy movies from Vudu or Amazon on Demand directly from the device, the need for physical media (for the most part) disappears.” I just don’t think it happens as soon as we’d like. The broadband infrastructure in the US is too stilted, and the storage for Blu-Ray quality anything but streaming or self-destructing rentals quickly becomes expensive. The storage issue will go away more quickly, but if the lawsuits, net neutrality arguments, and feet-dragging with updating aging copper infrastructure are any indications, we’re not going to see the type of necessary advancements in Bandwidth for a while.

I’m not sure I agree with this. Consumers have shown time and time again that in most cases, they value convenience over quality. The mobile phone market is a great example — millions are using mobile phones for their primary, and sometimes their only, phone service. I foresee digital video the same way: as soon as it’s easy enough to connect to a service like Netflix or buy movies from Vudu or Amazon on Demand directly from the device, the need for physical media (for the most part) disappears.

Will consumers be willing to give up the quality of Blu-ray purchases or rentals if they can get “good enough” quality from the comfort of their own living room? I think it’s a good bet that they will do so.

Personally, I think a Blu-ray player is a pretty superfluous device, especially for someone like Chris, who already has more than one piece of hardware with multiple types of subscription of pay-per-view programming available for streaming. Why buy another device as a gateway to Netflix, when you have two or three other devices with Netflix streaming already built in?