This sort of ignores the point of blu-ray, which was the video and sound quality... streaming HD and even cable tv does not even come close to blu ray. For that reason, I think Blu Ray is still a compelling format.

I guess you would have to see one to know what I'm talking about though. ;-)

Uh, yeah, I love my AppleTV shows and movies in HD format, but digital HD files =/= BluRay.

To ayz, the way network speed has only got better and better, it stands to reason 1080p will stream over the web quickly within a year or two. I'm really looking forward to it.

To the blogger, do you use a Mac? If so, what is your preference for getting high quality digitally downloaded video? I'm going the route of digital downloads too, but if you have a method you could recommend I'd like to hear it. Thanks!

I agree 100% with this article. I'm totally fine with not having HD 1080p quality. It's really not a big deal to me. The advantage of being able to watch the latest episode of Sunny In Philadelphia whenever I want GREATLY outweighs any MINOR loss in video quality.

Sunny in Philadelphia is NOT the kind of thing that makes a difference whether you watch it on Blu-Ray or streaming. Check out Planet Earth or an action movie like Transformers 2 on BluRay (on a large 1080p TV). It can be stunning, especially when paired with good sound. For shows and movies where a lot of effort has been put into making it look and sound good, BluRay is a HUGE upgrade over any streaming you are going to find from a network site, Hulu, Netflix, etc.

That said, it's not the BluRay format itself that makes it look great. It's the resolution, and the amount of information encoded. I'm no expert, but I assume you could get the same quality in a variety of digital formats, if you were to encode them at the same resolution and bit rate. The problem is that transmitting that much information, that quickly, takes more bandwidth than a lot of people have (plus, as I said, there are no hi-quality streaming sources). Mailing a BluRay to someone is one solution to that problem. Downloading an HD torrent is another (because you can transmit the information more slowly, then watch it once it's complete). Watching it in lower quality is another alternative, one which, as you pointed out, works great for a lot of programs.

I have a 720P TV and stream 720P Netflix movies over a Wifi enabled Blu Ray player from a G router (it must be at least 6 years old at this point). Most of the time I can't tell a difference between that and a DVD. If you don't have a monitor or a TV that can play 1080P videos, it doesn't really matter if your device can stream them.

Blu Ray is still attractive for those who seek a high quality home theater experience. For the rest of us, DVDs and streaming is sufficient.

I do believe that streaming is how we will access our media in the future. 10 years ago we all would have said streaming high quality media was impossible because it would have required too much bandwidth. Now that bandwidth is easily available to almost everyone. In 10 more years we'll look back and laugh at how slow our connections were and 1080P will have long been obsolete.

There's always going to be an audience for quality. nothing compares to a blu-ray disc.
I wouldn't want my movie to freeze because the internet connection lagged. sure, its available and cheap but I rather watch it from a blu-ray disc hands down.

I'm in the camp for digital distribution. I don't think owning content will die, but I do think that disks will go. They scratch, they require you to stick them in a little slot or tray. We've been doing that sort of thing since before the 80s. We've grown too lazy for it.

Streaming 1080p content will soon be possible. There are already people with the bandwidth, but there are no services that stream in 1080p.

The thing that you have to realize is that by the time streaming Blu-ray quality is possible and cost effective, we'll have moved on to something better than 1080p. 1080p will become the low-res standard and 2k and 4k will be the new high benchmarks.

There will probably be one or two more disk standards before content distributed on disk loses majority market share.

At some point the studios will agree on some sort of standard for digital distribution. You'll buy shows (or even subscribe to them) and get the delivered to a hard drive device that will store your content for you to watch any time. You'll own it forever and you'll be able to download as many times as you like.

If this sounds like a pipe dream then have a look at VALVe software's Steam platform. Games you buy and own forever. You can install on as many machines as you want but can only be logged into one at a time. These games can exceed 12gb in size and the company makes tons of money a year.

Not to make this comment longer, but NBC played with a torrent distribution for a while. You downloaded a client that managed the torrents and played the videos. This allowed for higher quality than streaming, reduced bandwidth costs for NBC, and they could have update ads for the videos at any time (as compared to disks which are the same forever). There were issues, but I'm going to finish my extra long comment now.

Sadly, no Netflix or Hulu in the country I'm located in. BluRay is great in that it doesn't seem to be as region-locked and usually has a lot of language options.

We tried purchasing a movie online through the Sony Playstation store, but we didn't get to choose the language the movie came in, which was annoying. Automatically dubbed. Bleh. Won't be doing that again.

One thing often not mentioned in 1080p/720p/480p discussions is viewing distance. I could buy a 50" 1080p TV + Blu-Ray player but if I sit more than 8' from the TV my eyes cannot distinguish 1080p vs 720p.

My TV is further than 10' so I've never been interested in Blu-ray for my setup.

http://hd.engadget.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/

I recently lost the code for a movie I paid to download... now **POOF** it's useless.

I like being able to make copies of discs, make a version for my phone, and still have the disc as a backup (and even make money off it when it's time to sell). Can't seem to do any of these with downloaded versions...

I think that without the blu ray medium, we are not able to get HD codecs into the consumers homes and so do not create what whe have now in the digital distribution. Blu rays do matter because they allowed for the proliferation of high quality in videos. I think saying they do not matter seems to be a statement of ignorance, even if one does not use it or will not, it is because of blu ray that you are enjoying the streaming HD.

Lets also not forget that the streaming "HD" video from all of the available services is, and will be for the foreseeable future, very compressed and looks like shit compared to blu-ray at a similar resolution. Saying something is 1080p says nothing about the quality of those pixels. It may be "full HD" but since it's so compressed to stream efficiently (and to save the provider money on bandwidth) you can still lose all the detail you thought you were getting with HD.

There is always a battle between quality and convenience, and the poster is just stating a preference towards the latter. MP3's versus CD or Vinyl or FLAC present the same option.

There will always be a market for the higher quality options, even if the nature of those options change. Why the blogger here presents one side of an argument as fact is another question.

Great article. This was also on my mind as I was contemplating on buying a Blu-ray player. My choice was just to get a Sony Playstation 3. I hesitated because I do not feel the need to buy Blu-ray discs that clutter up the house.

I believe eventually any form of disc-distribution is in BIG BIG trouble. With the advent of digital distribution medium like Netflix and Hulu and the move to a Media File servers for home -- it's very archaic to have to pop a Blu-ray disc to watch 1 movie. As of right now, most of my dvds have been transferred to hard-drives and accessible using a media player. No discs, and no fuss. Blu-ray is a great format but discs in itself is on the verge of death.

Network speeds and capacity have in no way increased at a pace where you are going to see most people streaming or downloading blu-ray quality 1080P anytime in the near future.

Netflix has already started streaming 1080P to the PS3.

http://www.techspot.com/news/40676-netflix-streaming-on-ps3-gets-1080p-surround-sound-no-disc.html

Don't see a lot of complaints from users regarding bandwidth issues.

bluray are dead before it release, me and non of my friends own any bluray equitment, when we want to watch movie we watch it online, we never buy any phicyle disk

I don't live in the US. Hulu, Netflix are useless to me. And while Netflix has recently been introduced to Canada, most stuff is locked to the US and the titles available are few and far between and the actual selection sucks. Your post only applies for those who live in the US. DVD (and sometimes BluRay) it is for me.

i have a 3mb internet connection, and a ps3 player with streaming netflix. at certain times of the day it'll stream 720p w/o hiccuping, but most of the day it periodically buffers. not the ideal viewing experience. i'm thinking 1080p would do much much worse streaming. one would need a much faster connection, like fios to stream 1080p.

and to all of those who say if you're a certain distance from the tv it doesn't matter if what you're watching is in 720 or 1080, either your tv isn't the greatest, it's massive, or you have never watched "the lord of the rings" trilogy on blu-ray.

one tip to people who have considered buying a blu-ray player - definitely buy a ps3. the commercials are right. it only does everything, and it upscales old dvd's very well.

Not that everyone cares, as the posters and commenters here illustrate, but when will people realise that Blu-Ray is not about being 1080p, it's about the bitrate that the storage capabilities of BR discs allows for.

Consider this. I could take any crappy digital video file, something that's only 640x480 in dimension, and adjust the resolution of it so that it's now 1080 pixels tall. Make it progressive, and I have a 1080p file. Awesome.

Except it'll look like ass. The bitrate that original file would've been encoded at would be so low, that the greater resolution of 1080 is completely wasted.

Yes, this is an extreme case. But hopefully my analogy illustrates that not all 1080p is made equal.

Netflix might stream 1080p where available, but the clarity, depth and dynamic range of their content cannot hold a candle to what Blu-Ray will offer.

It's just not the same thing. At all.

But, just as crappily encoded mp3s trumped CDs, people go for the convenience over quality every time these days.

I laughed when I read the comment about mp3s vs CDs. I can't be the only one old enough to remember vinyl, and the kvetching that came with the arrival of CDs.

My brother is a cinephile and audiophile with a gigantic screen, blu-ray, and home theater setup. I live in a tiny studio and have consolidated by using my Mac mini and LCD as an all-in-one entertainment center. It doesn't compare to the experience of watching movies at my sibling's house, but it's a compromise that works for me. I don't watch enough television to justify paying for cable TV.

I still get DVDs through Netflix, and am considering a blu-ray player to hook up to my multifunction HDTV, but the OP is right: the future is likely to see more streaming content and most people are willing to make small compromises in quality for the convenience. As technology gets better, so will the quality of these options.

I'm using DVDs, Blurays from Combo Packs and Netflix, but haven't done much movie streaming just TV and Web content so far. For certain media I just want the physical media still.

I've been debating whether to get a Blu-Ray player myself or not... I recently got one for my Dad that also streams NetFlix, etc. Not sure whether to spend $150 for one of those or get an AppleTV for $100. Blu-Ray quality may be higher, but in reality I'm not sure I'd notice the difference on my 5 year old 720p TV.

Here in Australia bandwidth is limited so streaming/downloading is restricted.

Blu-ray looks and sounds great, is coming down in price (and will continue to do so as it's audience grows) and lets face it, some of us like to own a copy of the things we pay for...

that said - not even blu-ray would make Super-Man Returns worth watching.

There are two reasons to at own a blu-ray player (or at least a DVD player):

1. I love Netflix streaming. But it sometimes freezes or crashes, or the audio does not work. You can't invite a bunch of friends over to watch a movie if you can't count on the movie playing correctly all the way through.

2. Netflix does not stream, or even rent, every movie available. Nor does Hulu. For some titles, you simply need to buy them, and that requires a player of some sort.

Blu Ray is AWESOME.

Since this thread has been revived, I have to add to my prior comment about Netflix. Oddly, at the same time Netflix announced its new "instant-watch only" plan, they dropped a lot of movies and TV shows from their instant-watch list. And they dropped even more from that list as of January 1, 2011.

Since Netflix has made it clear that you can't count on them to stream what you want, or even what they let you stream last month, you need a blu-ray or DVD player as a backup so you can rent what you need on an actual disk.