why get bluray?
Recently I’ve made a decision to stop buying CDs and get my music online. It just makes more sense these days. I use my music almost exclusively on my computer or iPhone, and most of the time I only like a handful of songs from a CD. Paying $18 for a CD just seems ridiculous to me now. Especially when I could pay $4 or $5 for just the songs I like.
A few days ago Apple announced HD movies for sale and rental from the iTunes store. Now, I don’t have an HD tv yet, though I assume I will in the next year or two, but my question now is why would I buy a bluray player when I can already get HD movies for 19.99 from the iTunes store. The same movies that are between $25 and $30 for the bluray disc. It seems like a regression to start buying discs again after just making a switch away from CDs. Even more so considering how many emerging technologies allow me to view media from my computer on my tv.
I think one could make a couple arguments for physical media vs. digital downloads for media:
1. Movies are more of a social thing than music. It’s easy to bring your DVD to someone’s house but not so much to transfer a digital movie.
2. The storage space required for movies is quite large, especially for HD. This translates into long download times and consumption of valuable storage space. One could certainly argue that disk space is getting cheaper, but movie resolution is also getting larger, offsetting it somewhat.
That said, I’d much prefer manager *everything* digitally. It just makes my life simpler and it’s easier to find and manage things. I think it will take some time before I’ll be ready to store movies on my computer rather than on DVDs, though.