In the UK, until BT's 21CN is rolled out in conjunction with FTTK or FTTH then the idea of downloading 1080p HD content without waiting ages is a pipe dream.
Optical media is "permanent" (i.e. hard disk fails, don't lose movies), can be shared (DRM on downloaded media will make this hard) and is available to everyone now. The players will become cheap (£100 by XMAS for no-name brands I'd hope).
As for Microsoft - they are US based and may believe cable networks over there will deliver downloaded HD content reasnobly quickly in the next couple of years. Perhaps someone realised the world is bigger than the US and they've had 2nd thoughts. As someone else pointed out, they are big and ugly enough to have had some contingency plan in place for the failure of HD-DVD... or are they still supremely arrogant ?
For the record I don't own an XBOX or a Playstation 3 - both a too big, ugly and power hungry; I'm waiting for a device that doesn't look like a prototype.
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@Nicholas Shaw
Mr Shaw is spot on.
In the UK, until BT's 21CN is rolled out in conjunction with FTTK or FTTH then the idea of downloading 1080p HD content without waiting ages is a pipe dream.
Optical media is "permanent" (i.e. hard disk fails, don't lose movies), can be shared (DRM on downloaded media will make this hard) and is available to everyone now. The players will become cheap (£100 by XMAS for no-name brands I'd hope).
As for Microsoft - they are US based and may believe cable networks over there will deliver downloaded HD content reasnobly quickly in the next couple of years. Perhaps someone realised the world is bigger than the US and they've had 2nd thoughts. As someone else pointed out, they are big and ugly enough to have had some contingency plan in place for the failure of HD-DVD... or are they still supremely arrogant ?
For the record I don't own an XBOX or a Playstation 3 - both a too big, ugly and power hungry; I'm waiting for a device that doesn't look like a prototype.