Digital distribution won't be coming just yet.
So, I've been thinking about how the various movie and videogame
companies are saying that this might be the last era of disc-based
media, media that you physically obtain from retail or mail.
Instead, in the glorious and supposedly near future, we'll download
everything. Admittedly, we do this for music by now... But movies are
different. It's purely a matter of degree, but in this case a
quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference just because of
sheer difference in scale.
In small words: no one minds waiting a minute or two to download a song,
or ten-ish minutes to download an album. Movies or even TV shows take a
lot longer to download.
Digital distribution might be the future, but even with BitTorrent,
Steam, etc (where "Steam, etc" are basically proprietary spins on the
BitTorrent P2P concept)... the future won't be arriving anytime soon.
Current compression schemes can't stream or download an HD movie in a
reasonable amount of time with a reasonable level of quality, at least
not at the speed of broadband in North America.
Videogames vary wildly in size, but as a rule of thumb, the big AAA
titles take way, way more than an album in MP3 form. On the other hand,
I think videogames marketed to the hardcore niche can be quite
successful as download-only products. Steam doesn't just leverage P2P,
but also pre-ordering and as a consequence of the pre-orders,
pre-loading. Valve's big games get downloaded over the course of
several days across the internet before the official release date;
they're locked until the actual release date, of course.
But I think that pre-loading model doesn't work for the mass market (for
games) much more than it would for movies. Only a few titles are the
sort that see heavy pre-orders.
By the way, full disclosure: I'm enough of a traditionalist that I
usually prefer physical media when given the choice. So maybe this is
just my biases at work here.
