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It’s a growing battle: Discs vs. Downloads.

According to NPD entertainment research, discs are still ahead of the game when it comes to home media viewing — but it won’t stay that way forever. The days of physical media are limited. Stephen McGill from Microsoft even went so far as to say that “Blu-Ray is going to be passed by as a format. People have moved through from DVDs to digital downloads and digital streaming…. So, who needs Blu-ray?”

Kaz Hirai from Sony says, “To think everything will be downloaded in two years, three years or even ten years from now is taking it a little bit to the extreme.” There are two sides to this argument.

1. Physical media will be around as long as the generation that used it is still alive (case in point: my great grandmother prefers VHS).
2. The mainstream style of home media viewing could lean in the favor of digital downloads quicker than people think. Just look at how much computers have developed. In 1977 Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corp. said “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” At the exact same time, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were working on a project that would impact the future immensely with Apple, Inc.

No one can deny that digital media downloads are becoming more and more popular. But there are still some reasons for sticking with disc. Some people argue that quality is better, you can bring it anywhere and borrow them from friends, and what about the special features? These are all concepts that digital downloads will have to address sooner or later.

Click after the break for the top sources of digital media download and streaming.

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Netflix Streaming: Improving the Quality of the Stream

I recently installed a Netflix Streaming Blu-ray player in a friend’s house. The idea seemed pretty seemless until you start digging into it. My first observation was the installation is not something a “non-geek” can do with ease. The player did not have the right firmware out of the box and we had to do a complicated USB download and installation (the USB stick had to be totally clear of any other files).

Once we got the correct software loaded on the player, it worked quickly. You queue up some movies in your Netflix account and select them on your on-screen menu and it starts to stream the video to your blu-ray player within 30 seconds.

My problem was with the quality. There was a “quality bar” indicator that showed us that we only had 2 bars out of 10. Apparently the quality of the video codec streamed to your tv depends on your connection. The streaming of the movies were terrible at 2 bars. Barely watchable.

Here are some tips from Netflix on how to improve the quality: http://blog.netflix.com/2009/03/netflix-trying-for-consistent.html

If you do actually get your player to work, at a watchable quality, you will come to know quickly that a very limited library is available for streaming. That was the most disappointing aspect.

As a videophile, I recommend not hassling with the above. It will likely lead to disappointement.