And hence, one of the main reasons why I would be opposed to the total movement of games and movies to downloadable/digital content only....The lack of ability to easily take your game or movie to a friend's place to play/watch. No more letting someone borrow your game/movie. You have to rent it or buy it new (note: it would also kill buying used games/movies, as well). You'll always essentially be paying full price for games/movies/music in the future if the market goes all digital content.
I could see going digital only content in the right circumstances.
With movies for instance, I would consider going all digital if there were a way to:
- Add all of my current DVDs to the library without being charged again
- have all the storage offsite, like video on demand services where I can go access any of my movies at any time from any net connection/compatible STB
- a token method to loan out movies to friends and family for periods of time, make it so loaned content is not available to me to appease the studios, but allow me to set the time limit of the loan
- A cheap method for upconverting all available movies to the latest HD format either on a movie by movie basis or all at once
- the ability to download a movie to a portable device for when I'm away from net connections (use a similar setup to the loan tokens)
I can see the benefits of not needing all of the storage for my movies to be onsite, and a nice way to upgrade. I don't currently have a Bluray player, not sure if I ever will, but if I did add one, now anything that I have that I wanted in HD, I now have to re-purchase. You'd think that if it were only like $1 per movie you already owned to up the resolution to whatever standard, the studios would do even better on that deal than they would trying to re-market the new format. They could even yank the old format from the market since you'd be able to downconvert to your target device and still have the highest resolution available should you ever need to upgrade equipment.
I'm not so sure that games would work as well on this system, but with a setup like this I'd probably convert all 400+ of our DVDs