Digital Home Thoughts: Will Downloads Kill Physical Media?

"Why did so many companies dump HD DVD so fast? Intriguingly, one often-cited reason is the approaching era of Internet movie downloads. The logic goes like this: as long as there's a format war, consumers won't buy DVD players of either type. By settling on a single format - it doesn't really matter which one - the movie and electronics industries can at least start milking the remaining years of the DVD's life. In fact, though, the Internet movie download era is more distant than pundits think, for four colossal reasons."

The article is accompanied by a somewhat entertain video. The funny thing is that a lot of the cons the author presented are mitigated by illegal downloads, much like they have been for music. I think legal download will continue to grow and as media companies become more comfortable with the process they will start to remove restrictions (like they have with music) and see more growth. Still, I think we will have physical media for years (and years) to come.