There’s a topic that I feel I must touch on, it involves the future of how we all watch movies and TV.

Have you ever heard something similar to this? “In a few years we’ll be all watching TV and movies streaming or downloaded to our hard drives” or “Blu-ray won’t be around for much longer because everything will be distributed over the internet instead”. It “sounds” smart at first, after all, there’s digital media all over the internet and YouTube is leading the way with the digital streaming of video.

Forget the hype that companies like Microsoft and Telstra are trying to build and take a step back, have a look at the state of the Internet and take a look at HD movies.

If you were to download a HD movie from a company offering them, it can generally be anywhere from 4-7 Gigabytes, the best you can get from something that can barely called HD is about 1.5-2 Gigabytes. As I’m mainly comparing this to a real HD source, lets go with the 7 Gigabyte version.

Say you want to download a few movies, 7 Gigabytes each, 5 movies totalling 35 Gigabytes.
Lets compare common internet connection speeds.

256Kilobits per second, this is the entry level “Broadband” speed in Australia, a lot of people can’t even get this speed, but we’ll start here anyway.

7 Gigabytes at 256 Kilobits per second will take you 2 days and 17 hours to download
35 Gigabytes at 256 Kilobits per second will take you 13 days and 14 hours to download

So, at your basic broadband speed in Australia it will take you more than 2 days to watch your first movie and more than 13 days for all of them to download, meanwhile saturating your connection in order to download them. Lets take a look at 1.5 Megabits per second now, it’s the best that most, not all Australians could possibly get, even though most don’t have this connection or greater yet.

7 Gigabytes at 1.5 Megabits per second will take you 10 hours and 49 minutes to download
35 Gigabytes at 1.5 Megabits per second will take you 2 days and 6 hours to download

Much better, but it still takes almost 8 hours to download the first movie and 2 days of downloading the rest of them, saturating your connection. I’ll jump straight to 12 Megabits per second now, this is the fastest speed any large amount of Australians will get within the next few years, although looking at how fast negotiations are going on with the Government, it may take longer than that.

7 Gigabytes at 12 Megabits per second will take you 1 hour and 20 minutes to download
35 Gigabytes at 12 Megabits per second will take you 10 Hours to download

So at the fastest connection that we can handle in this country, it will take you over 1 hour to download the movie of your choice and 10 hours to download them all, again while saturating your connection. This is while assuming that the source can deliver your download at that speed.

Before I go further I understand that many people have connections faster than 12 Megabits per second, I do as well, however this is not indicative of the general public and companies can only do what the general public can do, otherwise they are screwing themselves out of the market and no company would willingly do that.

So it kinda takes the convenience out of downloading proper HD movies, especially on a standard Australian internet connection where you have to wait 10 hours minimum to watch your movie, the people in this country who prefer to stroll down to the local video rental store and rent a movie that they can watch straight away at HD quality simply don’t like to wait.

Now we go back to reality, pricing, in order to be able to download 5 HD movies a month you need to have a complete quota of at least 35 Gigabytes, 10 movies and you’re going to be using 70 Gigabytes, there are not many internet plans currently that allow downloading of that amount per month and with those amounts you’re looking at paying anywhere between $80-$110 currently and it’s not looking like it’s going to get much cheaper in the next few years. People in the USA and Britain are only now starting to feel the limits that Australian customers have been experiencing so even they aren’t safe from it.

So on top of the price of the movie, the price of the connection that is only at that price because you choose to download HD movies and of course the inconvenience of downloading at the speeds available in the next few years, plus the cost of the hard drive(s) required to store these movies why would people choose this method over simply walking to a shop, or a video rental store and grabbing something fairly cheap that they can watch straight away that just needs to be put into a player?

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