Quantum? I don't even know him!

These days it is of course very common to purchase all forms AV entertainment using the Internet, but it is increasingly common to use it as the actual infrastructure for the delivery of said content. The use of Internet as infrastructure for delivery of AV content is allowing it to compete directly with the traditional physical delivery infrastructure, and I think it's a really interesting situation. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm focusing on non-interactive content, specifically: high definition movies.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about high definition content, its delivery, format and media standard. On the physical side, we have blu-ray emerging as the de facto standard for what currently passes as "high definition" content. (I don't like using that term because it is so very arbitrary--what will we call "high definition" content in five years? Standard definition? Old crusty definition? It's silly.) As far as current state-of-the-home-theater tech goes, Blu-ray is a pretty good standard: it has the capacity to house quite a bit of minimally compressed high-resolution video and audio, and the bandwidth to adequately deliver said content to a playback system. There is valid criticism about the completeness of the Blu-ray (roving) standard vs. its rival, HD-DVD, but the fact is HD-DVD couldn't compete with Blu-ray's superior technology, and this is likely the key advantage that won the format war. (The format war discussion, however, is for another day.) So, the question in the context of this discussion is: can a data delivery infrastructure compete with a physical media format? In my opinion, the short answer is yes, but not yet (at least for the foreseeable future.)

There are three major hurdles to get over before widespread adoption of content-as-data will be accepted. Firstly, Internet infrastructure (for the purposes of this discussion I'm only talking about North America) is grossly underpowered for this task. The Internet backbone is capable of handling quite a bit of bandwidth, but the home distribution layer is not even close to where it needs to be in order to make convenient delivery of massive amounts of data a reality. Let's work with some numbers. Comparing apples to apples, let's see the differences in obtaining content via Internet or via Blu-ray by way of brick and mortar establishments:

Our fictional friend Larry has a Blu-ray player and a broadband internet connection which averages about 3Megabits/second download speed (a solid and very typical broadband speed). A Blu-ray disk can contain up to 50Gigabytes (thats 400Gigabits) of data. How long would it take to download that much data over a 3Mb/sec internet connection? 37 hours, and that's assuming that Larry's internet connection speed never drops below 3Mb/sec, which is very unlikely. Now, let's assume Larry is lucky enough to have a connection like Verizon's FIOS, which has a 10Mb/sec download speed. Things speed up to 14 hours, again assuming no drops in speed. How many of you plan what movie to watch 37 or even 14 hours in advance? Now, combine this knowledge with the fact that a majority of Americans are still without even basic broadband internet access, and you can see that the combination of inconvenience with lack of delivery infrastructure makes it unlikely in the near future that downloaded content will be able to compete with physical media. How do delivery mechanisms like Apple's iTV and Microsoft's XboxLive service get around this problem now? By compressing the hell out of content and offering it at a lower native resolution, both of which diminish the quality of the delivered product. In short, these services do not offer a product that can compete directly with the current state-of-the-industry. Now, what about Larry's Blu-ray player? Well, he can likely be at any number of establishments that offer Blu-ray discs in a matter of minutes. A more accurate comparison might be made with purchasing movies via an online retailer like Amazon.com, which would require similar wait periods for a movie. However, online retailers like Amazon represent but a fraction of total sales of media--most likely because of this very challenge.

Secondly, there is a cultural hurdle in the way of the digital distribution services: people still like to see and feel the thing they are buying. There are many of us who are comfortable with the idea of housing an entire collection of movies, music, videogames, etc. as arrangements of 1's and 0's on some type of data storage technology, but there are many more of us who have yet to adopt such familiarity with technology. This particular issue will only be resolved over time as digital storage becomes more commonplace. It's not a problem per se, but rather a cultural shift.

Lastly there are security and licensing questions that continue to cause problems for the AV industry. Copy protection on a disc can be cracked, the content copied and distributed universally; indeed this is happening now. What remains to be seen is the fallout from offering very high quality content (i.e. content virtually indistinguishable from the original master) exclusively over the internet. It could be argued that illegal tampering of IP is a fringe activity these days (I'm sure many in the industry would argue that point), but what will happen once we have an internet infrastructure capable of delivering this data in a matter of minutes rather than days? Whether it be more or less secure, one thing is certain: until it can be proven unequivocally that a studio's content is secure, there will be resistance to a new form of infrastructure from those who will make these decisions. Quantum computing might solve this problem once and for all, making it against the laws of physics to copy data protected by a quantum state, but we aren't quite there yet. Also, what about licensing? If I buy a movie online today, will I be able to queue it up at a moment's notice 10 years from now and be able to watch it at my leisure without renewing a license?

So, in an ideal world we would flip on our TV's, order whatever content we wanted, have it delivered to us in a matter of minutes, then stored permanently on some redundant storage medium in either the great server rack in the sky or in a smaller-scale version of the same in our own homes. The savings in fuel consumption alone justifies this (think of how much fuel is used to bring a disc of whatever type into your home!). Then there is all the detritus of packaging..."stuff" that is inherently wasteful and useless. Personally I'm looking forward to the day when this is a reality. Unfortunately, I don't see the brick and mortar establishment going away for quite some time.