Also with physical discs you get bonus features or extras sometimes referred to as special features that are unavailable with a download. I have all of season 1 of the ABC Family show Kyle XY from iTunes and they just give you in downloadable form the 10 aired episodes from the season. iTunes does not have the alternate pilot from the season 1 DVD or the extended season finale — where they have a deleted scene near the end of the episode.

The DVD is able to have these features but iTunes doesn’t and can’t get them. If iTunes were to have the alternate pilot it would be an individual download and the customer would be charged separately for it — meaning if you buy all the episodes and the bonus features the amount you have to pay will be higher.

Storing video on a computer means that if there is a lot of video and you don’t have a lot of disc space it will fill up really fast. All my videos from iTunes are stored on my Intel compatible 2nd generation Apple Mac Mini with the older Intel Core Duo processor. These are the earlier Intel compatible Apple Mac Minis released before 2007. I got mine in September of 2006. The first generation Mac Minis were with PowerPC processor, 2nd generation Intel Core Duo, and current generation (3rd gen models) have Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I have from the last generation a Mac Mini and when I first got it I had 90 GB of free disc space — it was advertised as an 80 GB Mac Mini but said I had 90 GB free space on the Macintosh HD. As soon as I started filling it up it quickly shrank down to 22 GB of free space.

Until more computers with over 1 terabyte of storage are released to market and are made more affordable — they have to find their way into the homes of consumers for use with digital media that can store it all without running of hard drive space and until they get extras to be featured with downloads I doubt physical media will ever be completely replaced. Consumers want media in a standard form that will work with their TV and computer regardless of DRM issues.

There are a handful of digital movie download stores/services today: take Apple’s iTunes Store that sells music and video — and when I say video I mean downloads of TV shows and movies and now rents movies in downloadable form; there is the MovieLink component of Blockbuster Total Access which has a mail order DVD rental business and DVD rental by store service; Netflix has its streaming Watch Now service for Windows PCs exclusively but hopes to bring it to Mac users later this year but they don’t sell movies in downloadable form or rent movies via downloads so they don’t count. There is also CinemaNow.com which counts as a movie download store/service and XBox Live Video Marketplace by Microsoft which requires use of an XBox 360 with an Internet connection and an XBox Live membership and access to the Live Marketplace store.

Also high definition video downloads would take up a lot of space and require a lot of bandwidth. All these digital download stores have incompatible products — iTunes video does not work with MovieLink nor CinemaNow or XBox. Neither do MovieLink and CinemaNow interoperate well together even if they both use a similar DRM system by Microsoft they have their own software in some cases and different offers.

A DVD can play on a Mac, a Windows PC or Linux PC. There are some restrictions but they aren’t severe and technologically it is possible for the tech savvy to copy a DVD to a computer and bypass the DRM even if there are possibly some legal issues in doing so.

Insert any DVD bought in the US in almost any or in any North American manufactured DVD player connected to a television and it will work right away. During the format war between HD DVD and Blu Ray with both types of players they were both backwards compatible with existing DVDs that offered video in standard definition. Despite the fact HD DVD and Blu Ray were incompatible with each other. Also DVD players would remain incompatible with HD DVD and Blu Ray consumers would have to buy a newer high definition based disc player to play HD DVDs or Blu Ray and buy the disc player that is designed to work with the format your buying content in. I think Blu Ray will still have that backwards compatibility with DVDs — in regards to its copy protection at least it plays in the majority of Blu Ray players. If I buy video from iTunes but have an XBox 360 I don’t have to worry that my investment in iTunes was wasted.

If your going to buy video from iTunes the best option is getting Apple TV for getting that content on an HD TV. Otherwise if you want XBox downloads go for an XBox 360 and use it to download content and stream it from there to the TV.

All DVDs work with all DVD players regardless of the region the DVD player was made for provided the DVD and DVD player are not copy protected to work with a specific region.

Not all DVDs have region encoding and even for those that do I haven’t noticed. I only play DVDs I own in US DVD players. I have never tried to go to another country and insert a disc in another country’s DVD player. When I go to another country and want to watch a DVD in an international DVD player I get a DVD for that country’s style of DVD players.

There are also issues with bandwidth both for the customer downloading and the provider of the download service — the day everyone switches to digital downloads completely is the day all digital download stores will have to have a uniform DRM system or ditch all DRM altogether for purchased content.

After all there has to be standards. VHS was a standard — it became the industry wide standard as far as consumer use went in the days of the Betamax vs VHS war. Most consumers favored VHS as a physical format for video and more people bought VHS instead of Betamax. When Betamax died everyone bought VHS only.

The DVD became the next standard after VHS but there was no major format war like VHS versus Betamax to decide the DVD’s future. Next came Blu Ray versus HD DVD. There has to be a standard even when downloads become more common. What format will be more used? Will Apple’s video and music formats be the new standard? Will Apple DRM be the standard copy protection system for all content once everyone were to supposedly switch to downloads only?

Apple is unwilling to license FairPlay though! Everyone wanting to buy media want their media to be compatible with the most used players etc. If I buy media from iTunes I want to make sure its the most popular and widely used store and has the most popular format — it should be available and accessible to as many people as possible. I don’t want to be an early adopter of a format that will die off. In some cases it is good to have more than 1 choice but when it comes to media formats there sometimes has to be 1 specific format and everyone will buy exclusively in that format so they’ll know if it works. What if I buy a DVD and go to a friend’s house and want to watch it with him? I take the DVD with me but he has a different type of DVD player than the one I have at my house — it still supports the same region in case the DVD has region encoding but it is manufactured by another company I don’t want to find that the DVD only works with a specific manufacturer’s DVD player. All DVDs should universally work with 1 uniform type of player. Whoever the manufacturer is doesn’t matter what matters is that if there is region encoding on the DVD I got the right region based DVD player to watch that content.

Whereas with downloads — iTunes video won’t work with any media extenders made by any other company besides Apple even if they are for the same region as the Apple TV.

Also high definition video downloads in addition to taking up more bandwidth require faster Internet connections to download quickly. A high speed connection for some people even in the US is not a problem but in some countries like the US and even India some percentage of the population is still slow in adoption of broadband based technologies. There are people in 2008 still stuck on slow dialup connections. Storage is a problem unless the computer’s hard drive is large enough to store thousands of terabytes worth of video if you download a lot of video that is.

I think digital downloads will complement physical DVD and Blu Ray sales and that is complement with an le not compliment. When I say complement I mean digital downloads will go with physical sales as an alternative medium — some studios might offer a special where you buy the DVD and they give you a free download or a discount on a TV download of the same studio. Or like iTunes Digital Copy on select Fox and Lionsgate DVDs and on select Lionsgate Blu Ray Discs studios can include an iTunes electronic version of the file or a MovieLink version of the file etc that can be copied to the computer and loaded into whatever media player/store software downloaded content is stored in.

Consumers who download and purchase from the iTunes Store and then see their content added to the iTunes media library can even copy from the iTunes Digital Copy initiative a file from a DVD to iTunes that gives them instantly an iTunes version of the video without having to shop iTunes Store. They can get the DVD and the benefits of an iTunes video at the same time. Get both the DVD version and iTunes version together from the DVD.

This will no doubt provide renewed interest for some in buying DVDs and even Blu Ray discs.

People will buy DVDs to get the iTunes version as well and enjoy both the DVD and iTunes version without having to buy both separately.

Also what is being implied here? That eventually all media discs will stop being made and physical media will end its life-span entirely. That brick and mortar retail stores like Blockbuster Video, Hollywood Video, even the Netflix mail order DVD rental business will go kaput and companies with on location video stores will have to stop distributing physical products.

WalMart is like the largest retailer of DVDs or certainly one of the largest and has made its own video download store to compete with iTunes after complaining that video download stores like iTunes were undercutting WalMart’s DVD sales because they got to sell their content cheaper. They had a point but with downloads you don’t get extras that come on a DVD and with downloading studios can afford to sell downloads cheaper and make more money because there is no manufacturing cost for making a physical tape or disc. Now WalMart wanting to get a piece of the video download market for itself made its own video download store/service but dependent on Microsoft’s DRM it has made its product only available to Windows users — that’s not too bad for the majority of computer users as they are Windows PC users but not all PC users are Windows users. Some PC users are Linux users and even outside the PC space there are computers by Apple called Macs which run Mac OS X.

WalMart Video Downloads don’t work with the most popular line of mp3 players/portable devices capable of playing video and music known as the Apple iPod. Neither do any other legal video download stores outside iTunes with non FairPlay DRM systems have the ability to gain playback on an iPod, iPhone or Apple TV.

Until there is only 1 digital download store for video that everyone uses and it can come with extras I doubt discs will ever completely be replaced with downloads.

Also it is quite likely that now that HD DVD is dead — unfortunately Blu Ray’s win is bad for consumers because it means more DRM for consumers — HD DVD had less copy protection — but also troubling is the fact that while HD DVD was around Sony to stay competitive had to keep dropping prices of expensive Blu Ray players and now they are raising them again. Until Blu Ray becomes affordable again and stays affordable I would never consider upgrading to Blu Ray. It is likely that Apple doesn’t yet want to add Blu Ray if the parts become so expensive it drives up the cost of its Mac computers too high.

Apple doesn’t want their Macs to be too expensive they want them to be somewhat affordable with Mac Mini being the most affordable at the moment in the desktop line of Mac computers.

Oh, and always: fsck Steve Jobs.