Digital hi-def content more important than Blu-ray

Really? I loved the ideals and everything behind HD-DVD but now that’s gone now we’re starting to hear the VP Interactive Entertainment at Microsoft push Digital Downloading in HD. Now to be fair everyone was on the digital download revolution for sometime but now it looks like it’s heating up again. Here’s my problem, how? You got telecoms that have taken billions if not trillions of dollars to upgrade their infrastructure and we have what? According to a quick google search somewhere between 1.5Mbps to 5Mbps depending on your state. You can’t even push across a DVD in real time at those speeds. Sure with some AVC encoding it is plausible to get a reasonable stable SD content that will fill your TV with minimal pixelation and dropouts. Now you punch that up to HD and you start to see the early 1990’s where you had to buffer a quarter or more of the movie before you could watch it or fear the dreaded cliffhanger scenario while you wait for the download to continue. What does all this mean to Joe Sixpack? It means either queue up your downloads overnight or wait for Verizon to come knocking on your door and offer salvation. Ma’ Bell et all is not going to be providing decent rollouts of ADSL2 anytime soon and even that is only 12Mbps to 24Mbps so it could still dampen the HD streaming party. I know my next move will be planned around a Verizon fiber install and if you care about downloading anything relatively high-def you will to.