Video Disc Rental – Extinction by 2020?

Today I came across an article in The Australian outlining the downgrade of Blockbuster credit rating to a level just above default in USA. The article also went on to detail cooperative marketing efforts between the Hollywood studios and the major cable operators to promote video-on-demand services.

Bringing things back home to Australia within the context of the National Broadband Network, I believe that physical video rental as we know it could change quite significantly. With tens of megabits of perhaps 100Mbps speeds touted by the Commonwealth Government, disc rental could be easily supplanted by a hefty back catalogue of movies that can be instantly rented and streamed online. We’re already beginning to see this with the advent of Foxtel Download and Foxtel On Demand (albeit limited to what is on offer at the time and client software in the case of Foxtel Download).

Having said all of that, I believe there still is a place for physical media (be it temporary or semi-permanent) for video storage at least in the short to medium term (which I touched on in Optical Media – Next Stop, Obsolescence). Migration from physical to streaming media (including IPTV) won’t happen overnight and will certainly be dependant upon faster broadband speeds to kick things off.

What will this mean for the disc rental businesses? I guess time will tell. I still can’t help but think people will be hanging on to their CD\DVD\BD players for a long while yet though.

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