VS ???

Stephane Dion from the TheTechZone.com thinks that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies are... well, too little, too late. Why? iTunes has movies on its menu - yeah, well Disney and Disney-affiliate movies for now. Soon enough, Dion says, so will Microsoft for its Zune, and with iTV (temporary codename) on its way, there will soon be no reason for movie downloads to not appear on the TV screen.

Which means that when Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies (and their associated players) finally come out in force, they will find a market that has, well, settled for movie downloads, and which actually love them. They will instead find its niche in a small market of tech die-hards with a lot of money in their hands (are you forgetting the Xbox 360 and PS3 people, Stephane?), but it won't become the home movie standard that DVD became.

To sum up why he believes so, Dion lists the five following reasons why digital download will kill the next-gen movie discs:

• Because it's cheap. You don't have to buy an HDTV and an HD player to play any of the iTunes movie stuff, but you'll have to in order to play Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. And the downloads (for now) are cheaper compared to the discs.
  
• Because it's cool. Like music downloading is cool. It's easy, it's accessible, and your neighbor's probably doing it as well. So why not movies?
• Because downloading's readily available from the production side. All those movie studios have to do - once they get over their movie-downloading fears and jump in the bandwagon - is upload the digital movie into a server. No need to print up new cases and discs!
• Because music downloading killed the CD. Like, "Video killed the radio star..."
• Finally, because high-speed broadband is bigger business than HDTV, especially when it comes to digital video and audio media - movies and music.
  

For us, only time - and the rest of Hollywood jumping in on the movie downloading wagon - will tell if iTunes (and its present and future competitors) will become the next generation's DVD, or if HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will be accepted as the norm. Dion may make a compelling case for the former, sure, but this industry is constantly changing and evolving. Besides, from where we're sitting, it's not like the CD or DVD's entirely dead, either, even given iTunes and less legitimate movie downloading sites.

Who knows? Even Stephane asks: "When are we able to download a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movie?" Now he's talking.