Will Internet Video Replace Blu-ray?

[lcaillo]

Do you really want the government to get in the business of telling us what we can download and what we can't? What will be next? Why not ban text messaging? How about banning breast implants? They use valuable resources in the health care system. How about banning cars that get below xx mpg. Again, a valuable resource...

[kq6qv]

Hospitals ban elective surgery any time they get too busy for it.

[hharris4earthlink]

Banning movies would hardly address the problem. The typical American household uses as much bandwidth as a major office park a few years ago. We download music, watch videos, email photos. We are now ranked 15th place on the broadband ranking kept by the OECD. People from other countries are shocked by two things about America: our homeless situation and the terrible state of broadband (not an exaggeration, by the way).

Improving America's broadband infrastructure is vitally important to keeping us competitive with the rest of the world. We need more capacity, better compression technologies and more sophisticated routers.

Banning movie downloads in this country to reduce bandwidth problems would be like banning school buses to avoid building highways. Not smart; not future pointing; and ultimately anti-American. Unfortunately our current administration would seem to have trouble spelling "smart", least of all being it.

Henry

[kq6qv]

School busses are necessary. Downloading movies is not. In a few years maybe 80% of all internet traffic will be HD movies. Is that a good reason why we should expand internet capacity?

[miller]

Are you just picking the 80% number because it sounds nice and high, or is it based on some sort of factual information?

- Miller

[hharris4earthlink]

Perhaps a better analogy would be ban a particular product being trucked on highways to avoid building more and better highways. Movies are Internet commerce analogous to highway commerce. To be competitive in this world, we need to expand our ability to do commerce, not cripple it.

[kq6qv]

Miller- I made it up. It is a wild guess, but it seems about right to me. It assumes that internet capacity expands to meet demand. Most likely capacity will not expand that fast, and it will be a long time before movies reach the 80% mark. I would not be surprised if they reach 90%. For the next decade movie suppliers will make their quality as high as they can get away with, which will be just enough to make the internet miserable for the rest of us. -Ken

[hharris4earthlink]

I believe he's right. Experts are predicting movie downloads may reach 80 percent with potential to jam up America's Internet. My argument is that this is a problem with our infrastructure and that needs to be addressed before we start banning downloads. We can't be competitive in the world if we reduce commerce in an attempt to fix our own infrastructure problems. This is a bad idea that would be a further strain on our current flagging economy.

[kq6qv]

Henry- Our competitiveness in the world is harmed by squandering our nation

[hharris4earthlink]

So who's going to judge the worth of a product? You? Let's not be ridiculous. I'm talking about free enterprise, not turning our country into some kind of soviet state where someone decides what products should be distributed.

We should be worrying about the fact that the rest of the world no longer considers the dollar the standard on which to do business, not planning on how to bring down free enterprise. The fact that our Internet infrastructure doesn't measure up to those in many countries should be a warning to us all.

Henry