As BluRay and HD-DVD fight it out, they are loosing ground to a new media distribution format… Downloading via the internet.

As devices like AppleTV, TiVo, XBOX 360, and PS3 mature and offer full downloads of HD quality movies and permanent storage on a central home media server that can stream movies to any TV in your home, copy to any iPod, Zune, or PSP, and stream to your laptop or cellphone (via Slingbox or similar), purchasing movies on pre-recorded media will be obsolete. (I’m ignoring any DRM lock out issues of course.)

A good quality HD movie may be close to 40~50GB* in size which is currently a problem for both network bandwidth and hard drive space but that won't be a constraint for long. In two years, downloading a 50GB file will probably only take a couple hours on most home internet connections (I think on my current cable modem it would take theoretically about 12 hours, of course, I never get near my theoretical bandwidth.) And if I could download an HD movie in 12 hours, that’s already faster than Amazon.com or DeepDiscountDVD.com can get it to me if I order it, so I’d already do this with current technology if it was available.

If a winner doesn't soon emerge in the next gen DVD media wars downloading HD media will be able to take over very quickly once it becomes more available.