Posted on 24 February 2009 by Quaid

Hi, all, Quaid here with a piece of information that makes me excited. Not necessarily because I am a fan of the service (never even tried it), but because I am a fan of the idea.

I said in my Blu-Ray article (which you can find HERE) that I was hoping to skip Blu-Ray as a format. Not because I don’t like the image quality, but because I think physical discs are a dying medium for films. I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on discs that will be replaced quickly with a new technology that is already here. And that new technology is digital downloading of High-Definition films.

Now, just today, The Hollywood Reporter tells us that the online rental company Vudu will begin to offer HD movies for permanent download. It’s going to start with 50 titles, including Man on Wire, and will offer the movies for $13.99-$23.99 (which is a little cheaper than Blu-Ray last I checked).

But what about storage? Seems you can store the movies on either your “Vudu box” or in the “Vudu Vault,” an online storage solution.

Me, I just want to be able to pull the movie onto my terabyte harddrive and keep them close by. Vudu won’t let me do this, sadly, as it is a set-top-box oriented service.

Now if only iTunes would follow suit, offering all of their movies to purchase in HD, we’d be set. And if Netflix offered HD streaming of rental films. And they offered all the Blu-Ray extras via some new codec like RatDVD. Do it now! The internet at large will resort to piracy if you don’t give them what they want. It’s an inevitability.