HD Movie Downloads still to come

That flood of demand for HD Movies maybe a little farther off than some studios and content providers had hoped.

Movie downloads service Vudu said this week that it will let customers renew HD movies for $1.99. The company, which offers standard-definition renewals for 99 cents, charges $3.99 to $5.99 for first-time rentals of HD titles.

?In this age of $4-a-gallon gas and ?staycations,? we felt that Vudu customers deserved a break,? said Patrick Cosson, the company?s vice president of marketing. Of Vudu?s 6,500 titles, about 200 are available in HD.

With studios such as Lionsgate forecasting U.S. consumers will spend about $1.5 billion on digital downloads and streaming this year, and Blu-ray revenue expected to account for about 4% of the $25 billion home entertainment market, digital delivery of HD films may jump from a negligible number to more than $60 million this year.

Already, Blu-ray revenue has jumped fourfold to more than $200 million this year, despite home entertainment spending being nearly flat at about $10.1 billion, according to data compiled by Video Business and Rentrak.

Meanwhile, Lionsgate said in an earnings call this week that revenue from digital delivery would more than double to about $3.5 billion within the next five years while the continued rise in high-definition TV sales suggests that HD titles will account for a progressively larger share of that total.

Still, the promotion by Vudu, which doesn?t disclose sales or rental figures, suggests that between bandwidth limitations that lengthen the time it takes to download or stream HD titles, the disparate components used to bring digital titles directly to televisions and the general cutback in consumer spending, it may yet be a while before digital delivery of HD titles becomes the norm.