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.

Blu-ray and Digital Downloads

With recent talk of superfast broadband by 2012 that will enable instant HD movie downloads and talk of the next movie disc format that promises to deliver awesome picture and sound to rival cinemas, what does the future hold for companies in the digital movie industry?

Blu-ray and digital movie downloads are products that are the future for many in the movie industry what what do they offer?

Blu-Ray Offers Quality

We, the customer demand only the highest quality movie and sound performance. This is one of the reasons why Blu-ray is becoming so popular. Now that the format war is over, Blu-Ray productions can now focus on delivering awesome picture and sound quality that this high-definition format can produce. Connecting a Blu-Ray player to the Internet and you have some really cool BD-Live capabilities with interactive multiplayer video games, online movie trailers and special features that can be downloaded to the player.

The BDP has the latest and greatest sound decoding formats (Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio) and a better picture quality than downloads.

Vudu Downloads Offer Convenience

With a minimum 2 Mbps Internet connection and a credit card, Vudu offers the ability to give your customers the video store in their home, with access to more than 6000 DVD- and HD-quality movies and TV shows for rent and/or purchase, all with instantaneous viewing.

The content is all at the same price (or less) than they are currently paying for their local video store without late fees or trips to the store to pickup, or, better yet, return their overdue rentals. It's like Netflix on steroids without having to wait by the mailbox for your next few discs to trickle in.

The new Vudu XL VBX1000 is targeted directly at the CI market. It features a larger 1 TB hard drive and a higher price than its baby brother, the VBX100, which is sold mainly through national chains and big box retailers.

Other download options exist on the market, including VideoGiants, Vizumi, Netflix and CinemaNow.

Companies that offer both Blu-ray and downloads will have all the bases covered. They can offero a profitable solution that also most likely lead to additional sales of new audio components with HDMI switching, wireless routers, cables and everything else that is needed to support great high definition video.

At a time when the movie industry is undoubtedly suffering one of the worst downturns since the inception of CEDIA, these products represent two of the best opportunities to enhance and upgrade systems since the introduction of the CD player. Long live Blu-Ray and Movie Downloads.