Fast Learner said:
You don't necessarily need to store much of anything with a very wide pipe and the ability to purchase the rights to watch something (even unlimited times). IMO, the desire to "own" electronic media will decrease dramatically as near-instant access to it becomes more real.
I disagree. People like owning the physical media. It gives a real sense of posession. Most people don't think in terms of owning the rights to view something, they think in terms of owning a physical copy of something. It's part of why downloading piracy and casual software piracy is so common, many people who would never steal a physical disc have no qualms about downloading a song or installing Windows on multiple computers because mentally they see the media as the possession, not the copyright. In their minds, they bought that copy, so they're going to install it wherever they feel like, and they aren't stealing anything, they didn't take the disc from anybody. It's not the way the law works, but we've got a big gulf between our laws, our culture, and our technology right now.
Possessing the physical media means the system is also much more usable when portable. I can play my DVD's on my laptop, in my living room, in the in-vehicle DVD player in a friend's van, on a mini-DVD player out in the field, ect., if I license a file, where I can use it and what I can use it with is much more limited, compare DRM'ed licensed music downloads with physical CD's or ripped mp3's. It also makes it much more useful archivally. For example, given how Lucasfilm likes to pretend that pre-Special Edition versions of Star Wars don't exist, in the kind of setup you envision, it's much easier to erase any trace that Han shot first if every time you watch Star Wars you have to download it straight from LFL.
DIVX was a big example of the failure of having to purchase the rights to unlimited view a media you'd already bought at retail. For those who may be unaware, it was a competing sub-format of DVD that came out at the same time (DIVX players could play both DIVX discs and DVD's, but DIVX discs didn't work in DVD players). The basic idea was that movies would only cost $3 or $4 dollars retail, and would be marketed as impulse buys at convenience stores and the like, as "disposable movies" essentially. When you first buy a DIVX disc, you could only watch it for a fixed amount of time before it would lock up. Your DIVX box calls in to their central server and reports the serial number of the disc you used, and how long it's valid for. Once the initial time (usually around 48 hours) was up, you couldn't watch the disc anymore. You could pay a few more dollars to unlock the disc for another viewing cycle, or just throw the disc away. For much more money (comparable to buying a new DVD of a movie) you could just buy unlimited viewing rights. Every time you played a disc, the machine had to check their central server to verify your rights to use the media.
It bombed, horribly. People weren't willing to buy such a heavily restricted media, and the more open and less secure DVD format took off by comparison. The format was terminated, and the servers kept open for a year or so for the use of current DIVX owners, before they were shut down and the discs obsolete.
