On the quality issue, it wouldn’t be THAT expensive (storage is sickeningly cheap) for them to offer multiple quality levels. Mostly, think about the disk space usage on a 40 GB box. Assuming that a two hour movie uses up 5 GB, that’s a big chunk of drive space to dedicate to a movie. Not that anyone should have a 40 GB model, adding a drive is trivially easy, but, whatever.

Basically even on a low-end common broadband connection a normal movie at full DVD quality could still download overnight. With 3Mbps, 6Mbps, and even 10Mbps available in some areas those folks would be able to pull them down all the faster.

This isn’t meant to be VoD – it is a replacement for waiting for a DVD in the mail. Which for most people takes at least a couple of days, and then you have to mail it back too.

I’m not that worried about the Macrovision aspect – TiVo and ReplayTV have both supported MacroVision for years. Multi-Room Viewing even has controls in the software to prevent sharing if a flag is set. Have you *ever* heard of it being used? I haven’t.

This new MacroVision system gives content providers more control, which is the only way they’ll ever agree to this kind of thing in the first place. But just because it is there doesn’t mean they’ll really use it, or that all of them will. It just gives the bean counters the warm fuzzies. The article is also less than clear – some of the things, about controlling digital to analog, sound like the FCC mandated Broadcast Flag support that ties into digital TV.

Digital Rights Management is a fact of life from here on out. How far studios go will be largely determined by the market. If, say, Warner tries to be draconian but Sony (who owns Columbia Tri-Star and is in the process of buying MGM) decides to be lax, it’ll pressure Warner to let up, etc.

(Aside: The Sony buyout of MGM almost assures Blu-Ray will kick HD-DVD’s ass in the market. Sony is the principle Blu-Ray backer. They’ve already announced the PS3 *will* use it – confirming the earlier rumors. And they’d previosuly stated that Columbia Tri-Star films would be released on Blu-Ray. If they release their library online on Blu-Ray, they’ll lock HD-DVD out since they’ll control the largest film library with many of the most popular titles of all time.)