Tuesday, July 16, 2013

DVDs and Blu-Rays will still be relevant for a while yet

This columnist for Forbes understands that but still misses one of the biggest reasons why. He addresses the fact that if you're picky about picture or sound quality streaming isn't going to provide the absolute best experience. He brings up other facts but misses one of the absolute biggest obstacles in the real world to media streaming taking over the U.S. market.

Our pathetic broadband quality is a major barrier not only to streaming taking over the media market but to fully utilizing the potential of high speed internet for education, remote medicine and other benefits we probably just haven't thought of yet. There are areas inside major metropolitan areas where you can't get broadband, believe it or not. I work for a small chain of funeral homes and cemeteries. They have a location in Leavenworth Kansas. It's a town with a bit over 35,000 people in it and considered to be part of the greater KC metropolitan area. To this day I haven't been able to get useful broadband at that location. Then you work your way "down" to smaller cities and towns and rural areas and it only gets worse. If you can find it, decent bandwidth is expensive most of the time.

Netflix and its gaming cousin, GameFly, are a much more reasonable answer for millions of Americans when they want to watch movies, television series or play video games and will probably be staying that way for years to come.

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