I would counter that format requirements will continue to go up as available tech improves, but the truth is that I ***still*** have not bothered with Blu-Ray at all, and even lossy 1/4 HD rips of Doctor Who look pretty good on my high-def projection system, let alone my tiny iPhone screen. As we already have with audio, we're rapidly reaching a point where most consumers simply aren't going to care about fidelity improvements enough to invest in near-future new technologies.

The screen already looks good to me in 720p or 1080i or even 640p (sometimes less). Spending thousands of dollars on something more impressive isn't going to make my 41-year old eyes see it any better.

Which would be simply awful if anybody was forcing you to pay for cable.

It's kind of irrelevant, actually.

You can buy an iPhone for $199 with a 2-year contract that locks you into AT&T anyway, or you can spend something like $600 on a PHONE just so you can jailbreak it and use it with a carrier that won't support visual voicemail and might lose you support from the app store, just so you can run a handful of "unapproved" apps which most people don't care about.

Guess which option nearly everybody is going to take?

We don't. I don't pay a dime for my TV service, but rather get it for free over-the-air (and via Hulu) thanks to ads.

Nobody HAS to pay for cable. Some people CHOOSE to. And they pay less than they would if cable channels had no ads.

If you want to buy ad-free viewing, get a NetFlix account and watch via Instant streaming.

Hooray for consumer choice!

Joke ----------->
Your head.

Yeah, and we've got the Southeastern states. Pretty much makes us even.

Phone calls are nearly obsolete, as far as I'm concerned. I'd say about 75 percent of my voice minutes are occupied by my over-60 parents calling me about stuff. Everybody else in my life usually "talks" to me via texting, e-mail, social networks, etc. when we're not face-to-face.

All customers of everything are purely a source of profit, and the correct price to charge for anything is whatever the market will bear. That is how capitalism works. If you want me to either give something to you or do something for you, you must pay me what I ask in exchange.

Reminds me a bit of this classic strip:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2009/20090501.jpg

I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Before DVD's arrived, most people thought it was WEIRD to own a physical copy of a movie.

After all, the vast majority of people do not watch the vast majority of movies more than once. Only the most dedicated of nerds and cinemaphiles maintained large libraries of VHS tapes and/or Laser Disks.

DVD's became cheap enough that people started to feel that they "might as well" go ahead in buy them, especially when $35 at Best Buy allowed you the opportunity to watch stuff like all the episodes of Season 2 of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in sequence. But that only recently has been how the market has behaved, and if streaming continues to get better and cheaper, I can see people not caring about owning disks anymore.

Heck, I used to line a wall with disks just like every other movie/TV junkie... but I don't believe I've purchased a new DVD since Spiderman 3, and now I'm wondering why I bothered.

If I want to watch a new release, I can add it to my NetFlix queue and wait a couple days with pretty much no cost beyond what I'm already paying for the service, or I suppose I could shell out a couple bucks to "rent" it off iTunes if I'm in some kind of a hurry. For most old movies (and a growing library of TV shows), I can stream them immediately off NetFlix and/or Hulu.

So it's unlikely that I'll buy another DVD ever, and buying a player for a new format is out of the question.

As more and more stuff shows up on NetFlix, I've been carting more and more of my disks to the used CD store down the block and getting rid of them, as well as dumping files off my hard drives. Why store all that shit when I can watch them whenever I want anyway?

The day just might arrive that NetFlix, Blockbuster, Apple and maybe Amazon will all be in the arena, offering "unlimited" streaming of every DVD ever made.

You'll know that day is about 2 years away when Apple releases some kind of Mac for the home with no optical drive whatsoever.

If by "another box" you mean "an HD tuner that's about the size of my thumb", then yes that's true.

I've been DVR-ing free over-the-air HDTV on a mini for years now. It works great.

I have guests over watching 420p sources scaled up to a 720p projector on a 119" screen all the time. Most of those who even give a second thought to video specs simply ASSUME they are watching Blu-Ray disks on a 1080p screen until I inform them otherwise, because they don't notice any pixelation.

And a lot h.264 files out on the Internet are only 360p, and even THOSE look perfectly watchable on my ridiculously-large screen. I seriously doubt anybody watching on their 50" plasma set can even tell the difference without doing a direct A/B comparison test.

The New York Times does not publish in the dialect(s) of the common citizens of that New York City. It has been regarded as a "paper of record" for most of its existence and is more formal about adhering to an academic writing style than most other newspapers.