[DennisP]

Streaming has always struck me as nothing more than a compromise with limited bandwidth and storage. If you can download a two-hour movie in two seconds, and it takes .001 percent of your storage device, why wouldn't you download?

Unless you're trying to appease the entertainment industry, of course.

[paulsutter]

Whether the data is displayed live off the wire, buffered in RAM, buffered on disk, cached on disk, or beamed into my skull by space aliens, it makes little difference to me.

I only care that the system is responsive with good quality.

[DennisP]

But all this misses the whole point of the article: that easy local sharing and storage will make copyright completely unenforceable. If the files in question are pirated, they're not likely to be available for streaming.

I just signed up for the Netflix trial: looked for three movies, none of them available for streaming. Then I tried Hulu: they want $7/mo and still show commercials. Then there's Amazon, but their prices per movie are comparable to brick-and-mortar rental stores (aside from a few things in Prime), and that's for 3-day availability.

Compare to spending a couple seconds copying the file for free, with blu-ray quality and no commercials, and being able to watch as many times as you want with never a "buffering" message. If the industry doesn't step up their game, there will be a market for that.

[paulsutter]

Most consumers put a huge value on convenience, and don't feel inclined to sneak around copying files. The studios cause the file sharing by making it inconvenient to buy, as you yourself describe.

Look at mobile apps. Easier to pirate than a movie, but piracy is not a problem because it's so easy to buy the apps. Look at the growth rate of app revenue.

Look at Starbucks and how much people are willing to spend on a coffee.

We'll see how it shakes out, of course. But the problem now is that the studios fail to make their product available, not that people don't want to pay for it.