Some foresee a future in which all movie purchases are via downloads, but the current technology still pits compressed 720p, reduced quality Internet HD against the massive storage of HD discs, 30 to 50 gigabytes, according to ITWire on Monday. Customers are still choosing both formats when the spirit moves them.

There has bee a lot of discussion lately about the future of movie purchases. Hollywood has taken the approach that they’ll deliver content to as many people as possible in as many ways as possible. Right now, that’s a smart thing to do because of the technical constraints when transmitting HD videos on the Internet. That may be fine for some, but for others who want the best possible picture and sound, an HD disc is the only way to go. As a result, Blu-ray discs aren’t going away any time soon.

Comparing sales results is hard to do. While Apple has sold 7 million movies, they’ve all been in "near DVD" quality. For some users with 1.5 Mbps DSL, downloading or streaming an HD movie is a difficult prospect, and sometimes watching a move in DVD quality is good enough. For others, still worried about the disc format war, they’ve still purchased 6 million titles in Blu-ray and 2.5 million titles in HD DVD because they wanted something better, right now.

"Until ultra high-speed broadband with a download limit allowing hundreds or even thousands of gigabytes becomes the baseline standard, optical discs are still the easiest and cheapest way to get 1080p HD content to a worldwide audience," Alex Zaharov-Reutt wrote. "All that we do know is that DVDs and high-def discs will be with us for some time yet � just as video tapes, LPs and audio cassettes are still part of the lives of many."

Pronouncements of the death of physical media, for now, may be overblown. In addition, there are always situations and global locations where people need to have the physical disc. The issue for now is that not all all HD is created equal, and consumers need to know the difference between highly compressed 720p video at 2 to 4 Mbps, uncompressed 1080i broadcast HD at 19 Mbps, and 1080p from an HD disc at 20 to 40 Mbps.