A while back, as an experiment in fun, I created a table called "Downloading vs DVD" in order to answer the question: "Is it more effective to download a movie, or buy the DVD"?

(Click read more to see)

The answer was then: unless you were on the Internet 2, you didn't want to download! Today's Cable Modem speeds ARE vastly improved, and at 3 Mbps or better, make it feasible to do so... times have changed

I'll try to update this for HD and Blu-ray sometime soon... the answer will be different for those big formats...

Broadband is an interesting issue: many people believe that the widespread acceptance of Broadband distribution of Video-based media is not too far away... The table above gives you an opportunity to evaluate for yourself the amount of time required to download the equivalent of a DVD-5 Movie (4.7 Billion Bytes).

Judge for yourself: each row in the above table lists equivalent times for downloading 4.7 Gigabytes, at a particular connection speed - for example, downloading a DVD-5 at 56K dialup speeds would take over 13,055 minutes, or the equivalent of slightly over 9 days of continuous downloading!! Of course, if you happened to have a T3 line, you could download a new movie every 15 Minutes, with time left over for popcorn :-)

How long would YOU be willing to keep an Internet connection alive in order to download a Movie? I welcome your comments

Chart Copyright (c) 2000- 2007 Bruce Nazarian, the Digital Guy

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