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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...
Downloading Vs. DVD - A Comparison | | Bytes on a DVD-5 | 4,700,000,000 | | Bits on a DVD-5 | 37,600,000,000 | | Downloading a DVD-5 Movie takes: | Seconds | Minutes | Hours | Days | Weeks | | Download Connection: | bps | | Typical 56K Modem | 48kBps | 783,333.33 | 13,055.56 | 217.59 | 9.07 | 1.30 | | Typical ISDN 1 B-Channel | 64kBps | 587,500.00 | 9791.67 | 163.19 | 6.80 | 0.97 | | Typical ISDN 2 B-channel | 128kBps | 293,750.00 | 4,895.83 | 81.60 | 3.40 | 0.49 | | Typical ADSL Slow | 500kBps | 75,200.00 | 1,253.33 | 20.89 | 0.87 | 0.12 | | Typical ADSL Reasonable | 784kBps | 47,959.18 | 799.32 | 13.32 | 0.56 | 0.08 | | Typical ADSL Fast (also T1) | 1.5Mbps | 25,066.67 | 417.78 | 6.96 | 0.29 | 0.04 | | Typical T3-fraction | 3.Mbps | 12,533.33 | 208.89 | 3.48 | 0.15 | 0.02 | | Typical T3 - Full | 45Mbps | 835.56 | 13.93 | 0.23 | 0.01 | 0.00 |
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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