True HD, uncompressed or re-encoded, is available primarily only on physical media. This will be true for the foreseeable future. Eventually digital downloads will be the delivery method of choice for most movie studios. They would prefer that consumers "pay per play" or subscription, rather than purchase a disk. Ultra broadband is coming "100megabit". Both Version and Comcast will have offerings in 2009, but it will be cost prohibitive compared to a $30 Blu-ray disk. Consumers are slow to adopt new technology. Until ultra broadband is offered at reasonable prices and installed in the majority of the country, physical media "Blu-Ray" will exist in tandem with downloadable offerings. Is it safe to stock your libraries with Blu-Ray? Yes! Ultra Broadband service plans may even charge for per MegaBit. That coupled with a subscription or on demand fee for a movie rental makes buying a Blu-Ray disk more attractive to the average consumer.

Unfortunately, the loser here with the format war has been the consumer. 28% of people said the fact that there was a format war meant they weren't going to buy a high-definition DVD player. They weren't going to try to figure it out." NPD's latest survey of consumer awareness about Blu-ray tries to cheerlead, with the headline, "Consumer Awareness and Potential for Blu-ray Disc Devices Rising." But then you read the results—45 percent of HDTV owners are now "familiar with Blu-ray," up from 35 percent the same time last year. That means over half of HDTV owners—not regular people with standard def TVs, we're talking the leading chunk of consumers that should be well aware of Blu-ray—still don't know what it is. That's horrendous.

The best HD quality is probably from DirecTV (the MPEG-4 national channels), some cable companies and Verizon FIOS. Dish is pretty good although they, and many of the cable companies, have been compressing their signals to get more channels into a given bandwidth. DirecTV still has this issue on their "old" MPEG-2 HD channels but later this year they are all expected to move to MPEG-4 (on the new DirecTV11 satellite) and then we expect the PQ to improve significantly. Obviously number of channels is a factor here also. Some cable companies have very few HD channels, so it's easy to avoid the need for additional compression. There are not many cable companies with the number of HD channels available from DirecTV and from Dish. Also many cable companies are severely bandwidth-limited, and it is not easy to create extra bandwidth across a complete cable system. The satellite companies, particularly DirecTV (and eventually Dish) are in remarkably good shape when it comes to future available bandwidth. With DirecTV11 about to start test transmissions, the big issue will probably be finding enough HD channels/material to use the bandwidth that will be available, so there should be no need to compromise picture quality because of bandwidth limitations.