Gaming Consoles Will Soon Be for Nerds Only

[danrok]

Game consoles to become a niche for nerds?

See front page:
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/g...erds-only.html

Comments?

[Aedan]

Bad stats:

Well, it was revealed last week that sometime in 2012, movie downloads will surpass physical sales and rentals for the first time.

The "surpass" part is only forecast by IHS Screen Digest, and only deals with the US market. That's a pretty poor way to start an article claiming the death of anything. Additionally, the article fails to deal with the 23% of the US population who don't have an internet connection - makes streaming to that demographic anything pretty hard.

[danrok]

Yes, I raised an eye brow when I read that.

Not so good, to base a long-term prediction on a brief event, which has not yet happened!

Also, there's some big differences between music distribution (retail), and movies.

Music is far more suited to on-the-go listening - you can walk, cycle, and drive at the same time. So, ties in neatly with mobile devices with direct downloading.

Movies are more of a sit down and watch in the living room thing, where you can have shelves to store discs. Downloading is not quite so appealing.

[robbie]

I need to show you my Western Digital Media player.
BlackBerry8330m/4.5.0.186 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/104

[Aedan]

I could show you my NAS, but none of that helps if you don't have an internet connection! I guess the question becomes "how can you deliver streaming downloads to everyone when 23% of your market has no Internet connection?"

[danrok]

Possibly via some ATM-like booth, choose a movie, pay for it, and it would be written to some form of portable media.

Also, useful if you only have a very limited Internet connection.

[Gizmo]

Seems to me like this all depends on having 'high speed' internet as well. While it's true that 23% of the market has no internet connection at all, it's also true that upwards of 30% of the population that DOES have 'high speed' internet has a connection that is 2 Mb/s or less, and 5% is less than 256Kb/s. (source)

With the bandwidth requirements of the games getting ever higher, it means that potentially up to half the market can't take advantage of the capability.

[booman]

either way, I'm a nerd who never invested in consoles and never will, but I have considered investing in netflix or amazon streaming movies.
Just because Red Box doesn't have the older movies I want to watch.