BlueRay: Less pain, more gain, time to think again?

I'm on Apple's side with regard to removing optical drives. Smaller, lighter, sleeker machines work for me as user who needs portability. I do have the external superdrive and think this is the right way to go because the optical drives seem to be the most failed component on my previous Macs, with three of my built in drives either failing or becoming highly unreliable.

And BlueRay was very slow to gain traction, and having replaced my VHS with CD-Video and later with DVD, I was getting bored with continually upgrading media. When BlueRay came out it was one of several competing standards, with expensive hardware and media, and no guarantee of the format war winner, online sourced 720p looked great in comparison. So I could buy the case against BR.

However, things have moved on considerably over the last year or so. $900 buys a pretty decent HD/3D TV, BR players are more plentiful and cheaper, and there's now lots more content. BlueRay has definitely gained traction:

http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1335903153

And as much as BR has moved on, online media has got worse, with more fragmentation and relatively high prices. To get the selection of media I want, I probably have to subscribe to 5 or 6 different services and have 3 different ways of streaming it to the TV.

So I just picked up a deal with about 45 HD movies on 14 BR discs, complete with depth mapping for 2D->3D conversion. These are many of the classic trilogies (or series) like Bourne, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, The Godfather, Star Wars, Terminator, Harry Potter, Twilight, etc. With each disc being either 25GB or 50GB, there is absolutely no way on earth I could have downloaded this digital media from my internet.

But I do like the convenience of having my media on hard drive so I can search and stream. I guess copy protection both for playback and reading the media is the issue, but these things have a way of sorting themselves out.

It sure would be nice to see a pukka BlueRay superdrive from Apple rather than hacking together some 3rd party option.

I'm onboard with online distribution (and love the fact it's backed up for me and accessible everywhere), but I just don't think the bandwidth is there in many parts of the world to handle new HD media, and I think optical drives probably still have something to offer over the next few years.

Fat chance I know.

-Najinsky