And behind this curtain... Apple and Amazon to launch movie download services

Now the Wall Street Journal is speculating alongside every blogger known to man. What will Apple unveil next Tuesday? They've sent out invitations to an event at a performing arts theatre in San Francisco, with the headline "It's Showtime!". OK. And it's safe to say that Disney is on board.

But now it seems that Amazon has signed up the other film studios to a competing services to be unveiled "soon". These two pioneering companies are betting they can get a jump on everyone else to catalyze the market. Some don't agree.

Mark Cuban offered this view:

"I personally think that the optimal connection will be personally managed hard drives. In five years, a terabyte or more of storage on a hard drive will be less than $100. We should be able to fill that up with music and whatever content we want in HD format, connect it to the TV and, using our remote, choose whichever movies we want.

"Everyone thinks content delivery will come from the Internet. It won't. It's too expensive and far too slow to deliver HD content. You just bought your 50-plus-inch LCD that is hanging on the wall. Do you want standard definition over compressed HD or the best-possible picture quality from your content?

"Blu-ray Disc- or HD DVD-quality content or better will be possible, but you won't get that quality from a download. The reality is that it's cheaper and faster to send (hard drives with terabytes of) content overnight via UPS than it is to download it over the Net. Brown is faster than the Net."