I was reading an interview with Sony marketing executive John Koller today over at GamesIndustry.biz and one of the comments he made that really intrigued me was this:

Q: So the obvious questions is, is this the beginning of the end of the UMD format?

John Koller: We still look to actively support UMD. Again, it’s a balance, because we want to make sure that retail has theirs, and on that we on the digital side support this new kind of distribution model. We look to the tangible disc as continuing to be very important. I think there’s certainly a consumer out there who values tangibility. We say that alot in our research. Consumers who just want to hold the disc and be able to use it.

On the other side, and again going back to music, we’ve seen that model and we know how that ended. We know that after a couple of years of digital most people said digital was for them because it’s so easy, they’re not going to lose the license to something they download. The consumer who likes tangibility is worried about system crashes and losing downloads. So that’s an education process for us to talk to consumers and let them know that content can be re-downloaded. It’s a balance, but UMD isn’t going away.

It reminded me of a discussion I had with a friend of mine once concerning the purchase of legal downloaded movies off of iTunes or Amazon Unboxed.  I couldn’t possibly fathom paying $10 or $20 for a downloaded movie that didn’t come with a physical copy.  I’d be too worried about DRM restrictions, viruses corrupting my movie files, and hard drive crashes.  Of course, with physical home video media, discs can get scratched or broken, lost, or stolen pretty easily (and there are still format issues between newer and older DVDs and players).

There’s no such thing as the perfect format, I guess.  Both formats have their problems.  That’s why the movement of including digital copies with the physical copy of whatever DVD is starting to grow on me.  Every DVD I’ve picked up or reviewed in the past three months has had a free digital copy included.  It’s kind of the best of both worlds.

Could you live in a world where movies are download only, or are you a Luddite like me, attached to your shiny discs?