I didn't mean it as a dig at writers and directors, although going back and re-reading my post it certainly seems like it (my bad). I merely wanted to point out

I didn't mean it as a dig at writers and directors, although going back and re-reading my post it certainly seems like it (my bad). I merely wanted to point out how large the number of stake-holders is for your average motion picture. One significant reason the film industry is so slow to catch up to the internet is because it's so hard to get those stake-holders to agree to anything and, at least until recently, their contracts weren't written with an eye to technologies that didn't exist yet. I think the reason we've stand-up comedians be among the first to offer audience-friendly distribution is that they don't have to go back an renegotiate all their contracts to allow them to give the audience what they want. I agree that blu-ray quality video streaming to the home would be a huge step forward (and actually a very reasonable usage of that bandwidth - the higher bitrate codecs are mostly useful for reduced latency, which really isn't an issue for Hollywood content). There would probably still have to be some remastering, at least of the audio, which is not optimized for streaming, which would be expensive given the current market size.