You will NOT need the physical disk of the movie you have downloaded from the Kaleidescape store.
I am very encouraged with this news. I have long argued that Kaleidescape needed to shift its business model away from the shiny disks and this news certainly moves in that direction. The Kaleidescape experience with this business model will continue to build real value both to its established customer base as well as open the doors to new customers which is a good thing. The math behind this shift is really significant at first blush.
Assuming that the download provides a bit for bit comparison to the original BD movie then the following, albeit overly simplified, cost model emerges.
Today, my average Canadian cost of a BD movie is close to $25.00 + 13% HST (tax). But the real cost of owning the movie should include the M700 carousel which will add another $18.75 + tax to the cost of owning the movie in the Kaleidescape environment. But I have to store it on my 3U server populated with 14 2 TB drives that support 600 BD movies or $63.33 (+tax) per stored movie.
So the real cost of owning a BD movie in todays K environment is approx $107.08 plus tax. One of the first obvious amendments to the cost in the new environment is the carousel is no longer necessary. So my cost just dropped to $88.33 +Tax. But wait there's more. I have close to 1800 BD's and if they were all in servers I would have to stack fully populated 3 U servers to hold them all. This wouldn't change the per cost storage but if I could theoretically store the movies so that only 600 BD movies were on line at any given time with access to an off line library then at 38K for each new fully populated server I have just taken roughly $72,000 out of my equation. so my 1800 library movie storage cost is now 21.11. My net result under the new model is my original $25.00 plus 21.11 storage cost or $46.11. For me that's less than half the cost of the old model. This is very compelling because in the current model I have to get into my 12 cylinder gas fed vehicle and drive to a big box outlet which although sometimes fun....the gas costs more than the movie!!!!!
All of this assumes that once I buy my movie from the K store that I can (within reasonable limits) download it again at a later date if I was to remove it from my system. My hope is that there might be an eventual upgrade program that would allow me to replace DVD's with BD's where it made sense. I am not buying DVD's anymore and have not for the last couple of years.
My wish list also includes the hope that the catalog of available titles is reasonably comprehensive and not just obscure material.
This news I hope is a fabulous introduction to what it will be like living life 'in the cloud'. It certainly extends Kaleidescape's powerful ease of use all the way to the point of sale. Count me in!!!
Peter