High-def to curb movie downloads: Blockbuster

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Movie downloads from the Internet will not siphon off sales of high definition DVDs until the speed and quality of downloads improve, Blockbuster Chief Executive John Antioco said on Tuesday.

"We think packaged media remains king for a long time," Antioco told the Reuters Media Summit in New York.

Antioco said sales of movie downloads will reach about $1 billion by 2009, or less than half a percent of overall film industry revenue.

It's going to be very difficult to develop a library of high quality, high definition download movies, he said.

Still, the download market is not something the company can ignore: "We can't afford not to be in it," Antioco said.

He said the company could introduce a movie download service as early as next year. Blockbuster is an investor in CinemaNow, a movie download service.

Antioco said packaged DVD sales will remain the most profitable way for movie studios to reap revenue from releases and those profits will get more dramatic with the spread of high-definition offerings over the next five years.

By comparison, movie downloads will likely lag that growth. largely due to the time it will take the average broadband user to download a high-definition movie, he said. It can take hours to download a high definition film but most consumers don't have broadband capability to even attempt it.

Despite the challenges to downloading high-definition content, Antioco said, "it's a business that we will need to be in both for competitive reasons and for consumer reasons, to have a full-service brand."