We all know that digital distribution is the way of the future, many companies have moved to digital or are only digital.

iPhone: All applications, games, movies, music is by digital distribution.

Play Station Portable Go (PSP Go): Sony’s new hand-held is only digital distribution, there is no disc slot for older games, you have to download them.

Xbox 360: Many games are available from the Xbox Live Market Place, extension packs and Xbox 360, Original, Arcade games are all available as downloadable content.

Play Station Network: The PSP Go and PlayStation 3 has many games available much like the Xbox Live Market Place. Discounted games such as the Play Station One library is now available on the PS Network.

Microsoft has gone digital, you can now purchase Microsoft products online by digital distribution. i.e. Office, Windows, etc.

Blizzard Entertainment has made all there games available digitally.

Computer Games: Many computer game companies like free MMOs are digital download only, and many companies have moved there games to distribution systems like Steam and GOG.

Music: Many bands have moved to digital for the cheaper, quicker and more available distribution.

Movies: Video rentals will soon be a thing of the past thanks to new on demand services like Netflixs and iTunes, many devices now allow for on demand video rentals over the Internet.

So what makes this so expensive for people under Northwestel?

Simply put Northwestel does not provide enough monthly service usage to accommodate the growing use and demand of digital distribution. The lack of usage makes owning a PSP Go a luxury.

Northwestel provides an average monthly data transfer of 10 GBs at a cost of $65 CAD per month. The average Xbox or PS3 game can range between 800 MBs to 10 GBs. The average movie on Netflixs is about 1.7 GBs for a 1 h 30 min movie. The popular computer game World of Warcraft has long gone digital with a size of about 9 GBs to download, the average computer game ranges from 650 MBs to 5 GBs with compression. Now add transmission over heads while downloading, 650 MBs becomes 670 MBs and if the distribution service uses bit-torrent then the total maybe 800 MBs data transferred.

That means, for $65 dollars a month I can watch one movie, download one game, and have just enough left over to do very light web surfing and checking my email. In other words I get about 11 hours of service for one month, and use almost all of it watching one movie and downloading one game. Not a hole lot of freedom you can do there now is it.

Thanks a lot.

 

 

 

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