Retailers explore movie download options

When movies shifted from videocassettes to DVD, retailers simply cleared the tapes off the shelves to make room for discs. That's not so easy now that movies appear poised to follow music onto the Internet.

It'll be interesting to see if the traditional music and movie retailers will be able to stay in that business within the next decade.

"Wal-Mart's typical customer isn't your leading-edge technocrat that's likely to download and store a movie on his computer," Hargreaves said.

No, that's not me. Just some other Hargreaves who knows what he's talking about. I also liked the ending quote (not by a Hargreaves, though).

"One day," he said, "my kids will laugh at me for driving to a store and picking up a piece of plastic with content on it and putting it in a machine to play."