Also, for many (most?) people, there isn’t a good enough recommendation system in place for them to know what to go download - browsing through the big gushing pipe of crap every evening is how they find the occasional gem of Lost, House, Grey’s, Good Eats or Mythbusters.

One related-but-not-exactly thought: there’s often the thought on TWiM that everything should be a download, that “plastic is dead.” That’s fine as long as one stays in their own cave, but what happens when you want to venture out? My high school and college sons often - almost every weekend - pull a DVD off the shelf and head off to a friend’s house where they’ll sit around and watch movies or shows together. If the only way they owned SuperBad or The Office was on a hard disk somewhere, that would be much more difficult. Like it or not, you can pretty much count on every household having at least one DVD player.