In the face of rough economic terrain and increasing numbers of HD streaming providers, will people choose Blu-ray over HD movie streaming? With the average price of a Blu-ray disc rental costing about the same, or even more than virtual HD rentals from iTunes or rumored Amazon HD service, it’s easy to see why many may choose the virtual rental. Virtual rentals also provide an “on demand” type of availability meaning they can be rented at any hour of the day or night, and users don’t even need to leave the comfort of their homes to rent/return the movie. With relevant benefits of not having to illegally download or physically store the media, this trend of media streaming seems to be the growing in popularity these days across the board with TV, music, movies and now HD content.

Blu-ray still wins resolution-wise if the player outputs in 1080p, but visually the difference between HD streaming in 720p and blu-ray playing in 1080p is pretty negligible, unless you’re a high-def aficionado.  The cost of the Blu-ray players is finally coming down slowly – but now they’re in the same range as AppleTV, which for around the same cost provides not only HD rentals, but also incorporates many other features than stand alone Blu-ray players have. If Amazon does indeed open an HD content service, it’s likely that media manager manufacturers would incorporate this feature into their systems, similarly to the way Netflix has been incorporated into Boxee and Xbox. And that move alone would bring even more customers to the HD streaming world. Only time will tell which platform will end up on top, but HD streaming sure does appear to be giving Blu-ray a run for its money.