From my quick look around, somewhere close to $1000 US for the drives. But it's easy to imagine there would be a day doing what you say would be totally feasible. They should already be offering an option to purchase movies at the store on USB drives as it is.

I'm hopeful in that I'm looking forward to the day that shipping 24TB of data by package delivery would be considered too slow.

It's pretty amazing how much better things could be, if we could pry the content industry away from outdated business models.

Well, consider what went into assembling that 24TB of content, and follow it from there.

Each movie cost something like, well, let's just ballpark $10M average (the >$200M blockbusters are relatively rare, balanced by old & cheap filler content made down around $1M each). Lead article notes Netflix has 8900 movies. Round both up sensibly, and we're looking at $100B to create the content.

Netflix has some 44M subscribers. Assuming all that content was made for & paid by Netflix subscribers, that's $2272 per subscriber. 8-O

Talmand SWAGged the storage hardware cost at $1000. Storage prices being what they are, that will be $300 in a year or so.

Would you pay $2500 to own, in a box the size of a pack of cards, the entire Netflix library? With updates (package deal, you get 'em all as they're made to cover production costs) of every movie added thereafter for $0.25 each? Could we persuade the entire 44M Netflix subscribers to sign up?

Not sure what to do with those numbers, but they're fascinating.

That's only temping because of the high resolution. I'm not sure if it's Comcast being intentionally awful or just incompetent, but I can't seem to stream HD anything on netflix. I turn on manual buffering and HD options just aren't there. If that problem didn't exist, there's basically no benefit in making paying the large up front cost.

Now, if production costs were completely covered by subscribers, it would be interesting to see what sort of movies get made.

Pointless factoid: that works out to about $65 per movie frame.

People would be concerned about privacy. One solution would be to encrypt it and then use the internet connection to send decryption codes. And really you don't even need to do that - it's not like pirated copies of the movies don't already exist.

They did send the whole library to their CDN nodes all over the world.