As you listen to the podcast today, picture Scott as the kid in this picture and me as Billy Bob.  That's pretty much exactly how it was when we recorded.

Credit: Miramax/Dimension Home Video

It does not remotely surprise me to see a trends piece in the Wall Street Journal (I'd link to it, but it's behind a paywall, so what's the point?) about Blu-ray sales finally starting to convince the industry that people might actually want physical media still.

Well, duh.  I've been saying that in print during this entire digital explosion, and people have spent a lot of time and energy telling me how wrong I am.  "No way.  Everything will be streaming in the future."  While I believe that streaming media is a major part of the marketplace at this point, I don't believe it's ever going to replace physical media completely, and I'm tired of being told that it will.

As a result, I've been guilty in my own way of being willfully blind to a bit part of the industry.  I have enough movies here in the house that I don't see much need to rent, particularly if it involves driving somewhere or mailing something.  I'll rent PS3 games from GameFly, but that's because I'm tired of paying $60 to play something for eight hours.  I rarely play a game a second time after I beat it, and the price point doesn't make enough sense to me on most titles.  With movies, I rewatch them, and I keep them so I can share them with others.

I decided to finally try out some of the various digital rental services for myself.  I rented a movie from iTunes.  I rented a few movies from the Playstation Network's rental service.  Finally, a little over a week ago, I signed up for Netflix's Watch Instantly service through the PS3.

In this week's podcast, Scott Swan joins me to discuss the idea of Netflix in general, their service specifically, and the debate on physical media versus streaming media.  We end up talking about a ton of different films and rambling wildly, and at this point, I would expect nothing less from Scott and I and a microphone.

We're done podcasting for the year, but we'll have a lot of stuff for you in January and in 2011 in general, and we'll be involving some really interesting guests for you as well.  Thanks for making my first year of podcasting a fun one, and here's to further growth in the year ahead.

As always, you can find us on iTunes, or listen to the embedded player below, where you can also download the podcast directly.