It’s long been the writing on the walls.  When will we be able to just download the movies we want?  Of course the studios aren’t going to make it any easier.  It’s their job to ride the packaged silver disc gravy train for as long as possible.  A download business model would benefit indie film labels and smaller circulation movies in general. 

But surprisingly it’s not iTunes that will be first to offer complete digital movie downloads first.  Nor will it be Google Video, MSN, Yahoo or any of the others you might suspect.  Amazon.com has decided it needs to stay a step ahead of encroaching competition from the players in digital media by becoming a player itself. 

According to Variety, Amazon.com is in talks with a few major studios and believes they’ll sell full length movie downloads as early as April. 

Specifics for how Amazon will execute a digital movie deal to the customer are currently being debated.  Amazon still has to serve distributors and at the same time doesn’t want to hurt its own DVD sales.  Some thoughts are that Amazon will sell downloads for a fee that gets credited to the DVD’s purchase.  Another suggestion is to give away a download preview to anyone who already bought the DVD while it’s sent through the mail. 

Amazon’s movie download is just one step toward a practice we’ll someday take for granted.  HD DVD and Blu-Ray best be careful their little war doesn’t drag on.  Optical storage formats pale in comparison to a well honed media playback device with swappable storage.  Silver discs could find themselves just another second tier distribution method after services like Cable’s On-Demand content downloads and services like Amazon.com.