Will Consumers Skip Blu-ray for Digital Downloads?

Can’t wait to see “Prometheus” at home?

The studio behind the film will be offering the sorta-kinda “Alien” prequel via digital download for a pretty inexpensive price nearly a month before its Blu-ray debut.

Fox is launching an effort to encourage online purchases by offering downloads of titles for $15 a pop weeks before they hit DVD / Blu-ray or VOD. The first movie released under the new model will be Prometheus, which will be available to download September 18 before hitting shelves in disc form on October 11. More after the jump.

Will it work? It may depend on how dearly movie lovers are clinging to their Blu-ray collection. The time factor will certainly move some (digital) product, but are consumers starting to assemble a digital movie library?

For anyone over 35 it’s hard not to remember that towering stack of VHS titles which is now worth approximately … nothing. The same isn’t necessarily true for DVD collections, but their value is diminishing every day. Are we all so eager to hop from medium to medium, picking up “The Godfather” one more time to satiate the latest craze?

I love looking over my Blu-ray collection, but it does take up space and, frankly, I rarely have time to watch titles more than once. Cloud storage could be the answer, but can we be assured we’ll be able to summon titles from up above in 10 years … or even five? And it’s unlikely most consumers have hard drives capable of storing more than a 100 or so movies digitally.

The streaming revolution is upon us, and while we have more choices than ever for watching movies, it’s not clear just how we’ll hang onto our favorites.