I have enough physical discs to be quite the undertaking to get media bits (zeros/ones) transferred from disc to disk (BD to HDD). I would keep the players for versatility and those quick needs (last minute Red Box rental), but would need to spend money and time on setting up a HTPC. Oddly enough, I was planning on some sort of expansion options for a cheap laptop to be connected with a wireless keyboard/mouse for some things, but heck, my Sony blu-ray player in our living room has so much internet connected options, I am not sure that I would actually use a basic laptop.
I would need to make the decision soon if I am going to need physical disc media storage and put shelves in somewhere, or make space for a HTPC and be forced to build one some time in the near term with a bunch of storage. Obviously I would only transfer over the movies that I really wanted to have "on-line".
Hmmm... I bounced that idea off of someone at work, and he said that he just started using his XBox Kinect for some movie viewing options, but the XBox is going to be in the family room in the basement, not the home theater. I guess if I had the movies stored on another machine in the house that had the space, I would just need to stream it (via a physical CAT5 connection) to something that can play it back in its full HD video and HD audio glory, but who knows what they would take.
So, while there are $$$ associated with physical media storage, there is probably more cost in a HTPC or streaming setup, plus added complexity that *could* make things more complicated than my wife/kids would care for unless done absolutely correctly.
