21st Century naming has co-opted the word for unlucky guys whose chutes don’t open and made it into the category name for all the devices that stream video from the internet to our TVs. Roku, X-box, Playstation, Vudu, TiVo, LG TVs, Samsung TVs etc. are among the “streamers.” And the big news is that most of the new, lower-priced models of Blu-ray players are also streamers.

Many people are buying Blu-ray players because they’ve included streaming capability as well as Blu-ray. With them you can access thousands and thousands of streamed movies and TV shows on Netflix and Amazon. You can also get the ubiquitous YouTube. (Why everyone who makes streamers believes that receiving fuzzy YouTube videos on a 42-inch LCD TV is important is a mystery to me)

My forecast for Blu-ray is that it will be important for games, but will have limited impact for movies until 3-D TVs become prevalent (at least a decade). In the meantime, we’ll use Blu-ray players as streamers; except for the occasional purchase of disc to see amazing details in tropical fish or the beads of sweat on Russell Crowe’s brow.

This is very interesting news for MovieWithMe.com because our approach to reviewing movies and providing services like Meet at the Movies and Premiere Event Nights is focused towards the coming era of instant access to all movies, all the time. A filter site like ours will be there to help you choose what to stream. But the source of the streaming (where the streamers go to fill up on content) already belongs to the dominant sellers like Netflix and Amazon and iTunes that have limitless resources to store and sell from massive libraries. By luck or pluck, they already own the future before it has happened.