So I’m flipping through the channels tonight, when I wandered into The Band’s “Last Waltz” on the Independent Film Channel (IFC). I tuned in for a stretch and was rewarded with Dr. John knocking out a tune (apropos after watching an hours worth of live CNN coverage from New Orleans), Muddy Waters’ masterful “Mannish Boy,” and a very young Neil Young belting out “Helpless,” among others… all in all, it got me thinking how close we are to a universe of legitimate high-quality downloadable movies and how fantastic that will be … when it finally happens …

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could not only download movies at will, not just complete movies, but specific scenes. Lets say I didn’t want to sit through all of the “Last Waltz,” but only wanted to catch one song. (Hey, I said Neil Young not Neil Diamond.) What if I didn’t want to watch all of “Five Easy Pieces” just to catch the classic diner scene with Jack Nicholson’s attempt to order a chicken salad sandwich on whole wheat toast?

Lets not aim just to get every film digitized, lets aim to get them indexed, as well. May Apple put their recent $50M data center purchase to very good use. And may Universal quickly find out that $40 for a movie download is unrealistic …