Well, not exactly - only papers made of, well, paper can fold. But it seems that New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years… .” He went on to say that the news outlet will likely move entirely onto the internet. James Joyner has details, including this rejoinder to Pinch’s declaration that the Times’ web site will charge readers to read: “Then the New York Times will exist only as a niche paper. Slate, Salon, and others have tried and failed going the subscription-only route.”

What I’ve not seen anyone point out - a scoop coming here, folks! - is that it simply takes longer to scan and read a newspaper online than on paper. You can flip pages, snapshot headlines printed thereon and quickly read the lead paragraph of a paper edition than you can click and wait for a page to load for an online edition - and then you’re seeing only one story at a time, even if the headlines (and only the headlines) for a section are visible on an index page. I don’t think people will pay to go slower.

But Amazon’s download service is excellent, just slow

Admittedly, Wal-Mart’s video download service is still in beta, which W-M does not disguise, but my experience with it shows it has a long way to go to alpha.

I signed up out of curiousity more than anything else. I have an All-In-Wonder TV card in my computer with cable TV running into it and from time to time I’ll record a movie onto my hard drive. I don’t record “keepers” that way; movies I want for my permanent library I get on DVD, and that’s not very many. The movies I record to hard drive I usually record to VCD resolution, just under 600MB per hour. Sometimes I’ll record a show to timeshift for my wife, and VCD resolution makes it convenient to write it to CD. Furthermore, I watch these shows while I do other work on the computer, with the media player shrunk to a box in the upper-right corner of the screen.

That’s why the W-M video download service appealed to the geeky side of me. It costs more than renting the DVD from Blockbuster (downloads range from $7.50-$9.88, with “hot” movies ranging up to $14.88), but I own the movie as long as I want. That price is also less money than buying the DVD, which I’d do for only a small number of movies anyway, and just as permanent.

But I haven’t able to make the download service work. It seems a simple process, though not a short one. You have to register, of course, and after that you must permit an Active-X control to be loaded, then download and install a series of propietary software control programs, one of which is the actual “Wal-Mart Video Download Manager.” Then you have to give your computer a name on another setup page, then, presumably, you can proceed. This page advises,

By naming you’re computer, you are authorizing it to play the videos you buy on our site. You can also transfer and watch videos on as many as three portable players.

Keep in mind: You can install the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager on as many computers as you like. But, the computer you use to download a video is the only computer you can use to view that video.

“Presumably,” I say, because that’s as far as W-M’s pages will let me go. Their servers refuse to accept any name I try to give my computer on the site, so that’s where it sits as of now. I’ve tried several times as I’ve been writing this, and not only did it refuse to accept any name it also zeroed out my shopping cart.

Although I have not yet been able to download or watch one of the movies, I have learned that you can copy the movie to other media such as a writable DVD, but cannot convert it into actual DVD format. If you want to watch one of the movies on a real TV, you need to download it to a computer that is equipped for TV output, such as a notebook computer. I do not know how large the files are, W-M only claims that they download in a surprisingly short time.

Not only movies can be downloaded. TV shows can, too. For example, you can buy a whole season of Fox’s “24″ for $36.25; single episodes are $1.96. Episodes of the current season are available up to Feb. 5’s show.

Wal-Mart, of course, isn’t the only game in town for this kind of service (and pffft to it, anyway). Amazon.com also has just started a service called Amazon Unbox. Unlike Wally World, Amazon emphasizes downloads of TV shows, charging $1.99 per episode, and also claims DVD quality.

Some of the most popular shows on TV (24, Prison Break, CSI and more) are available for download from Amazon Unbox. Which means you can enjoy them without commercials, and in DVD quality — before they come out on DVD.

It does offer movies, too. Unlike W-M, you can rent a movie by downloading it.

Your rental video can be stored on your PC for 30 days. Once you press play, you have 24 hours to watch the video before it expires.

Rentals seem to average $3.99 each. Download purchases pretty much track W-M’s pricing, with a twist. While both services allow transfer of the movie from PC to portable viewer (can you say iPod, boys and girls?), Amazon says, “you can keep purchased videos on 2 PCs and 2 portable video players at the same time.” Like W-M, you have to download and install propietary Amazon software.

Both W-M and Amazon offer shopping by movie genre, studio and TV channel. It appears to me that Amazon’s TV offerings are far greater and just as current for this season as Wal-Mart’s. I never got W-M to download, but Amazon claimed a DL time of 2.5 minutes for a 6MBPS connection, twice that for a 3MBPS connection, and 52 minutes for a 1.5 MBPS connection; this for a 1.93GB movie file. Well, it took almost an hour to finish downloading to my desktop machine. I ran the speed download speed test at PC Pitstop just afterward, which said that my connection is 3.3MBPS. What gives? I dunno.

Picture and sound quality:

This applies to the mandatory-install Amazon video player: Neither the sound nor the picture approach DVD quality. Heck, the sound isn’t even CD quality. It’s a low-power FM station kind of sound. The video quality is absolutely horrid. The image is extremely low resolution, much, much worse than the VCD video I can record off cable. There is an enormous amount of ghosting and fading with extremely poor color reproduction, all overdrawn with jigglies and swaths of lost detail.

But using Windows media player gives you an altogether different picture. The file is WMV format. I can’t honestly say the video is actual DVD quality, but it is excellent. The sound, however, is stereo and reasonably clear, and that’s it.

Will this kind of service take with the public? No question, I think. It’s convenient and not priced very high. Media storage costs and capacities are low and high, respectively, and I imagine there are a lot of folks like me who are content to keep an eyeball on a movie in the corner or the screen, instantly accessible on a hard drive, for a few dollars, rather than peel bills for a DVD that has to be shelved, located and loaded.

Both services can use a lot more titles, but that will come quickly, I would think. The main market may be the TV shows, though, for people who want to time-shift their favorite programs but don’t have a DVR and are put off by the price of getting one. I think the ability to watch shows on a personal media device will find favor with airline flyers. Amazon even features a way to buy a show on one computer and download it to another. My only complaint is that download speeds are still way too slow, but I am saying that after only one test, I admit.

Try it out! Buy link on the left; rent link on the right:

Update: I learned how Amazon enforces the 24-hours-to view rule. After 24 hours, the video file self-destructs and does not wind up in the recycle bin. Crude but effective.