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I just read an article on Engadget about the possibility that Blu-Ray will decline sharply in the next 5 years, that it's a one hit wonder. And i can't help but think that it's going to be gone soon either. By soon i mean the next decade (a long time, but bear in mind that CD's have been going for much longer). Many people are touting downloads as the next big step in consumer media, with broadband steadily increasing in speed, more companies are starting to offer (iTunes and the porn mainly) HD quality video downloads.
Now, the problem i see with the latter are as follows:
1. Digital Media has the problem of DRM. We all hate it, as it's the main "solution" to piracy these days. Digital files are by nature easy to copy, thus everyone can share them about without a care in the world as easy as you please.
2. Digital files are not physical. Somewhat obvious, but it's important. There is still a large crowd who want the physical item in their hands. Digital does not guarantee longevity. Hard drives fail, drives get corrupted and people accidentally shift delete their download folders.
3. Downloadable media is not feasible everywhere, and likely won't be for a long time. Sure it's not much of a problem to most of us, but there are places even in the West where broadband doesn't come easily - and even then the speed is poor. Not to mention all the countries that don't have broadband or a fast connection or the internet at all.
The obvious solution to 1 and 3 is to provide some sort of service like Steam. Steam is arguably the least intrusive form of DRM around in terms of games. Sure you've got to be online, but that's rarely a problem. The primary benefits being: the ability to download your content wherever you are based on your account, the ability to save what you "own", not having to worry about discs, the list continues.
There's iTunes, but that's hardly a good alternative to a client like Steam. What you should be able to have is the option to download all the stuff you've ever paid for, watch it as much as you like, but have it in a form that is only readable perhaps even watchable if you have the client application running. In return, you get the above benefits which far outweigh the problems of having intrusive DRM.
Here's where flash comes in. In my opinion it's been the elephant in the room for all this. I honestly think it's the obvious successor to optical media. Flash memory is cheap and getting cheaper, in the next few years we should see 32GB and 64GB cards dropping to below £20 in theory. It's almost unbeatable in terms of size, whilst hard drives may have more capacity per unit volume, they have a lower bound in terms of size and it's a lot larger than flash. And compared to just about everything else, as read only media it is easily the most durable.
The technology is already here and has been used really since the 1980's. Remember the GameBoy, how good were their game paks? The N64, SNES, GBA, DS all used flash based (i assume) rather than optical and we loved it. They didn't break as much, no disks to scratch - you could treat them like crap and they'd still work. The only real limitation at the moment is size to price ratio, and it'll soon be easy to put an entire HD quality film on a chip the size of your thumbnail.
All you'd have to do is take an old format, or make a new form factor and corresponding card reader and you'd have an easy way to distribute media cheaply and effectively. People who like their objects can be satisfied, it's very scalable - problem with most media is that it has to be changed significantly to move with data sizes and it's stupidly durable.
So.. what's next after optical discs become museum pieces?
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Originally Posted by JPreston
