Microsoft says HD-DVD and Blu-ray to be obsolete in 5 years
Oh Microsoft, when will you learn to keep your damn mouth shut? Richard Doherty, Microsoft’s Media Entertainment Convergence product manager (try saying that one 3 times fast) made a bold statement recently, claiming that both HD-DVD and Blu-ray will be completely obsolete within 5 years. Seems that the company envisions a world where high definition content exists entirely on hard drives and servers. Is the death of physical media on the horizon? Probably, but 5 years seems like an incredibly optimistic estimate. Hi-Def content requires an incredibly large amount of storage space. While average disk size is increasing steadily, it’s hard to imagine your average consumer with enough storage space to digitize an entire collection’s worth of content. Is this a case of Microsoft speaking without thinking again? We think so. Then again, who knows? If Microsoft wants to distribute a couple of terabytes of storage free of charge to everyone with a PC we certainly wouldn’t argue.
I agree 100%. I have no interest in any hd drives because I have my xbox 360 handling it right now and can see myself getting an appletv in the future. With those products out there I have no interest in any disks. But i’m not into keeping a movie collection either, for once i’m agreeing with Microsoft and saying they will be obsolete.
The more I hear microsoft, the more I think of what we can do with technology today.
Already we can carry theatrical movies around on our keychains with a 4 gb stick. And, shoot movies over to our 500 gb or higher external hard drive entertainment center.
Hard drives are “Physical Media”
I hope and the formats HD-DVD and BlueRay would be obsoleted by then. Hopefully be replaced with a unified format.
porsche, yes they are physical but I think you know what he means. There is a difference between the multipurpose hard drive/flash drive vs. a single purpose HD-DVD or Bluray player. As well as the delivery method.
While I don’t think the distributing terabytes will come up as easy as we would like, the idea that HD and Blu are going to be obsolete could be possible, if content distribution gets better and other companies adopt an adequate method (bit-torrent or something even better) to comply with this we can only see that statement becoming reality.
true, better delivery is the key but i dont think BT is the key because one must wait until it is fully downloaded before you can use it. Thats one thing about the 360 rental is that once it gets to a certain percentage done you can begin watching. But it is up to the Telcos and Cable Companies to do the delivering so its up to them and it seems it would be in there best interest to do it.