Wash your mouth out, Hal.      


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Quoting hal9g:

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Quoting Alien Redrum:

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You'll be seeing petrabyte drives for home use on the shelves within 2 years.

The common spelling is "petabyte" and the estimated production time line is 2 to 5 years.

See HERE.

And 1024 petabytes is an exabyte; 1024 exabytes is a zettabyte; 1024 zettabytes is a yottabyte (1 trillion terabytes or a quadrillion gigabytes or a quintillion megabytes or a sextillion bytes [1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000] or 8 sextillion bits).

So when we get our first 1 yottabyte hard drive? 

Totally fat fingered that.

Yeah, the technology has already been busted a few years ago for the ability to put a peta on a 3.5" drive, it's just a matter the manufacturing. We are closer to 2 than 5 for seeing this in, at the very least, business applications. The way drive space has been rocketing, I would imagine a yottabyte drive in 20 - 25 years. I may be over guestimating it, too.

That's insane. 

I don't think disc based or some form of hard medium will ever disappear. I think it's pretty much embedded into our brains that when we buy something, we want something physical that we can hold on to. This isn't true for everyone, no, but there will always be a market for it. And while we will see disc based sales drop in the future, the two will always coexist in my opinion. Or at least they will for a very long time.

Just look at CDs and MP3s. MP3s have been out for ages. They've really been a huge success with iTunes and whatnot, but CDs still exist and probably will for my lifetime. Since video on demand and video download type services are ages behind the music business and the fact that you can get a substantial and marketable difference in quality by increasing storage space (Bluray), unlike music (DVD music failed big time), I don't see discs disappearing.

Point I'm making is this. Bluray isn't the last video upgrade we'll be getting. There will be another upgrade down the road. And downloading HD video, either streaming or full downloads, are limited by internet speed and storage space even now. Standard Def works fantastic, but I think these technologies will always trail what the disc based media is bringing to the market.

So discs are here to stay, but it is a shrinking market.

As for me...I hate buying a digital only copy. I want something physical. At the same time though, I'm forced to buy a digital item sometimes. Games are often times only released via digital download if they are deemed to be not profitable enough to make a disc (or not large enough).

Quoting Grendell:

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Quoting Alien Redrum:

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Streaming and downloads are the way of the future, like it or not.

And as long as it employs DRM that tells me what I can and can't do with it, it will get absolutely no support whatsoever from me, and hopefully many many other people.

I will always want a physical product over a digital one. Always.

Ah, but that's another discussion (DRM).

I, too, dislike DRM immensely which is why I will never purchase mp3s from iTunes.

I'm very curious to see how the DRM will work in the future, especially with Amazon offering many of their downloads DRM free.

Quoting Agrare:

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Quoting Alien Redrum:

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Quoting Grendell:

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Quoting Alien Redrum:

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Streaming and downloads are the way of the future, like it or not.

And as long as it employs DRM that tells me what I can and can't do with it, it will get absolutely no support whatsoever from me, and hopefully many many other people.

I will always want a physical product over a digital one. Always.

Ah, but that's another discussion (DRM).

I, too, dislike DRM immensely which is why I will never purchase mp3s from iTunes.

I'm very curious to see how the DRM will work in the future, especially with Amazon offering many of their downloads DRM free.

you are aware that iTunes dropped DRM right? http://www.macworld.com/article/138000/2009/01/drm_faq.html

-Agrare

I had heard that, but couldn't find the article, so I figured it was wishful thinking on my part.

It's good that they did, and it's good for the future, too.

That said, it doesn't change my opinion on iTunes. Their business model is irritating (but genius) and the iTunes software is way too bloated for my taste.

At the moment, there are too many restrictions. From Europe, you can't buy US online movies or TV-series (much like with music originally), and European suppliers are scarce, if existing at all. Buying Blu-Rays or DVD is easy though.

The average consumer doesn't care about special editions, bonus-material, packaging, media etc.. Important is the price (cheap, cheaper, much more cheaper ) and easy availability of movies. Most friends of mine don't want to "own" a movie. They want to see it onetime and thats it. And this is the future of streaming and vod. Today the studios (I can only talk for germany) doesn't really like vod because they don't have the physical controll about the media. But this will change as you can seen in other countries (netflix came to my mind). DVD, Blu-ray and the next formats after this won't die, but the market will shrink with the growing of vod. A big problem today are the complete different formats used by the vod providers, e.g. my company use an different player than our competitors. Not very consumer friendly, every provider uses their own hardware.

By myself I prefer pysical media like DVDs (not DRM infested Blu-ray) and will go with it. But I like vod for movies that I don't want to buy by several reasons.

I can't see me doing this...I still use a rotary phone and listen to vinyl.