Strange, the DVD format is only ten years old and already on the verge of being obsoleted. In two years time everybody will buy Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.
But those will be out of date in five years as well, because by then everything will be stored on hard drives, and rented off the Internet. From then on new data formats will appear every couple of months, but nobody will care because thanks to DRM all content will only be consumable for a couple of days anyway.
You will stop updating your home entertainment center to accommodate new physical content mediums, and start updating your DRM software every couple of months instead. The price for the player will effectively be the same, but it will be hidden as membership fees and become part of higher content prices.
And there will be a cancellation period if you want out of your content delivery contracts.
Strange, if you think about it.
Imagine having to give notice to your record store around the corner when you want to stop buying there.
And don't get me started on pricing schemes. Imagine the madly huge and madly complex market evolving out of the fact that content distribution is really simple as soon as licensing issues are cleared. We're really lucky that the mobile telco industry is so far behind in terms of content distribution; I don't know about the US, but in Europe right now one of the more complicated acts a member of a developed society can pursue is deciding on a cellphone contract. According to modern industries, transparent pricing schemes are really really stupid. Let them pay, and let them guess at what they're actually paying for.
But it doesn't really matter, because by then I'll have an Internet-3 connection anyway, and BitTorrent will stream directly to my media player.
(By the way: Wikipedia says that Internet-2 is not a next-generation highspeed network, but the name of a consortium. The correct name of the network is "Abilene Network". Apparently Slashdot is lying, but what else is new.)
(Also note how highly the Wikipedia entries for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are ranked in Google when you search for these two formats. But now I'm really offtopic.)
Comments
i don't think that in two years, everybody will be buying blue-ray or hd-dvd. the regular dvd is too widespread for that and you get all you want with it (even more, look at all that bonus material).
yes, it's more likely that in about 5 years, everybody will get their movies off the internet (rentals, illegal, or whatever) and store it on their memory stick or laptop terabyte hard drive.
just like hardly anyone walks around with a discman anymore but uses mp3 players instead. i think any "disc" will be part of the past. like magnetic strips...
it's just a matter of bandwidth and storage and that will inevitable be big in the future.
oriba san, 2005-09-29 14:09 CET (+0100) Link
Yeah it will be interesting to see how the market will react to the new formats. I agree that the incentive to change to a new format is pretty low for current customers, but we'll see. After all, the Playstation will ship with blu ray, and I can imagine the first PCs shipping with the new drives as early as spring next year.
Oh my. Next year we'll have at least five physical formats for movie distribution. (VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and UMD).
martin, 2005-09-29 14:36 CET (+0100) Link
one of my friends describes this as "darwinism of information". only the information which is worth being migrated will survive the different formats.
oriba san, 2005-09-29 16:14 CET (+0100) Link
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=12398 -- "Bill Gates has revealed that he favours neither next-gen format - arguing that both are doomed to extinction by the advent of digital distribution systems."
Quote Gates: "The format that's under discussion right now, HD versus Blu-ray, that's simply the last physical format we'll ever have."
;)
martin, 2005-10-21 20:33 CET (+0100) Link
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