It looks like the march of obsolescence may soon put HD-DVD movies in the box at your next garage sale along with your old BetaMax tapes, 8-tracks, Laserdiscs, and cassettes (you do save your precious vinyl, don't you?). Now that Warner has established itself firmly in the Blu-Ray camp, the last two hold outs - Paramount and NBC Universal - are considering switching sides.

But, hopefully, all of this will be a non-issue soon - with near-instant downloads, 32GB thumb drives, and 1080p network-enabled set-top boxes arriving in 2008, Blu-Ray may soon join its one-time nemesis in the bargain bin heap.

...Do we need discs at all? With Comcast promising high-definition downloads in 4 minutes and prices of flash memory falling like a rock, maybe we will jump right to a world where video simply lives as a file on a hard drive or flash disk. There’s logic to that, of course, at least in an engineering sort of way. Why spend all the money and time to stamp out discs and distribute them through stores, when the information on them can be simply zapped over a network to someone’s television?

Interestingly, this won't necessarily put the local record store out of business. There's still something great about meeting people in person to discuss and physically posses media; the last seven changes in media (LP to MP3/DivX) haven't killed them off yet, but we'll need download centers with virtual media racks on touch screen flat panel monitors in place for this to happen.

Concerns over defective by design content control may prevent that, but with EMI and others releasing DRM-free tracks, DRM-free movies may not be far off. It would certainly cut down on packaging, shipping, and manufacturing costs, saving trees and petroleum in the process. Most importantly, the friendly neighborhood geeks at the record store could keep their jobs, too :)

via NY Times's Bits blog

Comments (3)

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Not going to happen soon...
written by sam winter , January 12, 2008

I've seen alot of this type of speculation going around recently without anyone mentioning the fact that the US telecom situation is sorely lacking and is a definite obstacle to distributing 15GB 1080P Divx files around.
The cable companies especially are guilty of rampant overselling of bandwidth... I bet if even 10% of people in one neighborhood started downloading 15GB movies as often as people get Netflix movies, their bandwidth would slow to a crawl.
Just the other day there was an article in one of the national newspapers speculating about how the national infrastructure is running out of bandwidth and how equipment upgrades are few and far between.
Downloads will one day become the sole source for all our media, however, until we get a competent FTC that allows broadband competition beyond the duopoly of 1 cable provider and 1 DSL provider (which many can't even get) then it's not going to happen. Well I guess there is Verizon Fios, but what percentage of the country do they cover? .01%?

Wouldn't worry about your HDDVD discs
written by d , January 12, 2008

Analogies between HDDVD/Bluray, and Beta/VHS don't work, because Beta/VHS were not the same physical size and general make up. You can't play a Beta tape in a VHS machine.

However, your HDDVD's will continue to play in future players. Soon enough, you'll see players advertising support for Bluray, HDDVD, DVD, CD, VCD, Divx and any other format discs are made in.

The future is now
written by EcoMattJames , January 14, 2008

for the low low price of $999 LG has a player that can play all of the above formats, as well as picture from thumb drive and MP3s. My friend Dave just got one, and aside from slight niggles playing DVDs (tiny little clicks between chapters, probably only noticeable to a stereophile such as myself) it's near perfect. Give it 3-5 years, players like this will be $200, perform better and fit in the palm of your hand.

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