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Gates Predicts DVD Obsolete In 10 Years
An anonymous reader writes "Not to say that Mr. Gates has been wrong before (sarcasm), but now he is claiming that DVDs will be obsolete in 10 years. As this post claims, I would have to disagree with the world's richest man and say that compact disk media is here to stay for a while because there is just no substitute for a media that cost cents." (And since SMH is going registration only, thanks to the anonymous reader who points out two non-registration sites -- FlexBeta and Yahoo! -- to read the same wire story, and for the observation that not all of Gates' predictions pan out.)
I still don't have it... The first question I think you should ask yourself is "Is there demand for such a technology", if not, ask yourself the following question "Can I create demand for such a technology". If both questions can be answered with a "No", which I think is the case for video on demand, then trash the idea... Nobody seems to want video on demand, and nobody managed to create a market for it.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
No maybe if Billy G said 20 years I would have taken him more seriously. By that time advances in storage due to nanotechnology should be widely available. I'd expect to see low cost devices similar today's USB Memory Keys, but with terabytes of storage. An advance like that will start to displace DVDs/CDs.
DVDs will be as obselete as PlaystationOne games are now, in that the PS2 will still play the PS1 games, and you can still purchase a PS1 to play these games.
There will be new formats available, so I'm sure in 10 years time we'll all be watching HDVD, or some other similar but greatly enhanced format, but the players will still play DVDs (in the same way that DVD players today still play VideoCD).
The physical format won't change (210mm diameter, 21mm diameter hole, 2.1mm thick), but what can be held on a disk that size will change. DVD is 2 layers, but we have already seen that someone has managed to get 15 layers, and that was 2 years ago.
So, we will have something better, but we will still be able to use our DVDs for a long time yet.
T.
From this article:
Here the crystal ball clouded over due to a blue screen of death. Bill's predictions and his crystal balls can be a little inaccurate. He once said that there was no future in that little networking novelty called the Internet.
Yeah, and he also said we wouldn't need more than 640k but in this case I believe he is at least partially correct. It may not be in 10 years or less but scratchable media needs to go away. We need something that can handle a large amount of data and remain nearly indestructible.
I have probably screwed up 90% of my CD collection over the years. I now just keep most of the music that I really want to save as SHN's on my computer. At least that way I can recreate the CDs as necessary. While I take very good care of my DVD collection (burned or otherwise) I can still see problems occurring due to drops, accidental scratching, etc. I moved most of my music collection to CD in the late 90s and gave away my tape entire tape collection in 2002. What happens when that media goes south (and we have had how many stories predicting that it won't last forever)? I'm screwed basically.
Gates' idea, while nice for corporations that would control the media, wouldn't be so great for the consumers. The RIAA/MPAA would just LOVE to control and watch how many times you watch/listen to something and charge you accordingly. I don't think that the people would though. While he might be talking about a more local storage location I doubt it. Sad but true...
Let's try and develop nearly indestructible media and keep the storage local and out of corporation control. When he says the "TV" will be able to tell if we can watch the content or not I am fearful that he is less concerned with our children's virgin eyes and more concerned with whether our bank accounts can afford it.
co-incidentily future versions windows won't be supporting DVD-Rom drive
He envisons a Microsoft DRM WMA future with Janus and its ilk. That's what he wants anyway, but he won't get it.
640 DVDs ought to be good enough for anyone
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
because there is just no substitute for a media that cost cents
What about media that cost tenths of a cent?
-Colin
Huh? Are you just disagreeing with him just for the sake of going against Gates? DVDs as we know it will be obsolete in 10 years from now. Why wouldn't they be? Alot can happen in 10 years. Look at how fast we got exceeded CDs in computing.
Of course. It is safer to have all your media stored in your computer, so that when the next virus/worm/software bug makes your filesystem unusable you loose everything.
I wonder why does not he suggest nuclear power plant operators and cruise missile software developers to use Windows XP (including IE, everyone knows it is part of the OS) as an embedded operating system.
there is a way to transfer the existing format to whatever is next without any data loss.
I imagine that the next thing will be little cylindrical holographic storage devices. Or something to that effect. Where would you put the label though?
And everyone have enough with 640 kb of memory. And yes, floppy disk drives are in dying mode already for 7-8 years. Sure, right :)
Bill, people simply don't change technology so ofen. They simply enjoy things longer. They all are NOT stupid consumers.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
And that's a good enough reason in itself to keep DVDs around.
There are a few DVDs I'd like to obsolete a little faster than others, if that's at all possible, Bill.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
It doesn't matter what technology comes along.. even if the DVD was perfect, I'm sure all the movie companies, all the music companies, etc would move to another media to generate outcome. Sure, the VCR Cassette tape to DVD was a big step, and I had to rebuy everything in another format..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
He's right, we all know 64K ought to be enough for anybody. How dare you challenge Bill G.!!
Bill Gates once said that the "innernet" (sic) was a passing fad. Microsoft worked really hard to retrofit a whole load of stuff to Windows 95 when they realised how wrong they were.
I cant wait untill the media comes out where I can buy all my television box sets (all seasons ) onto one single disc, I would love to put in the x-files or STTNG disc and have them all at my finger tips instead of searching through boxes and boxes , and storing them. Also if there is ever a fire in my house I can grab my entire collection easier on the way out.
Is this the same Bill Gates that thought CDROM was the wave of the future? That besides programs, they'd be the way encyclopedias, dictionaries, catalogs, and most other data would be distributed?
Is this the same Bill Gates that thought the web would never catch on? It certainly would never replace CDROM as the media of choice for big collections of data.
I think he is right this time. If you make enough wild guesses you are bound to nail some of them.
We've already ditched the CDs for mp3 players, so why shouldn't we stop using DVDs? They're getting kinda big nowdays, I mean, a 5 inch plastic disc, isn't that a little large when it can fit together with a couple of others alike it in a hard drive of an ipod or something similiar.
What I'd like to know is what Distro he will be running.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
because there is just no substitute for a media that cost cents
No, it will not be obsolete because the movie industry has embraced it. There has been substantial capital invested in this technology and it will not be thrown away this quickly.
didn't the guy also say that NT4 support would be gone in 10 years?
It took this long, and there are still people without DVD players, both in thier computers and for thier TVs. Games and other applications that require multiple cds still do not use DVD technology mainstream. I doubt that DVD will die untill its replacment is competative in every way. It is difficult to get the world to change to a new way of doing things.
I've always just assumed memory chips would get cheap enough to obviate the need for any kind of spinning disc. How far away can we be? 5 years?
Preparing for massing Gates bashing party exactly 10 years from now!
compact disk media is here to stay for a while because there is just no substitute for a media that cost cents.
That's not completely true. Higher quality will make another format more popular with users, and something that can't be copied easily will be popular with the MPAA. With DVD burners (even dual-layer and blu-ray) becoming available to the home user, DVDs are to easy to copy from the MPAA's view, and average consumers who don't burn dvd's and get told that a new format will look better on their new expensive HDTV will be tempted to switch over. I read a recent artical about a company that created a new video recording format that hold about 1GB/layer and can be layered 100 deep. It was some sort of "holographic" alternative that wrote the data onto what looked like a 1" square piece of glass. It even had it's own custom reader out that was rather small. Supposedly it's near impossible for a user to make a pirated copy of this movie, and something that small that can hold that much data would provide some incredible picture quality. Anything that can provide high image quality or is difficult to copy will catch on. Remember, the MPAA can shape the market, and if they like a new technology, they can put on the neccessary preasure to replace DVDs before their time. Of course such a move would motivate users to pirate movies online at the same scale they do music (which is becoming more possible with bigger HDs and highly available broadband). Well, in the end, nobody can predict the death of a technology, espeically somebody with a track record like Bill Gates.
Ok, I think I'm done now...
I image mister Gates sitting in his office, saying to an employee "Check this out. Every time i do a prediction, it hits Slashdot."
... Just because he is who he is, should it be mentioned every time the man predicts something? Why don't we wait till the frikkin book comes out?
come on
Of course they will. There'll be something else that carries 100 gigs for 10 cents. But he probably means he thinks spinning things will get replaced by tiny, cheap USB (or whatever there is in ten years) drives. Which seems plausible and would be okay with me.
It will know what we want to watch
That's funny, usually I don't even know what I want to watch. If I feel like watching something, I like to flip open the DVD binder and start browsing.
DVDs/CDs won't go away until there is ubiquitous broadband, including in the mountains, in the car, out on a boat, and everyone has terabytes of crash-protected (RAID or whatever) storage (I don't want $8000 worth of movie purchases depending on a hard drive not crashing).
Heck, broadband isn't even available everywhere in major cities right now, contrary to what the pundits say, let alone in your car where the kids want to watch a movie. Sure there are a few mobile broadband pilots starting out, but how long will it be before Verizon/whoever can take 100,000 peole simultaneously streaming movies from their home server to the back seat of their minivans in the middle of the drive across Kansas, and do it for pennies an hour?
For once I agree with Gates. Who wants to muck about with discs? I am already making plans to build a large disc array to store my entire DVD collection.
On the other hand, as a delivery medium DVD is pretty cheap and efficient, I just think that DVDs should be like other software, you buy the disc and then install it on your movie server and put the disc away as your backup.
As for video on demand, TiVo certainly shows the possibilities and I think that going to a situation where we can select video material from an enormous library where we pay for each piece of material and don't have to sit through adverts and other crap, well, that would be heaven frankly
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
It turns out I was right (I couldn't play a SouthPark (longer, uncut) DVD on Windows because of weird/annoying "unauthorized" and a variety of other messages about a legal copy (Blockbuster) of the DVD.
Studios/movie companies wanted a technology which would make it more difficult to rip movies than VCDs, and they wanted to implement the protection in hardware. What better way to do this than "invent" a technology which is "superior" to VCDs because of higher_capacity, menus and other bells and whistles, claim that it is the "hep" technology and phase the more convenient media out. Average Joe is happy to see the "extras" and "better" quality, and embraces the technology, and thus renders the more intuitive/convenient technology obselete.
If they really wanted just capacity and high quality to benefit the customer, they could've written plain AVI/MPEG files to DVD.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
... I predict Windows will be obsolete in 10 months. Even being nobody have the same possibilities than B.G to be right.
Is he saying that DVDs as a format will be obsolete? Then I'd say yes. Obviously there is going to be some changes. with DVD-HD, and blu-ray disks. But as with CDs, I'm sure we'll see backwards compatibility.
If he thinks we're all going to give up our 5" silver disks, he's crazy. Unless there's a major technological breakthrough (like who knows, holographic cubes or something) they're going to stay around for a while. People still use punch-cards for Christ sake!
It took decades for CDs to overtake tapes and records (yet much less time for DVDs to take over from VHS tapes).
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, is the world's richest man.
"640k ..." (shakes Magic 8 Ball) "... should be enough for anybody."
We ARE talking about the .Net king, and the guy who said the world only needed 4 computers..... and then went on to make himself dirty ritch selling them to everyone else..... do I think DVD will be obsolete in 10 years..... well people still use tape.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I REALLY hate to agree with Pearly (Gates) but I've been saying the same thing for over a year. Why the heck do I need a piece of plastic that can warp, melt, get scratced and otherwise become useless when I can just keep it all on disk and whatever backup makes you feel happy. I mean, as the price of storeage continues to drop (geez, 400GB is now about $200!!) I think the line between what we used to think of as long term storage Vs archival storage, like DVD's, is going to get very fuzzy.
article from the Inquirer this morning...
"He said the concept of carrying around film and music on little silver discs to stick them into a computer was ridiculous. He moaned that DVDs could get scratched or get lost."
Yes there is : no media but raw storage available via hi-speed wireless connections.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I take this less as a prediction and more as marketing rhetoric to try and push MS products like Windows Media Center edition and jazz like that. We all know Mr. Gates has made stupid claims before, and often times they just aren't based on reality or technologically feasable. Facial recognition? In average people's homes? In ten years? I have a hard time swallowing that one...
--
Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
He is probabaly right, I know I hope they'll be gone by then.
http://www.leadmagnet.50megs.com
I would have to disagree with the world's richest man and say that compact disk media is here to stay for a while because there is just no substitute for a media that cost cents.
In 10 years, a lot can change. New forms of storage that today might not be cost-effective may become so, and the data requirements of consumers may well bypass the capabilities of CD/DVD's. Don't you remember when 1.44 Mb seemed like a massive amount of storage?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
with blue laser discs around the corner, we can get hd-dvd with the h264 codec. i just think that people will make dvd and hd-dvd players for many years to come once they are released, so unlike vhs, you don't have to worry about re-buying all your movies. the switch will be much easier now than going from an analog to digital player. i don't see why people are worried.
plus i'm also looking forward to 20gig burnable cds.
- tristan
When I see my neon blue biochemical Lava Lamp storage device with with oodles of storage capacity , pretty blue glow with floaty things inside, and the ability to transfer my self inside once my body is no longer useable I'll be happy. Till then it's the old fasioned tried and true method of storage, stone tablets.
:) Just have to leave some kind of key or index for translation so a future scientist won't mistake my laundry list for some weird ceremonial religeous ritual.
Hey, it work for joe-six-stick Cave Man back in the day.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
People are making the 640k connection a few times so far in the comments I have read so far. How about something a little bit closer to today?
Bill Gates published "The Road Ahead" in 1996. The Intenet was not mentioned.
Will DVD's still be for sale/popular in 10 years? Maybe not. That being said, a prediction from Bill should not be given much weight on it's own.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Gates wants the current DVD system to become obsolete because Windows Media 9 is one of the encoder formats used in the new HD-DVD format which is currently in the works. (One more reason to support the competing Blu-Ray format ... no MS!)
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I dunno if I agree with Gates on this one. First, there is an awful lot of deployed hardware to handle DVDs. Second, media companies are pretty happy with the model of being able to sell a physical object. Microsoft, on the other hand, would love to become a service provider that everyone subscribes to. Third, the consumer benefits that Gates lists are pretty, well, unimpressive. The facial recognition is just fluff. The fragility of DVDs is true, but even an object that needs to be handled carefully is more substantial (and in my experience, trustworthy) than 100% reliable service. Having a personalized electronic video index instead of one general one might be somewhat nice, but it's not all that exciting. "Keeping the kids out" hasn't sold much of anything thus far, and I don't see it likely to start, especially not migrating everyone to a new format. The "know what we want to watch" thing was tried with the Tivo, and I expect that it will eventually be an interesting feature, but it's not a feature that neccessitates a format change -- an existing DVD player with some way of grabbing the latest "similar associations" database or phoning home could do it -- you don't need to blow away the entire DVD format for it.
No, if Gates is right, it will be for other reasons. If we can really get the bandwidth for it, video-on-demand is a neat idea. You pay a subscription fee, and get to watch all the movies you want, and the ones of your choice. There will probably be some kind of add-ins that publishers will come up with that don't exist on DVDs, and demand for the add-ins might produce enough consumer interest.
Other than that, I see DVD staying around for a while.
May we never see th
I bought a VCR 20 years ago. I still have tapes that I bought then. Just last week, I picked up some new DVD's. I'm planning on still having them in 20 years as well. After that, I'll probably be dead, so any new technology will have to be adapted by you kids. Now, get off my porch.
Its not just DVDs going away - its all removable media. When broadband is fast and ubiquitous and everything is stored on servers (On Demand video, music, data, etc.) there is no need to manufacture, buy and store a bunch of physical records, tapes, CDs, and DVDs. The floppy disk is already gone, the rest is on the way.
I certainly hope he's right. I hate CDs and I'm trying to get them out of my life. They do scratch, I do lose them, and they're just annoying to use. The perfect system to me would be something similar to iTunes but which would remember everything I had purchased so that my music would be available anywhere I ever went. Like the now defunct mp3.com.
With the speed of network connections increasing at a phenomenal pace, I can easily see the same technologies being present for video. Just a few days ago I wanted to see Rounders and I found that the DVD was missing from its case. Aaaaaaaaaaaargh. What I would have given to just go into my HTPC scroll through a list of movies (maybe sorted by ranking so that Rounders would be near the top), find the one I want and just hit play.
I won't shed a tear if DVDs go and are replaced with what he's talking about.
-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)
In case you haven't noticed, that's what technology does. It becomes obsolete.
Bill Gates predicted to die within the next 100 years. Film at 11:00.
1984: 1st PC to include a 3.5" floppy - Mac
1986: 1st PC to include SCSI on every machine - Mac
1991: 1st PC to include CD in every machine - Mac
1998: 1st PC to eliminate floppies in every machine - Mac
2000: 1st PC to include a working DVD burner - Mac
2002: 1st mainstream disk-based MP3 player-iPod
The next pasture is always greener
"there is just no substitute for a media that cost cents."
Let's think...10 years ago, how much did DVD media cost?
Oh wait, 10 years ago there was no DVD!
The only delivery mechanism that is not subject to these constraints are network delivery of licensed material. It is never damaged or destroyed because you don't get to keep a copy of the material that was purchased. If you want to use the material again, within the constraints of your license, you fetch it from a network server again. Can't be lost, can't easily be destroyed.
There are other constraints, I think, that would keep this from becoming a reality. The most obvious is that with every purchase of a physical media (CD, DVD) you increase the amount of local storage available to the consumer. If you have a caching media server, it is possible to overrun the cache and degrade performance. If your local cache of media is a physical object that makes the data local, that is less of a problem.
There are legal and moral constraints too, but that is a whole other discussion.
And I predict Gates's predictions are obsolete in 0.1 Years
When the dvd hardware market gets saturated and there are fewer and fewer features to add to the latest and greatest players and discs, the manufacturing industry will push for a new format in order to start the whole cycle again. A prime example of this was when 35mm film cameras were replaced (to some degree) by the 'new and improved' APS film, it had a smaller negative area which meant poorer quality photos. The added features were of questionable benefit. The reality was that the industry couldn't tweak the existing technology much more. Where's the profit in that??
... who wrote "... no substitute for a media that cost cents." ... can he possibly be wrong?
Dunno, but let's post that in the story heading anyway!
Well, for one thing a GPRS connection to my Google(tm) 1 Gig storage would be MUCH cheaper...
The point is I will have a large personal repository someplace on the net, and never need to use any media whatsoever... for I see a golden wireless future...
There may be better media available in 10 years time, there is higher capacity stuff even now (just not in price per gig) however DVD are digital media and the protection we well broken I expect in 10 years time I will have access to all the content on a different device, however that does not mean I will be paying to replace my 200+ DVDs. This is in the same way people arn't racing out to replace all their CDs. I think in mean peoples minds DVDs will be "good enough" in the same way CDs are difficult to place as a standard as people don't need (willing to pay for) something "better" and DVDs for the first time give access to video in a format that "feels" perminate, after all most collections don't rewatch most the content they have, it will be hard to convice people to rebuy it all again!
James
Admittedly the 5.25" is gone, but seriously, installed user base and legacy uses make ubiquitous media types hard to get rid of. The day Dell stops selling new towers with floppy drives and Blockbuster stops renting VHS is the day that, well, we've probably only got another decade before the CD-ROM gives out. I imagine DVDs will continue just a little while after that.
To sum: "Gates is likely off by at least five years," says the 200,000,000th richest man in the world.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
I believe the actual quote is supposed to have been:
.exe file is less than that.
640K should be enough for anybody.
However, Bill Gates does deny that he ever said that, or that it was taken out of context.
At the time, 640K was enough. Today, people are amazed to see anything application whose
T.
- Everybody has to buy new hardware
- Everybody has to buy all the records all over again on the new media
- Better RIAA/MPAA control of the world's consumers - including the possibility of remotely making stuff unplayable.
. Of course, it's also vaguely possible that a free, standards-based recording medium will come about. (Ha!)What are you going to put on DVD when broadcast flags go into effect next year? Between the DMCA, DRM, and Secure computing, I can see a day in less than 10 years where I'd have nothing left to burn.
I've had this argument with an ardent tech evalgelist before. He argued that DVD,CDs and HDD are ridiculous, not only because they can be damaged easily, but beacause they are essentially mechanical devices. 5 microseconds was too slow for him. Radial latency was too much of a hang.
He figured that in 10 years time we'll all be using flash memory based devices capable of holding Gigabytes of data, instead of mechanical media.
I argued that while flash memory type devices would emerge, you can already get 1-2GB USB memory sticks, the CD/DVD format would also increase apace. Although I'd have to say DVD is lagging behind, but probobly only because, unlike USB flash, it required better hardware to use the higher storage. Blu-Ray discs should give us 50GB of portable storage, and Rockstar at least expects them for the next format of console.
I figured that in 10 years time 50GB DVDs will be the norm and perhaps as much as 200GB DVDs will be readily available. While at the same time flash memory might only get up to 10GB at an afforadble price. That was another argument I had in favour of DVD. Price. DVDs can be as cheap as $2, but even a 128MB USB stick will cost $50.
We will always have portable, hard media,(read only?) storage, simply because it will always be bigger cheaper but still slower than the alternatives. Having movies on HDD is nice, but how can we bring them over to a friends or with us on holidays? It's nice to have something you can hold in your hand and say, that's mine, rather than something 'somewhere' on hard disc that might expire, or delete itself by tomorrow.
May the Maths Be with you!
His skills seem to be in siezing advantage in the present rather than predicting the future. This doesn't seem to have done any harm to his career, but really we shouldn't consider him a prophet.
Damn! Thank you, Mr. Gates! I am SOOOOO friggin' glad to get that timely news. I mean, if I'd learned that DVDs were going to be obsolete in only FIVE years rather than TEN, I'd be pissed at the industry for not giving me enough time to think about what I was going to do with my new DVD player.
...and then whatever replaces DVDs will be mature and ready for end-user consumption! WOOHOO! Oh, wait -- I may not have money for that new piece of hardware after having 10 years to spend money on stuff that I'd not been told was going to be obsolete in 10 years. DAMMIT!
:-D
"Honey! Throw out the DVD player at the yard sale this Saturday! We're gettin' the next big thing...a few years from now...but we're gettin' it!"
Hell -- TEN years to think about what to do with these DVDs and my DVD-ROM drive. Maybe I'll go ahead and toss the DVD-ROM drive and fill the space with one of those 5.25" drive bay Easy-Bake-Ovens -- or a 5.25" drive bay aquarium. Yeah! That's it! Watch two male betas battle it out in my cold cathode-lit case while I frag on Far Cry! And then DOOM3, followed by Half-Life 2, Splinter Cell 4, World of Diablo vs. WarCraft VII, and Star Wars Galaxies III: The Expansion Pack...
My only regret -- we didn't get at least 10 years notice that Duke Nuke'Em Forever was in development. On the other hand...we're getting close.
IronChefMorimoto
Isn't it obvious that DVDs won't be the primary distribution medium in 2014? Gates isn't saying we'll all have tablet PC's (or flying cars). He's saying that the CD format, now widely available for 20+ years, won't last another 10.
Of course he's wrong on this point: true OSS fanatics will still be using Linux on bootable DVDs on their obsolete hardware. And I still have some cassette tapes floating around.
But really, who cares? Gates isn't in the business of making predictions. And the people who are in that business, like Cringely make equally stupid predictions such as "IPv6 will be popular" and "Wal-Mart will take over the online music market". Who cares?
Actually he didn't say that. http://www.thocp.net/timeflashes/tf_1981.htm
http://www.leadmagnet.50megs.com
I predict that I don't care what Bill Gates predicts.
I dunno where Bill Gates buys his media, but I just picked up a 50-pack of DVD-Rs for 31 cents per media.
And usually I'm pretty good with them...
The ability to grab a CD/DVD and play it somewhere else is a boon to the consumer. There may be a more viable market for direct download media (TV on demand, etc.), but I think the onslaught of malware is making people leery of any downloads.
/.er). I could just see the fights on that one - little Jimmy mugs in front of the tube and gets Teletubbies, Britny jumps in front and its Nickelodeon, Ashley butts in and its Chef! (she loves Britcoms!!).
Gates' vision of DVD/CD obsolescence would only seem doable if some other openly portable medium was presented. Today's MP3/PDA/whatever devices offer this somewhat, albeit at a lower quality sound and restrictive portability (they talk to virtually nothing). And the **AA disorganizations basically want all portability to be replaced with 'repay-ability'.
I would guess that CD/DVD storage will still be present 10 years from now. Just look and cassette tapes (and LPs to a lesser extent) for proof of historical media fanaticism.
One of his thoughts - facial recognition - would be a mess unless the TV/content selection was controlled by 1 person (or a lonely
"there is just no substitute for a media that cost cents.""
Bandwidth costs NOTHING but electricity and the averaged amount of installation/upkeep, which is currently WAY overpriced because of all the middlemen. When the pipes get fatter, bandwith prices are going to plummet. Permenenent storage cost is already tiny, and files can be housed in just a couple locations to feed many people.
I agree with Bill Gates on this one. His timetable may be aggressive, but he's right, whether it's 10 or 20 years.
Not that I like this idea, I'd much rather "own" my media, but I think it's an inevitability that distribution will be "online" in very short order.
people like Gates think users do not want control. He thinks we just want to "work" or "have fun".
It is the primary reason why Windows sucks too: its all good and well to abstract the machine from the user using eye-candy and whatnot. It is a stupendously Big Mistake to abstract the machine from the -admins-.
He reminds me of that IBM guy: all the world needs is 5 computers...
And its true, at that time, 5 * IBM-CPU was enough for all computational requirements of the time.
However, the PC revolution was so succesful, because people -want- control, not just "work" or "fun", people want -information-, especially the dangerous kind, so we can avoid -being- in danger.
Thats also why fire's, and car-wrecks fascinate us. We like to avoid becoming one, it is a good strategy to survive as a human.
"/Dread"
is that your right to view DVDs will be obsolete in 10 years. Notice that in his "prediction" the viewing device is the media, which means no access to the media without permission from the viewing device, which means you no longer own the media. Wow, sound like a really deal idea to me.
I don't think we will EVER have "indestructible media." There's just no money in it. LPs were about the closest we ever came and that's mostly because they are analog - there's lots to be had between "a little" and "everything." Compare this to DVDs that frequently develop "dropouts" just like analog vhs - except with vhs you could still see something there even if it was warped or noisy or had bad sound. Now it's just nothing at all.
Same thing with tv here. The PBS station used to have frequent splats opf noise on it due to some inexplicable inability of the network engineers to maintain a proper stl. Now, thanks to their all digital upgrade, we don't get the splats of noise - we just get really fucking annoying dropouts. Not once or twice an hour but more like two or three a minute. Just a second or two but it's so goddamned annoying I have just about quit watching the only network available to me that had something worth watching.
When digital is good it's really great - but when it's bad it completely sucks ass, which means it must be replaced in order to continue using it. And there's no way the corps are going to spend money developing media that lasts more than a scant few years - there's simply no profit in it.
For an obsolete medium, there sure are a lot of CDs still being produced. What is interesting is that the number of CD players has certainly reduced with DVD players being slotted as the replacement with the ability to play CDs, CD-Rs, CDs with MP3s, VCDs as well as DVDs.
I agree with you (and gates) that there will something better in 10 years - but that does not mean that the usefulness of DVDs will have diminished. Like CDs, DVDs have been well designed for their primary task; providing movies with a variety of different features.
The 50 GB blue laser DVDs will probably be used for movies series and TV seasons as well as computer backups/applications and displace the current DVD format for computer applications, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to agree that DVDs will be "obsolete" anytime in the forseeable future (or even our lifetimes).
I suspect that Gates made the statement more to get his name in the news and present himself as a visionary, as a fairly positive piece about himself.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
A few days ago, I was trying to decide between an external hard drive and a DVD burner as a backup solution for my home PC (which I'll soon be moving to Gentoo). I knew that if I got the DVD burner, I'd have spindles of DVDs and stacks all over the place of things I burned that I'd probably never use again, so I picked the hard drive. Personally, I'm sick of optical media, mainly because it's too fragile and it piles up. I know that every time I buy a new CD or DVD, I immediately rip it so that I'll be able to actually use whatever was on it in another 5 years.
If Ikea could create their own Blue Screen of Death, suppose it could be an elecrified shower curtain in royal blue. :)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Last time I checked anything Bill put his name on was pretty worthless (Hello Windows), he hasn't really been in touch with the real digital world (AKA right now the open source movement, he's trying to crush it rather then support it). So his opinion means jack to me.
Show me someone who didn't make a fortune several decades ago and then abuse his market control with an opinion like that and maybe I'll listen, untill then let Bill do his little song and dances about how Linux is evil and the usual business crap Microsoft love to throw around.
let the caos ensue
if those were accurate, i would be watching holographic movies inside my flying car today.
I think DVDs will be around as long as SD video holds out, and I doubt that anyone seriously expects HDTV to pass the 50% adoption mark within 10 years.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Generalissimo Franscisco Franco is still dead.
DVD obsolete in 10 years. No shit? Really? 80% of technology is obsolete in 10 years. In 10 years we've gone from 3.5" 1.44 megabyte floppy disks in boxes of software, through CDROMS, to Electronic Distribution on most stuff.
That's not news. Predicting something that WON'T be obsolete in 10 years would be news.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I think it's too early to call this a failure. CD players and fax machines didn't take off initially, yet you can go into any electronics store nowadays and find both. Tablet PCs will take off when they get lighter and the performance gap between them and laptops closes.
Maybe somebody will even release a movie about it on DVD :-).
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
Sure thing! As soon as Bill gates gives me a billion dollars I'll throw out all my DVD's and put all my movies on the hard drive. Just because someone is worth billions on paper, doesn't make them smarter. More ruthless and money obsessed, but not smarter.
The main point is that the DVDs will be replaced by fast connections. Why go to video store to rent a movie (or wait to be mailed to you) when you can click a button?
;)
Laziness is probably the most important thing that moves the world ahead
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
And it's not his fault. He tries to make the future conform to whatever is best for him, which makes him a master businessman. But the technician in him seems to have died long ago.
I can't put together any evidence to support this statement (nor am I bothering to RTFA); it's more just a feeling. I personally find this statement about DVDs to be ludicrous. They might not be called DVDs, or they might not even be disks, but there will likely be removable (optical?) media for the forseeable future.
There were a lot of benefits to DVD video over VHS video. Off the top of my head ...
... when the price of these hits $1000 then maybe the next big thing will start to catch on.
1) Smaller medium - VHS tapes were bulky. Compare the size of a VHS TV season to a DVD TV season. 11 large cassettes vs. 10 2mm thick DVDs.
2) Better quality
3) No tapes stretching/breaking/wearing - lasts longer
4) Extra features, commentaries, languages, etc
And the price for this was: Basic DRM - stops casual copying, doesn't prevent lending however. Not a terrible price to pay.
The problem for the companies is that anything newer has to have the same extent of benefits to be worthwhile to the consumer, especially if the price for that is strict DRM that probably will preclude lending the media to someone else once you've 'installed' it. The only obvious benefit at the moment is higher-quality HDTV 1080i or 720p movies. I suppose 20% of households might have a TV capable of viewing that in 10 years time.
It also doesn't negate the fact that DVD is 'good enough'. VHS wasn't 'good enough' in any way, that was obvious. DVD might not be good enough on a 100" hi-res digital screen either
...you just reinvented thin client. Again.
Thin client is always so appealing to The Man, because you can charge rent forever, and because it centralizes all the power.
That's why thin client will never sell, except to The Man.
I read the article and it seemed to me the quotes of a man who has lost contact to reality.
Sure if I have a billion dollars in the bank can I have information whenever, where ever I want it. However, I am about a billion dollars short and as such have to stick to cheaper things. Namely DVD's on special or the Movie Channels.
Also what Mr Gates is forgetting YET AGAIN, is that I like to own my own data or movies.
I am also amazed at his prediction that TV's and computer's will know what I want to see. Especially since often I have no idea what I want to watch and make a habit of channel surfing.
An individual who has too much money and time on his hands....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I doubt DVD's will become obsolete, but they will probably not be the medium of choice in the future. I could easily see in 10 years more emphasis on things like Video On Demand in the form of and legal, controlled online storefronts. With broadband pipes becoming more prolific and bandwidth speeds ever increasing, the availability of immediadly selectable, downloadable, and viewable content from a variety of sources seems very likely and doable.
In addition, we're soon approaching a point where specific media types could become a moot point. As things like memory cards and various portable and online storage capabilities become cheaper and have significantly larger capacities, the very notion of a specific media type will fade. As long as you can store, access, and transfer the content, the medium really will become irrelevent. And there's really no reason that this could not be done (reletivly) securely in a way that could probably satisfy the various "media organizations". It just requires some innovation to make the "playing" of the content controllable.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
didn't he know the voice is easily broken
you can easily scratch your face
you can loose your voice
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
DVDs Predict Gates Will Be Obsolete In 10 Years
DVDs rallied to defend their position as leading video media Wednesday, predicting that Gates will be obsolete within 10 years.
"In the near future, we simply will not have a need for Gates," said the flat round storage, " there will be much easier and quicker ways to do the things Gates do."
Gates were unavailable for comment.
He's not.
A DVD is 120mm in diameter, and the hole has a diameter of 15mm. And they're 1.2mm thick.
Google knows all.
From a purely technical standpoint they're already obsolete. They could be potentially replaced with streaming video, hard drive storage, solid state memories, and holographic optical memories. Any combination of these, especially streaming video plus some means of recording and storage has the potential to replace DVDs in the next decade or so.
From a practical standpoint it should have a long time left because of the installed base of players, public acceptance, and wide availability.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I'm sure Mr. Gates' point is that since high-bandwidth network connectivity will be ubiquitous, there will be no point in *any* physical media. I mean, in normal circumstances, you wouldn't even think of saving a web site to a disk to show it to someone on another computer with internet access. So, assuming that network storage is fast and 'net access pervasive in 10 years, isn't it reasonable to assume that people will choose the path of least resistance, and store their items in such a way that they can be accessed from anywhere? This is certainly an idea that people have been talking about forever, and that we are starting to see now.
For example:
http://del.icio.us/ is a site dedicated to storing bookmarks
and there is iDisk, and all sorts of photo sites.
I don't think the article says anything new, the author just tries to make it sound controversial.
---------------------
Freedom or Evil: Freevil.net
G. W. Bush says, "You decide!"
81LL G4735 1S 7H3 5UCk!!! I R 133T H4X0R!! (+5 Insightful)
Moderation Insight
With a little luck maybe Microsoft will be obsolete in 10 years. We can only hope.
Who's leg do I have to hump to get a dry martini around here?
That is not bound to happen, or it's not a "capitalist incentive"... Billy himself said that hardware will be free pretty soon. However, since Microsoft don't produce (much) hardware, they couldn't care less...
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Of course DVD will be an inadequate storage medium in 2014. Just consider how many doublings of storage capacity we'll see between now and then.
And why do we care? Just because DVD will be obsolete does not mean we'll be unable to watch the ones we have. My VHS is surely obsolete, but I can still watch those tapes. Must we quibble simply because the statement came from Gates's mouth?
Nothing to see here. Move on.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
I would say that DVD's will be around for a while even if a new format, just like VHS is now. They have been released in large amount unlike VCD or laser disks that I bet the average person cannot find in their local Best Buy. They might get old but I don't see them leaving any time too soon until another format truely proves it self.
Gates is making this statement so he can sound aligned with the content creation industry. The RIAA and MPAA would want nothing more than to be able to sell you a temporally restricted product that you will have to reconsume every time you want to experience it.
Realize this: when you buy a DVD, you now have a mostly permanent edition of that movie you love and enjoy. You can watch it when you wish, as you wish, without having to pay any more money to these companies. In their mind, this is competition. You now have a reason not to purchase any more media from them- instead of creating more content, they are simply trying to scrounge more money out of us. See: Video on Demand, EZ-DVD, DIVX.
Gates, being the head of a company that's involved in the technology of distribution, wants his product to come on top. How better a way to do this then to align yourself with the view of the media industry.
Look. Video on Demand? That's nice. However, if people don't have a physical product, then it better be an unlimited consumption mechanism, based on a subscription. If not, people will not accept it. DIVX was not accepted. EZ-DVD will not BE accepted.
It's simple: property is a right all humans feel they are entitled to. The commons is not enough for humans to feel ownership. Small communes succeed because they are simply sharing personal property amongst a small number of individuals.
Marxism failed because it's an attempt at sharing property with too many. End of digression. (=
DVD's are a blazing success because they are the pinnacle of movie efficiency at this time: they store the most features, in the least amount of space, for the least amount of money per use. Media servers, hard disk arrays filled with AVI's, or Video-On-Demand- these are all inferior.
So, Gates is doing the right thing for his company by coming out and saying this. He's just trying to look good, and thus, make the technology that Microsoft markets, look good.
We need to make sure he fails.
And in a twist of fate, Microsoft announces Longhorn will release in 2014 on 6 DVDs!
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
I'm still waiting for hardware to be free as Bill Gates predicted.
:-)
Then I could simply upgrade my hardware every few months or so and not spend a dime
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
He probably means when this happens and society descends into anarchy. Not much time to watch movies when you need to find food.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
in the future we'll all be using solid state drives instead of mechanical spinning hard drives. We already use SD/CF/memory sticks to store content for pda's. eventually they'll have enough memory capacity-and prices low enough so that movies can be distributed on them
Join Team Mozilla #38050 Folding@home
Sounds pretty similar to this idea
I predict Bill Gates is already obsolete!
Soviet Russia Predicts Microsoft Obsolete In 10 Years.
Of course, it makes perfect sense, they built a timer into all the DVD players that expires in about 10 years! The scary thing is i wouldnt put it past them to do that. He might not be too far off on this one. He could be talking about two things: DRM or internet storage. DVD used to be a locked down format, but thanks to some people who risked their own freedom to get us some, we have a pretty free format. Obviously this cant be allowed to continue so DVD must be retired and replaced with something more DRM'd.
On the other hand an hour ago I was about to get a big pack of CDRs and was thinking about a DVD burner and then it struck me, why not just by a new hard-drive? its not that much more expensive per GB, its more reliable (aslong as its not an IBM) and much faster especially considering you dont have to look for a disk. I used to burn lots of CDs just to carry work around, but these days i just store things online, CDs have replaced floppies but now they're starting to seem just as crap (with some going bad after just a year or two) DVDs are still not a perfect CD replacement because there are plenty of computers at uni's and work places etc that are stuck with CD drives and with fast internet access getting more popular i can just email myself files or leave my PC running and ftp to it from anywhere. We're going towards everything being networked and online, I havnt used a computer that wasnt on the net for some time now.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
It's MS's business model will be obsolete in 10 years time - it has got an inTuxication that won't heal :).
If I had points...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Isn't the link in the article presuming the tablet PC was a failed prediction a little premature? Maybe Mr.Gates just has a longer time horizon than you. The thing only launched a year or two ago. Linux has been around... what... 10 years? OH NO! Linux on the desktop is a failure!
Patience.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
"OS/2 is destined to be a very important piece of software.
During the next 10 years, millions of programmers and users will utilize this system."
Inside OS/2
by Gordon Letwin
foreword by Bill Gates
Microsoft Press
ISBN 1-55615-117-9 (c) 1988
Okay, I'm risking burning some karma here, but I had a post modded +5 funny this morning, so I have a bit to burn. ;-)
Have you ever considered that they couldn't care less about DRM on the media?
What possible reason would Microsoft, or more personally Bill Gates care about it? Seriously. They don't produce movies. They don't produce music.
The demand for it comes from the producers of content. They're a business and provide it. If they push to have their DRM standardized in commercial media systems, thats what they have to do... to provide that service to the content producers, it necessarily has to be pervasive.
If you want to Microsoft bash, I'm sure there'll be an IE security hole article today, but this doesn't seem like a supportable reason to.
But this really has little to do with the topic, which is about DVDs becoming obsolete. Consider this: 802.11x in my area is nearly useless as a community service because there are so many trees and such high humidity. And we STILL have no cable and likely never will, and even if they put a dslam in the local phone box most of the "town" is still too far away to make use of it. But the FCC is plodding ahead with plans to usurp the vhf analog tv band and are talking very seriously about giving some of that bandwidth over to local wireless services. That means even out here in nowhereland wireless media distribution becomes practical. All we need are devices to make VOD as easy to sue as the present day tv remotes and most of the community will never worry about those oddball services like netflix (which will evolve their marketing to providing quality rather than just selection) - because everyone will have "on demand" braindead action movies and tv sitcoms and all the crap they have now. Granted it'll be compressed to hell but, given the zeal of directv viewers who insist their picture is "just as good as dvd," most don't seem to have a problem with that now.
I would say that, if the FCC moves ahead with providing more lower frequency bandwidth to "wireless broadband" then predictions of DVD obsolescence are pretty much spot-on. In ten years "DVDs" won't be "DVDs" anymore they'll probably be some god forsaken "Windows Media" formatted disc (aka "WMDs") and most of us will have available to our homes "VOD" of the (shit) quality now enjoyed by all those digital cable and directv subscribers.
Sorry, but I have to agree with him. DVD's are too delicate to survive for any period of time. Especially when you consider Rentals.
Every time I rent a DVD I have to visually inspect it for damage and typically have to clean it before it will work. Compare that with the VHS tapes that you could toss at the dog and still play.
DVD disks are for shit. People don't know how to handle them and one stupid mistake renders the disk useless. I've already watched a lot of Music CD's die because they were mishandled or dropped and again, these don't compare well to the audio tapes of yester-decade.
They sell us stuff that's supposed to sound better, but you can't tell over the traffic noise anyways. Now you have a disk you drop on the floor and it's dead plastic from that point forward. But you can't record it only an audio tape, backup CD, MP3 file to play in the harsher environments. So you have a bunch of music CD's you get to stress about.
DVD's and CD's are the same media. Same problems will prevail. Keep an eye on vehicles. When you get the DVD player in the car, you will have to worry about damaging those Barney and Wiggles DVD's in the back seat. And you won't be able to record those onto any back-up media for use in these harsher environments either.
Get a book. They don't crash.
Sniff sniff ...
Can any one here smell fear?
Billy starts to get all emotional about IE exploits, loosing business to open source and now starts to make "leader type" predictions 1Bilion desktops / DVD get old etc.
These are statements that we normally hear from polititions in hopes of re-election. Is he counting him self out already? Is he really that scared? Why is it that all he does is *talk* but never *DO* anything?
As we already probably know if M$ really did have any hard advantage other than contracts for people to use thier product then we would not hear all the whining and complaining that they are finding that not only is their ship sprung a leak but it is dissapearing as well.
Well Billy evrey CEO / exec already sees what is going on it's time to move on buddy or actually DO something!!
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
With the DVD's copy protection / region monopoly features so thoroughly cracked, the makers are anxiously looking for a replacement.
The replacement may have the exact same physical characteristics but be incompatible with exiting DVD standards. Once something catches on there's no benefit to maintaining DVD as as standard (even a backwards compatible one).
I'd be suprised if it in fact takes 10 years for this to happen with as much consolidation as there has been among the media companies.
...that he's not getting a big piece of that DVD revenue pie that's currently out there.
Pioneering companies like Time Warner and Sony stuck their necks out in 1997 (yes, DVD is that old) to provide content for an unproven format. While companies like M$ sat on the sidelines and watched it play out. Warner / Sony deserve to make the cash now.
Profit from some real business risks Bill. Then, you won't have to make sour grapes statements like this one.
Political correctness is the newest form of slavery.
I forgot where I read it, but it is something about the bandwidth to the satellite isn't large enough to support true VoD.
This is one area where cable providers are going pull ahead of satellite.
You know what, 10 years from now I'll let you know who was right and who was wrong.
And, to a lesser extent, Tivo.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
dumbass
Since it has been done before, it can easily be done again.
Phase I - Introduce new technology. Market it as superior. Include DRM with better images, features, etc. This will be too expensive for most people. But it will be touted as the next thing you wish you could have.
Phase II - Cut prices. Offer deals with the new hardware. When CDs came out, you could often get deals for 6-10 CDs with purchase of a CD player. Taking that into account, CD players seemed reasonable.
Phase III - Force old media out of the market. No longer agree to buy back unsold media from retailers (except with the new format). Most retailers will not take the chance on unsold merchandise, and will start cutting back their catalog in the old format.
This is how CDs were brought to the market in such a short time and why LPs lost favor. Once that critical market mass is reached, the old technology will be obsolete (in retail). Video casettes are dead - not in the sense that you cannot find them anywhere - but in the sense that they are becoming much harder to find since retailers are dropping it as a format.
Seriously though, as for what it will be, I forsee a return to the Laserdisc format! Imagine a disc the size of a laserdisc, but with the storage density of DVD, or even the soon to be released BlueRay/BlueLaser DVD format! Add a few more layers and I bet you could get the disc up to 1TB or more!! That should be enough to cover HDTV video and whatever new formats come out, or enough to pack about 50 DVDs or 200VCDs on one disc! I for one am excited in waiting on the industry to loop back around to the 80's and start pumping out more Laserdiscs!!!
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
not to mention all that felonious stock markup FraUD, & softwar gangsteriousness. whois next?
all is not lost.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators... going in & out of 'style' since/until forever. see you there?
Pretty soon you'll be able to buy a terabyte of nonvolatile storage with a PC thrown in for free, on what will amount to a single chip in a cheap plastic case, which will talk to all the other consumer gear around you. It will be cheap because it will not need much in the way of IO devices, just a wireless connection or something to connect to the TV or whatever.
The money you'll pay will not be for that miniscule piece of hardware but for the lease of the applications / firmware / operating system you'll run on it...
Why would you store your data on a slice of plastic with a limited lifetime and which needs all sorts of mechanical contortions to write and read, when a chip can have the writer, the reader, and the IO/display all built into it?
And why would a manufacturer sell you that chip as a piece of hardware when they could sell it to you as a vehicle for leasing you their firmware?
Hey, they'll have you by the short and curlies then, so why wouldn't they do it this way? (As in, your data is now stored in a truly long-lasting medium, but unless you pay your lease fee, the operating system goes West, and with it your data...)
Welcome to Dystopia...
-- ted russ http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/mydynes/ http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/myblogs/
I blogged about the same inevitable trend myself just a month ago.
The format wars are going to fall at the feet of the codec wars. It is obvious, given the cost savings, that the consumer will migrate to the easiest to maintain and cheapest to upgrade system he can get.
If the consumer can drop his receiver, dvd player, dvr, cd player, tape deck, laser disc player, hdvcr player and all the rest of the mess current taking up a wall in his home theater and replace it all with one box that does everything, and is software upgradable (remember that THIS IS SOMETHING WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY TO ROLL OUT TOMORROW!) he will do so.
The new hub will be a media PC, esentially (though not really like the ones you see now). Give people this option, and they will go for it in a heartbeat.
The problem is that we have competing standards for streaming/downloading media. That needs to change, but doesn't look like it will for a while.
The real question isn't "Is Bill Gates right?" but rather "How can we get Linux to fill a niche in this new media economy?"
So, do you know any open source groups pushing for a standardization of the online media purchasing commerce? If not, we need to ask ourselves why not? This is gonna be HUGE, and it would sure be nice if I didn't need to have specific hardware or software to buy somthing from iTunes, for example. There should be a standard client protocol that I can connect to any standards compliant eStore with and browse/purchase media.
-Tom
I think in order for video on demand to become widely available, you need far faster broadband Internet access than you have now. Even with the current DiVX codec, a two hour movie runs into the 650-800 MB file size, a fairly daunting task even for today's 1.5 to 3.0 megabit per second cable Internet systems.
But by 2010, you'll see broadband Internet with true direct access to fiber optic connections available on a wide scale, with speeds at least in the 60 megabit per second range, with 100-plus megabit per second speeds available for users willing to pay premium prices. At these speeds, you'll download data between 8-16 megabytes per second, fast enough to download multiple shows at high quality onto your multimedia center hard drive (which by then would be well over one terabyte in size) in about 30 minutes! =)
Gates will be obsolete in 3 years.
so with my 2TB drive, i'm expeced to backup at max 20GB at a time?
do you know how long it'll take to backup all my porn at that rate?!!
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
Okay, barring his reasoning, is it really bold to say DVD's will be obsolete in 10 years? Given the way technology changes, it probably should be. Then again, we still have floppies.
1980's
Bill G: 640k ought to be enough for anybody.
2004:
Bill G: In 10 years, 4.7 GB won't be enough for anybody.
Thing is, this time around I think he's more likely to be right.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm only half way there...
DVD will be obsolete in two or three years, not ten. CD's been obsolete for at least ten; they're still in use. 3.5 inch 1.44 meg floppies have been obsolete for twenty, but they're still on there. Hell, damn near every technology in a computer is 'obsolete;' doesn't mean they're not still in use.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
....and what about the time/expense required to transfer old to new media? in my experience, most people don't bother converting their old videos to recordable dvd...they just keep their old videos and old player...
DVDs (in one format or another) aren't gonna go away anytime soon.
Not everyone has or can get broadband. There's no chance of broadband at the summer cottage. There's no broadband available in my car as I'm driving cross country. Yet, at the cottage, I can have a TV and DVD player, and in the car I can get an LCD/DVD player to occupy the kids as I'm driving.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
The people will continue to use DVD as they are still using Betamax tapes. I predict in 10 years There will be no more windows media player and internet explorer, that's for sure
He may be right that we see the death of DVD in ten years. I can see it too:
* Studios shift all home video to super-protected HDTV DVD.
* Consumers dislike restrictions placed on HDTV DVD's, format tanks.
* As there are no new movies on DVD - DVD is dead.
But not in a good way....
On the other hand people seem to have lived with DVD restrictions, so perhaps they'll be fine with future limitations. Though stuff like HDCP might make some people rather angry as older expensive stuff fails to work with the new standard.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The concept of optical storage is not going to die anytime soon - and the disks (VCD to DVD) are an ideal way to use it . We might be using quarter inch thick , non rotating crystal cubes in 2014 , but it'll still be optical storage - but we won't be going online on a congested network to get it when we feel like. Imagine waiting 5 minutes for your favourite pr0n flick to load up - you'll almost be done by then :)
Microsoft grew up on the desktop by defying the "Network is the computer" and bringing it to the induvidual "PC". This is just Microsoft admitting they were perhaps wrong :)
Do not underestimate the bandwidth of a concorde full of DVDs
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I have already ditched burning CDs / Buying DVDs. I only buy DVDs when I want some extras that are non-downloadable or when I want to support a good movie (like Michael Moores). (I believe I spend as much money as ever on buying DVDs though, even if that is not the way I "consume" movies/series)
;)
I download everything via bittorrent (series, movies, etc) - and store on a few big harddrives. (this also makes it possible for me to see several hundreds of movies and tens of series every year - something I could not possibly afford normally) Harddrives are now nearly as cheap as burning cdroms per MB - and they dont break as easily as cdroms. The cds also take up more space and movies on harddrives are always accessable and easily categorized.
Movies in DivX and music on MP3s stored on harddrives rule cdroms/DVDs ATM. I believe that in the future, this will only be more true. Also the Harddrives might maybe get substituted for streaming over the net (for example, as of today I sometimes stream 1CD or 2CD DivX movies from my server on internet (I have 8 mbit internet)).
So I dont really see why Billy might be all that wrong, he is evil and so, but that does not mean that he is always wrong in everything he says
What the current self-styled video-on-demand suppliers are providing is a very limited choice of stuff to watch. That's not video-on-demand in my book. That's "we'll stream you shit we can make money off because it caters to the lowest common denominator".
Video stores and VHS/DVD rentals give you more "video-on-demand" than what's being offered up now.
With bittorrent, you can also make requests (there's a part of the "demand" in video-on-demand), or see what everyone else finds interesting. Plus you get to see stuff before the "video-on-demand" people can supply it.
Current "video-on-demand" services are a poor substitute for bittorrent and a fast net connection. Which would you rather have?
Now, there's a good idea for a slashdot poll:
Bill was right... Just change "OS/2" to "The parts of OS/2 that we steal from IBM and make into Windows NT"
This could be the case if he were say Sony, but being that he hasnt dominated the entertainment landscape yet and only has the PC OS market I would say his statements are pure speculation.
If this was something he was shooting for then it would be a tough road for Bill and MS, whereas for a company such as Sony they could actually make it happen considering they run every facet of our entertainment lives, TV, electronics, movies, movie studios, gaming platform, toys, etc... if they decided to use a new format it would be much easier than say Microsoft trying to do this.
Boxes of old video tapes (replaced with DVDs), cassettes and LPs (replaced with CDs). Boxes of old 5 1/4 inch and 3 1/2 inch floppies, gathering dust. Think of all the money thrown away on now useless/obsolete media! I for one welcome the day where we don't have to invest in physical media and everything is available on demand.
I still have to buy a DVD-drive and we are in 2004... My computer is up to date but I only have cd-rom drives in it. DVD obsolete in 10 years, give me a break... let me buy them in the first place!
You're missing the point. They're not "on demand" because there's a lag to get them. You might as well say "my collection of videos is on-demand" or "my 20 lbs. desktop has a handle, so it's a portable computer."
He denies ever saying it, and nobody can find any cites to him ever saying it despite the fact that it occured during an interview. Amazing how that happens.
Bill's 6 non-secret predictions for 1998 (also here) (four of which were left over from 1997 because they did not become true) incuded that DSL and DVDs will be big, videoconferencing and net meetings will be big, PC TCO will reduce, and "that people will widely recognize that PC technology can take on any computing task." That last one is killer.
Also, earlier this year a more substantial prediction made by bill is that MS will kill spam in 2 years. I might switch to MS products if this becomes true.
VoD may be the next great thing, and this seems to be what Mr. Gates was hinting at. I cannot speak for the direction the VoD market is going. However, I think that regardless of the state of VoD, DVD's (we we know them) will be going the way of the VHS tape well within 10 years.
When DVD's were introduced, they were lightyears ahead of any other consumer-level media. However, the CRT TV's had changed little in 50 years -- adding color to the mainstream market in the early 60's and introducing incremental changes in quality throughout, such as Sony's Trinitron technology. Still, none of these incremental quality boosts were earth-shattering. Consumer-level CRT's were inherently limited in visual quality.
With the (post-DVD) advent of consumer-land LCD's and Plasma displays, the visual limitations of DVD's are becoming more apparent. High-quality displays show MPEG artifacting that normally wouldn't be seen in older CRT TV's. Furthermore, when compared against HDTV broadcasts, DVD's don't look quite as good as they did next to VHS movies.
The next nail in the coffin is the speed and price of computer technology. DVD players can be had for under $50. The manufacture of cheap DVD players is a reality, partly because of the economies of scale, but also in part, due to our ability to make the IC components in the players cheaper and smaller. We have the technology to make a high definition DVD, using better compression algorithms (both in terms of how much data they can compress, and the overall visual quality of the video) that require greater computing horsepower. This technology can be produced at a cost similar to the current cost of DVD players -- especially after a widespread market adoption over a few years. We are also able to produce players that use a media similar to DVD (optical media sharing the same dimensions and material to its DVD coutnerpart) which have a far greater data density, such as the blue-ray DVD's.
Assuming backwards compatibility with the traditional DVD format, this technology could become viable within 1-2 years. In this case, the obsolescence of the DVD (in its current state) is completely reasonable and foreseeable within 10 years.
-Turkey
..."These things can scratch or simply get lost."...i>
I see Mr Bill doesn't offer us what a substitute medium would be for viewing our movie content. Maybe his words: "simply get lost" are a clue that there will be no medium. That is, it will all be on line and under DRM control. And he is just the man to deliverer it to you for a nominal fee, of course.
> "These things can scratch or simply get lost."
And that is why it is now illegal to make backups of these things.
>TV that will simply show what we want to see, when
>we want to see it.
> When we get home, the home computer will know who
> we are from our voice or our face
I dont watch TV at home. But I might watch a movie on my Linux-laptop on the plane. When does mr Gates predict I can do that without rediculous disks.
Example: in 1987, my house was connected to the Internet via a Telebit 19.2 KB modem. Today, in 2004, it's a 3MB/256KB cable link.
Seventeen years is roughly eleven eighteen-month periods, so if network speeds had kept up with Moore's Law, I would have seen a 2048-fold speedup. Instead, I got a 156-fold speedup (or only 13-fold if you look at upload speed).
Portable physical media will probably always be faster than fetching data via a network.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I for one welcome the end of the CD/DVD optical storage mediums. Compact Flash cards are becoming so cheap, that I hope this is the way to store large quantites of data in the future.
CD/DVD electronics have moving parts. Moving parts mean more wear and tear, which consumes more electricity, which causes premature failures.
You may not like Bill Gates, but I think it's a far cry to imply that you're more intelligent than he is.
Amazing magic tricks
OK.
He isn't preaching to us. He is preaching to the masses. There are more than enough people around here content to NEVER OWN a movie and instead forever rent from BlockBuster or get it on demand from Cable. I suspect there are more of these people than of us.
As for the TV knowing what you want to watch, well it might never know what you really want to watch but TV now does nearly the same thing. How many people do you hear of who have to be home for a certain show or such? TIVO is freeing some from that chain, and if they can have their show on demand, and their viewing habits are tracked, and they will be, they will be watching what they want to watch because that is what by analysis is fed to their TV. Also, who says it has to be ONE program? The TV is just as likely to present you a list of things it knows you watched before and let you choose, hence it "knows" what you want to see.
Nothing magical about his claims. Nothing requiring silly amounts of money. Most if not all is done to today or very closely related.
Too many anti-MS anti-Gates bigots can see anything but hate.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Making a statement about DVD obsolescence is hardly a ground-breaking notion, IMO. And Bill allowing a decade for DVDs to fade is generous, given that the MPAA would most likely love to have it replaced sooner. Copy protection had to be updated soon after the current DVD format went public.
/. are underestimating a lot of what can be pushed through to the general public now. We've already seen the product cycles for different electronics cut in half. And if Bill had his way, all Microsoft software would be distributed via .net services. Discs are too easy to copy.
I think that, not just the parent, but people on
I'm not a conspirist, but R&D for getting rid of tangible mediums is top priority for the major tech players. The companies that provide the simplest solution the quickest stands to profit from it by licensing it to other companies. Video on Demand is just one of the rising techs... MS is going to need software-on-demand if they want to integrate your computer with your living room (like they have been).
Sure, this idea might not be reality now, and it might flop in the next decade as well. But, what kind of statement would it be if Bill said, "You know, I was thinking... DVDs may not be around in the next 20 years." People listen and respond to absolute statements, not guesses.
Why does everyone disagree with Gates? DVD may be cheep and consumers may like it, but it is not going to be around for more then 10 years. The industry is already exploring a switch to HD- DVD, Blue Ray, etc ... and that's probably going to happen. Especially since those media formats look a lot better on an HD TV.
Moreover, it's not to crazy to think that our movies will, in some way or another, come over broadband in a few years. This is how many digital theaters currently acquire their films. It's cheeper (insurance an licensing for film is enormous) and it's significantly more flexible.
Many folks are currently exploring ways for consumers to have movies piped in from their local theaters. Who knows if this will take off or not... but it will probably be an option in a few years.
All in all, wether it is going to be movies via the internet, or movies on newer silver disks, DVD ain't gon'a be around for more then ten years. The movie industry would LOVE for us to re-buy all of the movies that we currently own. Seriously.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
"You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
If anything, it was more forthcoming/honest. Sarcasm would be more like "Of course bill gates is always right! (sarcasm and link)"
Wait a minute... 1 XB of porn implanted directly under my skin? Bill might have something going here...
/*No comment*/ #No comment
The first question I think you should ask yourself is "Is there demand for such a technology", if not, ask yourself the following question "Can I create demand for such a technology".
... I do not allow worm and virus factories in my home). However, they do not offer this service, so on those rare occasions when I wish to see a film I will go where the hundreds of thousands of others who desire video on demand go: bittorrent or one of the other numerous P2P networks.
I would submit that the popularity of movie trading on bittorrent and other P2P technologies, as well as tivo timesharing (and tivo video trading) is an indicator that people do want video on demand.
However, like television, people expect to be able to get video on demand without strings attached (like DRM, or other crippling technologies that force them to jump through hoops).
I for one vastly prefer watching movies on my big screen tv over going to the theater. Just last night I went and saw Farenheit 9/11, and while I was happy to support Micheal Moore and pay for the film, I was not at all happy with the theater. It was a hot day (90+ degrees) and they chose to save money by not air conditioning the lobbies, and by turning the air conditioning off in the theater (after they had reluctantly turned it on in response to complaints about the heat), until I had to get up (missing several minutes of the film) and get them to turn it back on again.
Fuck them, and fuck their industry.
Next time I'll download the movie off the internet and watch it at home, in air conditioned comfort with a glass of nice wine. I would be happy to pay the same price to download the move concurrently with its running in the theaters, or significantly less to download the movie after its theatrical run, provided what I download can be stored and backed up freely, and viewed under my operating system of choice (GNU/Linux or Mac OS X
The demand is demonstrably there. It is the supply that is the problem.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
For music and small files, it's already so fast that for all practical purposes it might as well be "on demand".
10 years from now, when gigabit connections are the norm, it *will* be for almost all stuff.
Already there are parts of the world where 100mbit connections are the norm locally. In my own area, there are parts of town that have fiber-to-the-curb and you can sign up for 100mbps.
Please say "compact disc." Throwing the K in there makes it look too much like "compact dick," which makes people uncomfortable.
Maybe if I come out and make a retarded, inconsequential, happy technology statement, people will ignore all the bad press about the severe security holes in my products that have been uncovered in the last week.
Maybe the 'visionary' should spend more time envisioning a secure MS product that doesn't shop credit card numbers to Russia every few weeks.
- Have you ever noticed that the more you learn about technology, the more stupid you sound trying to explain it?
> Today, people are amazed to see anything application whose .exe file is less than that.
Wadya mean? I've got this executable that came with my copy of Win XP right here that's *way* smaller than 640K: ftp.exe weighs in at only 40KB.
Or do you mean any application Microsoft wrote?
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Bill Gates can basically say what he likes, what he says goes, after all with his control over the hardware and software industry if he decides to obsolete DVD in his operating system well thats his decision. Windows users will continue to follow whatever he dictates like sheep as they always have. Im sure the DRM people and MPAA/RIAA folks would welcome another media format to flog us. In addition DRM is perhaps another reason why DVD may become obsolete; everyone will rip them to *chosen drm free format*
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
...that Ballmer's hair is obsolete already!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It's not video on demand, period, unless it has two features which tend to be missing from bt. The first one I have actually seen in some clients: Up-prioritize the blocks at the beginning first. The second one is missing: Work with the video player, and retrieve blocks which are needed to continue the stream from some place you have skipped to immediately.
If you combined bt with (for example) vlc you might be able to make a vod system from bt. But what you are describing is not vod, it's video-after-demand.
Given that there are some video on demand systems which serve up DVD quality (or near it) video and which support jumping to time points in the stream and such, I'd say that bittorrent is a pretty pathetic substitute for video on demand.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think Mr. Gates is stating what he would like the future of video to become rather than what it actually will be. He desperately wants to insert Micro$oft software between you and your favorite movie. You don't need him to run you rcurrent DVD but you might in his murky world of on demand TV. Microsoft desperately needs a new avenue of growth. Problem is nobody is suckered by Micro$oft's vile tactics anymore. There will be a successor to DVD. Don't expect Microsoft to play a leading role.
an ill wind that blows no good
My TV's resolution is already much better than what the DVD can show.
Besides, MPAA wants to sell you the Godfather again on a new format.
My last IDE drive purchase was last month - 250GB IDE for $169 (CompUSA, instant rebate.) This is about $0.68 per GB, compared with a marginal cost of about $0.25 for DVD (4.6GB variety).
But look at my hard drive purchase history:ACG is the "Annual Compound Growth" in my sample - the rate at which the GB/$ is growing annually.
Assuming an annual growth of just 1.50 (50%) is maintained, in ten years $150 will buy a 10TB drive. That's over 1000 9GB DVDs.
I think that to assume ANY storage technology currently in use today will still be in use in 10 years is a bad assumption. My analysis is therefore flawed as well; for $150 we'll probably be able to buy 100TB of ultra-fast holographic or biomechanical memory in ten years.
In ten years, the only people buying IDE drives will be the Amiga enthusiasts.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
for a reason.
Back in 1992--4 (memory is hazy) when Gates was predicting the demise of the Internet, he said that he liked to take a pile of CD-ROMs with him for weekends in the country. He said that you could never do that with the Internet. He also said he was buying up content, such as a famous photo archive (Bettman?) and rights to lots of famous paintings (all of them, I think).
Years later, he's realized he can only charge you once for those artifacts. That's all. If he can charge you every time you get home and the computer turns itself on (because it's detected you're there and you're current on your M$ payments), he's a little better off. That's all.
... that WMD is pretty funny!
He's the richest man on earth!
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
I have to agree the DVD will be replaced by something - because there is a technology that effectively replaces cheap media: other cheap media, that does more.
It's unlikely any DVRW/CDRW technology will ever be truly rewritable. But as USB thumb drives increase in size and Hard Drive sizes shrink to meet MP3 player and cell phone demand, they'll be fully rewritable, smaller media than DVDs or CDs - why use anything else?
In a few years the one advantage DVDs will have over hard drives and flash memory will be the complication of copying them, which is ideal for companies trying to sell their content. This advantage will be made obsolete by 2 things:
Larger optical media, which has been mentioned here several times already.
A more effective copy protection system that works over the Internet; this same copy protection system could be used just as well for the content on any physical media, leaving the physical complications of copying it negligible.
That CowboyNeil guy keeps hogging the remote and he's always watching those sappy chick flicks.
The Farewell Tour II
Sort of like if you come over to my house and I go "bitch, go bake me a pie" and you go bake me a pie. Just because it took time to make doesn't mean you didn't bake me a pie when I demanded it.
The Farewell Tour II
IMHO, will be a pricing scheme of a)paying for the basic service, and b)paying for every individual show you watch... ...same will most likely hold true of radio.
hopefully there at least won't be any commercials, but I'm not holding my breath.
As this post claims, I would have to disagree with the world's richest man and say that compact disk media is here to stay for a while because there is just no substitute for a media that cost cents.
Is the submitter serious? In 10 years, compact disk media won't be around at all. I agree with Gates on this one (nice jealous quip about the "world's richest man").
Yeah, and he also said we wouldn't need more than 640k.
No, he didn't. He never said that. He denies it to this day, and I dare anyone to actually cite where he said this. Besides, back when he was supposed to have said it, 640k was enough for anybody.
Is that paid or free registration? If it's free, there's always Bug-Me-Not on Mozilla and Firefox.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
In my opinion, the DVD IS indeed doomed sooner rather than later, mostly because the content owners have become disillusioned with what they believed would be copy-proof tech. So they are looking for the next one, which they can control better. It should also hold high-definition media, meaning an increase in the amount of data, delaying the copying/sharing-problems a couple of years. Thus the war between consumers and content owners continues.
This little tech might be a candidate, and has an interesting conspiracy theory already attached: "FMD/DMD-The Next Step in Storage" (middle of page in issue 197).
--A Polar bear is a Rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.
I'll be amazing, too!
I predict 2 megapixel camers will be obsolete in 10 years!
I predict the Playstation 2 will be obsolete in 10 years!
I predict the G5 processor will be obsolete in 10 years.
I predict vacuum tube based difference engines will be obsolete in 10 years!
I predict ideology and politics and religion will be obsolete in 10 years!
Ah, that last one is a trick prediction. Ideology, politics and religion were obsolete the moment fire was discovered. Sadly, it doesn't stop people from continuing to embrace them.
--- Ban humanity.
-640K is enough for anyone. (that one was easy) -This Internet thing is a fad. -No one will want to look at a man stretching his bottom wide open. -Internet is not mentioned in his book "road ahead"(1996) which predicts what's ahead. -People would be using tabletpc instead of portables right now according to him
A few things to consider are the vast sweeping changes that can happen in 10 years. Personal Computers, nay, computers at all, are very little like what they were ten years ago. The two things that will decide if this prediction is correct will be the way we store things, and the things we store.
Looking at the time, 10 years doesn't seem too long to expect a shift in technology. Consider the floppy. Very popular 10 years ago. Hell, 10 years ago CD-ROM drives weren't even guaranteed in most systems, so floppies were the assumed portable storage. Currently CD-ROM is assumed, and DVD is becoming so. I find it easy to purchase systems without floppies. To speclate that the DVD may be replaced in 10 years is not so far fetched.
The acceleration of advancing technology will probably decide whether the media of DVD is sound enough technology. The write-once, or at least write-more-finite-times-than-magnetic-media aspects of any optical media will lead to their demise before their size, is my personal prediction. Scratching, warping, and other physical weakness of the media seem to be pretty reasonable reasons to not use them forever. While I don't think they'll go away in ten years (my computer store still sells 3.5-inch floppies), they won't last forever (I cannot, however purchase a 5.25-inch floppy off the shelf).
The size of the things we store continues to grow, but that doesn't seem to be growing as fast. The sampling of sound hasn't increased the size of storage required since the introduction of the CD (in fact, thanks to compression like MP3, it's smaller), but higher-quality video has become common. What you type will rarely fill the media, but what data you generate probably can. For example, backing up other media (like your HDD) onto inexpensive optical is very common, so this might drive a larger solution. Like CDs can store multiple tunes or albums(heck, to the hundreds of tunes and many albums with MP3 compression), video storage of the future may store much more than we live with now; entire seasons or runs of television, all of the series of movies or actor's lines, every home video you've ever produced...
Not that you care, but personally, I use flash media now for most of my portable storage. It's virtually indestructable (in everyday, carry it in my pocket use). It's pretty spacious; my current 256MB USB drive is capable of holding practically my entire working environment (OS not included, but data and editors are), and larger drives are available when this no longer suffices. They're not as cheap, I'll grant you, but I got it on sale for less than a stack of CDRWs, and I've written to it more times than I could have a similar priced stack of DVD write-onces. While not replacing DVDs yet, I'll argue that these flash media are reasonable replacements for CDs; it's conceivable that a small shift in the technology or manufacture and this could replace DVDs in size, too.
I use an external HDD for the backup of my main system's HDD. Well, in reality, I typically back up all important data across multiple HDDs--either on drive sets in RAID, separate systems or servers, or both. Again, not as cheap, but faster and rewritable to a much larger degree (lots of billions of rewrites versus thousands or millions).
End the FUD
Who should be supported in their vision of the future: Bill Gates or the RIAA?
that's what I do for a living. unfortunately only porn producers are currently willing to sell their videos this way.
Oh well, if an Anonymous Coward says so, it must be true!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This guy is losing his mind. I truly wonder how this guy can be a "leader" in technology when he has no idea where the technology is at or where it's going.
DVDs aren't going away. People like to buy and own a physical good. If you like a movie, do you buy the movie or keep renting it? Video-on-demand is just another way of "renting" a movie albeit without the physical object. This idiot is so enamored with subscription service that he thinks people are willing to keep paying money for no other reason than sustaining his business. Price has nothing to do with it either. Watch how many people buys DVDs instead of renting it at 20% of the MSRPs.
Not to mention that DVDs are just becoming a great media for recording videos at high quality. DVD technology is getting better and better as evidenced by the new dual-layer DVD-R format and will continue to improve with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD. 8 years after the introduction of DVD, VHS still lives and we are talking a significant improvement in quality here.
There are some things in technology that change at rapid pace, but there are things that move glacially (thank God - I don't want to replace my collections every 3 years).
It's easy to create .NET programs that are less than 35k. (Please pay no attention to those monsterous .NET DLLs and ignore the ram-suck sound as they load! ;)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If you had the choice, which would you prefer?
And once gigabit dsl becomes widespread, downloading the whole movie would only take a minute or too, anyway.
the contention is not that no one will be using DVD's, only that such technology would be obsolete. There is a market today for VHS tapes. However, VHS tapes are obsolete. As far as rural areas go, I would not be surprised to see a broadbrand program that mirrors rural electrification of yesteryear, as the information and opportunities offered by the internet rises in value much higher than cable tv.
Valete!
All that Mr. Gates has described is marrying TiVo with artificial intelligence, which is already feasible. In fact, Mr. Gates already has AI installed in his mansion to play music, display artwork on screens, and select appropriate television programs individually catered to the tastes of whoever is in the room. It's easy to predict the next big thing when you are the richest man in the world and you already have one.
Mr. Gates, DVD's are already obsolete, unless you want to watch something that's not on television. However, there is still a niche market for collector's items that will be difficult to fill with the technology that Mr. Gates describes. And what do you do when you can't get re-runs of a particular program such as B5 any other way but by buying it?
Mathematics is not a crime.
Actually, according to your link, he claims he didn't say it.
But the author in your link leaves open the possibility that he may have said it and then lists a bunch of facts that would have, at the time, made the statement appear reasonable.
Whether he said it or not is irrelevant to me. He is a terrible prognosticator on other issues related to technology. The only reason he is cited in tech-related articles is because his business has been successful, not because his technology has been superior.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
This kind of statements show Microsoft culture very well. They make predictions of glamorous future while ignoring the reality of today. It happens all the time. Maybe Bill should care more about his products people buy today instead of what people may buy 10 years from now. The future won't be much anyway when Microsoft puts out crappy products.
...He DID say DVD's specifically will be obsolete. That's not an outlandish statement, and I agree that there will be technology that will be smaller, faster, of a larger capacity and more convenient than DVD's ever were in 2013. Why is that so inconceiveable?
Think about it... Where is Technology going to be in another 10 years....
Think about how cheap disk space has become....
Think about how mp3's have changed the way you listen to music....
I don't like Big Bill as much as the next guy...
But so what if the DVD is outdated in 10 years....
10Mbps for $100/month sounds achievable for bursty usage like web browsing, but a) way more screen-hours (orders of magnitude?) are spent watching television than web browsing; and b) the throughput per screen requirements are way higher.
Scale that connection up to 10-15MBps per television set, at an average of 1-1.5 sets per household active during primetime, and I think Comcast's infrastructure in my town would melt. (Figuratively.) I am not an expert on network infrastructure, but I think a lot of hardware and fiber is called for before it can happen, and when the cost of that gets folded into my cable bill, Netflix is going to look pretty good.
Wunerful ! Just in time for LONGHORN then ! *8-11-2-trunk*
Gates is smoking the bad stuff. DVDs dead in 10 years--not. They are just NOW coming into their own. Will I be pushed all this content to my wireless notebook by mind reading computers while I'm waiting for a flight? Based on what? My RFID luggage tags? The airport computer is going to know what I want to watch? I hope all the other passengers want to watch the same stupid shit because it's going to take one hell of a streaming server to satisfy all of our disparate tastes.
BTW--I spent over an hour updating WIN XP with triple-nested updates that demanded other frigging updates. Why doesn't our Chief SW Architect take a look at that problem B4 he blabbers on about technology that M$ didn't build and has only VERY recently begun to embrace.
see starz.com for details.
i was kinda wondering if it was any good. think i might do the trial today.
I cant remember which episode but Homer goes to the dump, he walks past a pile of records marked "Vinyl", a pile of tapes marked "Betamax "and the last one is a space for a pile with the sign DVDs above it.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
He wants to sell software, and DRM is the one 'feature' that closed-source software has over the open-source alternative.
Billy Boy is a capitalist. He wants to own a) the means of production and b) the means of distribution of AV media.
He doesn't want to share any of either. He really does believe that Microsoft deserves 100% ownership of both.
He will talk down CDs and DVDs not because he has a better alternative but because they are currently independent and do not rely exclusively on any MS product.
Of course, the studios won't like that, but I'm sure the studios and distributors can develop an appropriate pricing scheme. But the infrastructure is already there. Imagine a world where the TV does have video on demand (which it does), but is also connected to a content provider that allows me to download a disc image if I want a hard copy.
Comcast is having "issues" with dropouts all over the place. I have them periodically myself, and it's pretty damned annoying.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually I'd like a bt-based vod system with the specific enhancements I'm discussing. We could have p2p vod! We're close now, there's not that much that has to be implemented to get there. Plus, such a system would be well-suited to a mesh network :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Bill is wishing for digital "On-Demand" video.
He's a scratcher.
You know the type.
You pick up a CD/DVD of theirs off of the stack on top of their TV and notice that every single damn disc has a scratch on it.
You put it in to play/listen - it starts to skip and they're like, "Oh weird, how'd that happen?"
The worst is the scratcher-friends who craftily ask to borrow your favorite CD/DVD. (Because all of theirs are unwatch/unlistenable)
So, you're all like "sure!"
You get it back after 2 months after bugging them for weeks about it and you open up the case to find . . . SCRATCHES ALL OVER THE DAMN DISC.
And you call them on it - and they say "What? I didn't put those there! It must've been like that when you gave it to me."
Even if you obsessively carefully handle your discs, put them away when you're done and never abentmind-edly store stacks of them on sandpaper.
THEY get offended?!
Do these people have no respect for personal property?
The secret, Bill, is to just put things away when you're done with them.
Either that, or someone will invent un-scratchable coatings, which I find far more likely in the next 10 years.
The problem with video on demand is that the infrastructure is not widely deployed. Most tvs don't support any of the digital tv standards so you need a settopbox. The situation is different from country to country with many local monopolists competing (i.e. you don't have much choice in selecting cable operators). The network quality is mediocre at best with unpredictable bandwidth, latency and availability. You need uninterrupted downstream bandwidth of at least a few megabits per second for good quality video.
I agree with Bill Gates that this is going to be different in ten years. By then most homes will have some form of broadband, mobile telephone networks will have been deployed that support broadband services. In other words, pretty much anywhere you go there will be some form of broadband that is good enough for high quality streaming video.
Then it is just a matter of offering the content and using the bandwidth. However, before that happens a number of legal issues will need to be resolved. Also there will need to be some standards (as in not owned by Microsoft or any other company). And finally the media companies will need to get involved. All that can happen in ten years but I don't see much happening yet.
The media companies are still clutching to their existing revenue streams. At the same time they seem to be only frustrating attempts to move beyond physisical media. It took a company like Apple to convince the whole industry that online content is a viable revenue stream and that was only this year. The same could happen for other content then audio in a few years.
Given open, widely supported standards and given the wide availability of networks this could happen. The latter is on schedule to being solved be 2014. However, ten years is a very short time to change an industry that depends on proprietary, closed standards.
Jilles
Warren Lieberfarb predicts Bill Gates will be obsolete in 10 years.
If you forget about the future, the future will forget about you.
Today, people are amazed to see anything application whose .exe file is less than that.
:-)
iexplore.exe is 89 KB.
wmplayer.exe is 72 KB.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Well, here is one theory . Seriously, maybe Microsoft has plans to get into the media production industry within the next 10 years. Maybe they, or Bill himself, already owns chunks of big media companies. So it might be safe to say that TODAY Microsoft doesn't produce movies or music, but in 10 years....
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
To me, the math is simple: local storage will always have an advantage over real-time transmission from a central repository, especially as the demand on bandwidth grows. The notion of the network delivering increasingly high-quality content in real time to every possible endpoint is absurd; the cost of the infrastructure to support the bandwidth will be prohibitive.
I don't. I think having a "local" repository, local in the sense that is serves the city and surroundings, could be rather cost-effective. It is the long-haul lines that are cost-prohibitive, like providing Internet access (where you in some form pay for shipping your packets halfway around the world and back).
Take a look at e.g. a University campus. You could easily serve 10.000+ people over the network from one repository, and I don't think it'd be any more of a strain than P2P is now. 10.000 people * 10gb movie collection each? Oh, there's definately better economics in centralizing that.
The big showshopper is to split the pie. The network owners are the only ones capable of offering the service, the content owners are the only ones capable of offering that specific content. End result? No service, nobody earns anything, massive pirating. Oh well...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Makes you wonder if he just makes a lot of predictions with the hope that one will be right and he will get credit for it in the future.
He makes all of these predictions, and when they are proven false later on, he denies ever saying anything or claims that the quote is out of context. I guess he feels he has nothing to lose, since he can deny anything that is wrong, but take credit for correct predictions if he ever guesses correctly. If nothing else it gets him more publicity when it is in the news and then gets forgotten soon after.
Break the mindless monotony!
Well, he's evidently lobbying for the new HD-DVD standard. Good news, the codec that will be used is not proprietary. :D
So now each show/movie effectively becomes its own channel. So will we have to revise that familar complaint about cable TV? :-)
There have been some research going on, about using crystal like material to store data. Similar to the one seen in Superman & Minority Report movies. It does make sence to store data in 3D, because you can fit more data in 3D object than 2D object. If people think about it, today's harddrive have more than one platter, and in a way it's 3D. Moving away from 2D storage is a good idea. I personally think 3D removable storage base, will come in before 2014(10 years from now), possibly around 2010. But to say that DVD will be obsolete is pretty far-fetch, unless Gates wasn't including Blue-Ray as DVD Technology. The problem w/ non-disc base medium is, the possibly more expensive to produce, and that's the main reason Y the disc-base storage is going to stay.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- If picture worth a thousand words, how many megapixels is it? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
What about Blu-Ray or a technology similar. It seems logical to me that if HDTV ever takes off (which it probably will) then people will want a technology that wil allow them to watch movies at the same resolution as their TV.
I hope we go back to magnetic tape...like some sort of jesusesq resurrection....its gonna be sweet.
Didn't he say that the internet would never become popular outside the scientific community?
You are true genius Mr. Gates!
That's storage space, and I believe the quote was referring to RAM. Load up IE or WMP and see if their RAM usage is less than 640K while in use.
...the difference between making a perfect copy and a "sufficient" copy. You may have your 100gb movie, but I predict a dual layer DVD (8-9gb) in XviD format is sufficient. Kinda like how CDs are the perfect copy, yet mp3 is "sufficient".
The RIAA may stay ahead of what is privately available formats, but they can not escape the fact that the mediums we already possess are big enough. Whether theirs are 2x or 5x the size compared to ours, has less and less importance.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As my parent poster said it goes back to the problem of bandwidth, I have a feeling the current VOD system pushes their networks envelope. HDTV is roughly 18MBit/sec, not likely going to see that delivered on demand anytime soon but some sort of caching as my parent poster was describing could alleviate some of it.
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
Cds are being replaced by mp3s, internet downloads are replacing music stores, and large harddrives are replacing cd libaries (I just threw out 300 music cd cases becuase they were taking up too much room).
10 years ago my "large" hard drive was 500 meg. 11 years my new notebook had a 100meg HD.
My home HD at the momenet is 80gig.
What will hard drives be like in 10 years? What about downloads speeds?
DVDs are already low res, I would much rather watch the same show via an HDTV channel. I'm already recording normal TV using Tivo.
Its just a matter of time before network speeds improve (again), and HD drives get to the point where you can just download and watch any movie in HighDef.
Sure, DVDs will always be around. I still have an 8 track tape or two. But, I stopped using CDs long time ago, I just burned them all to mp3s. Taking out discs and handling them takes too much time.
Last night I watched the Abyss on cable, my wife pointed out that we have it on DVD (along with 600 other movies). Even though DVD quality is better than normal TV + Tivo, its just easy to user the remote to change the channel and watch it.
There are already consumer portible "Tivos" now. So you can use an ipod like device for your movies. Sonys new hand held is designed for displaying movies.
How long before you can carry around 500 movies around with you in your pocket?
DVDs will be "old" within just a few years.
In 10 years, DVDs will be as "akward" as cds are now.
bt is a pretty poor choice for this overall. It's designed for swarming popular files, and the more popular the file, the better it works.
If you want to demand an episode of Pinwheel, though, you better hope theres at least one other retro kids' tv addict out there or you'll be without seeds, and no video on or after your demand.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
DVD's may be out for sure but having data recorded on the atomic level will increase total media sizes beyond what we can dream of. So as Gates is aware, with so much data out there search and discovery tools will be big business. In the future the recordings, files, data will be out there but those business that are able to find it will be winners. I am betting Gates will be a winner.
There was a recent Simpsons episode where Homer goes to the dump and walk by an area marked "Laserdiscs" which was filled with them, and one that said "DVDs" which was empty. I just thought this was quite appropriate.
HD is either 720 or 1080 horizontal lines of resolution, coupled with the 16:9 ratio makes it more than 4x the resolution of the current DVD's. A you do NOT need a "special" room for that. Just get a 51" HDTV display and play a DVD and watch an HDTV broadcast back-to-back. There is simply no comparison. HDTV is so crisp, so vibrant that it makes the DVD look like a VHS tape.
So, for any HDTV display right now, DVDs are *not* good enough. HDTV is just that good.
10 years ago I said the same thing about the floppy, and It doesn't look like magnetic media will be disappearing soon. Once these technologies reach critical mass, there's a huge legacy following that makes them hard to get rid of. Look how many people still use VHS. It may come in a smaller disk or a higher capacity format, but optical media isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
As I remember it, the architecture for the IBM Personal Computer was already defined when Microsoft became involved.
When the PC was introduced I had a Z-80 based system with 64K memory and the CP/M operating system, so 640K was a huge increase in memory size.
For a nice date: Call strftime(3C)!
This is all about control. With physical media, the user can control what is done with it. The DRM/copy-protection on discs can't stop anyone, and so any attempts to manage the end users' rights fail, because the end users can circumvent the restrictions. If the people who own the copyrights abuse their customers with them, the customers have the ability to screw the copyright owners back, by distributing their works. Even non-physical works can be controlled, because computers can store the data until it can be broken, or can simply store the unencrypted stream - physical media make it easier, and allow users to store and keep content that its providers don't want kept.
/. favorite copyright-/monopoly-protecting organizations, Hardware DRM prevents users from storing or manipulating digital works, and thus prevents users from being able to do anything with content that its providers don't want done. The problem with this fantasy is users want to control the content they pay for - that's why DIVX went down in a ball of flame. Users don't want to be forced to sit through commercials, to pay to watch movies they "own", to be forced to listen to what music companies say they should listen to. Physical media allow users to exercise the rights that they fought for and desire. The movement away from physical media and towards hardware DRM is the content providers' attempt to reassert control over their works and to enforce their pricing schemes.
MS desires DRM (particularly hardware DRM), as do many of
This is just another attempt for the people that sell content to tell people what they want and force-feed it to them, rather than selling what their customers want. I hope that the market will greet them with the silence (and the lack of sales) that their contempt deserves.
I agree that the bandwidth is just too high for VOD for the whole nation/world, plus, for many people, such as myself, I prefer to own the movie and watch it anytime I want.
So what I can see happening is something similar to how we purchase music now. You purchase a movie, and as bandwidth allows, it'll get downloaded to your DVR, which you can optionally burned to a blank DVD. (limit 1 DVD) You'll get a message along the lines of: "The movie you selected will be available in 42 minutes, if purchased, you may start watching it at that time"
In this model, you can pre-purchase the latest blockbuster and as it comes out to DVD, your copy will appear on your DVR, ready to be viewed or burned to DVD. Maybe they'll even have an optional printer for printing the cover for the DVD case.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
That's what we keep saying about the floppy...
The only folks around my office that use tablet PC's are the Microsoft Consultants.
Oh wait, that's already happened. Nevermind.
I don't think most people will care about DRM, either. But they will care if they can't watch their shows without sitting through moronic commercials that they can't skip (when they can remember being able to decide being able to do precisely that) or when they can't watch it more than a week later. These are the characteristics of the digital broadcast flag that TV fought for. While nonphysical DVD replacements might provide lots of convenience, it's more likely that their producers will use them to support broken business models, giving consumers less for their money than before.
Consumers won't care if content is DRMd, until they find that it denies them what they want and handcuffs them to something they don't. Content producers desire DRM so that they can sell what they want, rather than what the public actually wants - copyright infringement comes into play because customers weren't getting what they wanted for what they wanted to pay from content providers. There's no reason to expect that content providers with ironclad DRM will be any more respectful of their customers' desires than they are now, and if that's the case what they sell later won't be as attractive as what people have now - it will cost more and be more restrictive. At that point, people will care - either they'll get angry, or find new ways to infringe copyright, neither of which bodes well for the people selling DRM.
people said the same thing about Video CDs and Laser Discs, that nothing could replace them. Then came along the DVD, using newer technology. In ten years, imagine a new disc that cost pennies to make and stores more than a DVD?
;)
Or imagine you can download videos after paying for them on the Internet for less than the cost of a DVD and every media device in your house is Internet ready and your PC or router acts as a server using streaming video and audio to serve up video and audio to those devices. I believe Apple has a new Airport device that can play audio files to a stereo remotely that have been downloaded with iTunes. Imagine iMovies or iFilms from Apple to download movies or TV shows for $5USD a pop using the same technology as iTunes? Using a DVD burner you can make up to 5 copies, and using Quicktime streaming video your Airport device or PC or Mac can act as a server to a TiVO or other DVR device, or perhaps the AUX port of a TV, VCR, or other media device?
Since Gates said it, I imagine Microsoft has a plan to offer a cheaper than DVD technology in the next ten years. Perhaps their own media distribution company, seeing how profitable iTunes is and MS has the money to make deals with the Film and TV industry to use his video and audio formats. DMCA friendly, of course.
Apparently files are cheaper to distrubute than DVDs, just ask any Internet Video Pirate.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Either they will open source everything or the reality will ruin their bussiness very soon.
Predicting the decline of any massively popular media is ignorant. We still have tapes. Hell, vinyl is making a resurgance! You can still get reel-to-reel tape too.
Chris Knight is my hero.
Hey, leave my Osborne 1 out of this.
Have you seen this [apple.com]?
;) This would make it all too easy to do that.
Just this week I found a product called Kaleidescape. It seems to be the equivalent of storing all your CDs on your hard drive in iTunes. It's super expensive, but looks very cool. You just load your dvds into the reader and it burns it to the HD. You then put a networked player in every room and play any DVD at any time. The thing is, it seems like it would promote piracy. Why buy a dvd when you can just rent it from Blockbuster and load it to your system?
Here's a review on that system. (Scroll down.)
You want a sig? I can get you a sig... Hell, I can get you a sig by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish.
So, "Is there demand for such a technology?" Yes!
"Billy G here. I own about half of everything, but I want to own more! I was counting money this morning and realized something: I can't make much, if anything, off the current DVD movie rental and ownership scenario.
"So, I have a proposal. Let's transfer movie rental and ownership onto a platform where I can sell my distribution method and DRM, not to mention my computers, software and/or servers. It'll all be buggy and insecure and either strongarm or ignore whatever standards are in place, but you tolerate it now so I'm betting you'll tolerate it later.
"Anyway, I just wanted to speak up in hopes of planting a seed that will influence this market in my favor for the long haul. You guys listen to almost everything I say, anyway.
"Have a good one! I have to go find a company that's doing a better job than we are to purchase."
Of course, Steve Jobs has his problems too. OS X is arguably the best OS on the planet. But his obsession with products that look "cool" is just as irritating. People like dull, inexpensive, boxy towers with lots of slots because they regard a computer as a tool and that gives them the best value. They no more want their computer to come in wild colors and odd shapes than they want a hammer that's odd looking.
In short, both Gates and Jobs have a problem with listening. Gate's wants to dictate how our software works, contrary to our wishes. Apple listens carefully about what we want in software but ignores our hardware wishes.
The latter is the primary reason why Apple's share of the computer hardware market is a mere 2.8% and declining. My Mac is almost eight years old, and I'd love to upgrade. The PC market is filled with hardware I like, but Apple makes nothing worth the cost and hassle of an upgrade.
--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle
I just listened to "The Road Ahead" a little while back (the revised 1998 edition)... Gates mentioned several schemes for legally acquiring music online, and NONE of them were as simple as this:
$.99 a song, you pretty much own it.
Oh no! Bill had a dozen schemes, pay per month, maybe you pay a small amount each time you LISTEN to the song, etc... But it ALWAYS involved a continuous pay cycle. That's just stupid. So much for his powers of future observation...
Was it really such a simple thing for iTunes to be so effective? Yep! The jury is back with their verdict: we want to OWN our media (in that we want it when we want it after paying only once).
My wife will give up her $10,000+ DVD collection when you pry it from her cold hands...
did you win a free ipod? build a case for it here
As an archive device for computers DVDs and CDs will be replaced by devices with higher capacity. Eventually rotating media will be obsolete and other means of reading/writing will be developed.
As a means of delivering music and video SOMETHING will be around for those that want to have a 'hard' copy. I don't think music and video stores will be obsolete anytime soon, though we will have other options.
On line delivery via broadband could replace video rental. Digital cable via broadband with on demand download would become the 'block buster video' of the future. No need to actually save the content at the site of delivery, with bandwidth to burn the server would be your store. You might pay per view, or perhaps an unlimited per month charge just like for cable and ISP.
Also its possible that not everyone will have broadband in the future, it may never be available for mobile, extreme rural etc.
Yeah, right. That's what they told us a few years ago in order to get all that free bandwidth. We need the subsidy to convert to HDTV so we'll be ahead of evil foreign competition (there's an oxymoron for you: "subsidized capitalism").
Yawn. I predict BILL GATES will become obsolete long before DVDs (Oh, wait, it's already happened)...
The fact is people like to be able to archive data in a tangible format, but they will demand increased efficiency, especially as file sizes increase over time.
Hence Holographic Data Storage, dramatically increasing the data per square, or in this case cubic inch of medium, while possibly (as technology improves) still providing an inexpensive easy to store medium.
And quite frankly, I think our new robot overlords wouldn't settle for anything less.
As data storage/volume ratio increases, so does the throughput of the memory BUS that is the human race.... Gotta love all that legacy hardware.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
DVDs, as well as every storage medium, will be obsolete because everythin will be in a pay-per-view, pay-per-listen, or pay-peruse format. of course, that's what you stupid libertarian/republican dog-eat-dog/survival-of-the-fittest jerks want because you think the poor should have absolutely nothing.
It will also depend on whether the streamed video source is on Comcast's local (typically metropolitan area) network or not. For cable companies, connections to the backbone are usually sized at roughly 20-50 Kbps (yes, kilobits) per subscriber -- if they have 50,000 high-speed data subs, the backbone connection will be between 1 and 2.5 Gbps. At 3 Mbps per stream, 1 Gbps is sufficient to support 333 simultaneous users -- less than 1% of the high-speed data subs. Some forecasts for conventional video-on-demand have peak-load estimates (simultaneous use) as high as 25% of digital video subscribers. If VOD over cable modem achieved even a fraction of that level, the data service would go to hell quickly. Long before the problem reaches that point, expect to see the cable companies impose monthly limits on bit volumes received, with hefty fees added to the bill for repeated violations.
Depending on the local cable plant, that level of conventional VOD may or may not be a problem. The company I worked for (before being bought out by AT&T Broadband, and in turn by Comcast) tried to design the network with 700 MHz of downstream bandwidth shared across 500 households. Whether that was sufficient to support lots of VOD depended in part on how many analog channels we were required to deliver (federal regulations currently require local channels to be delivered in analog; many cable networks have long-term contracts requiring analog delivery). Under reasonable assumptions about moving cable to digital, and a gradual increase in the VOD peak rate, it looked like enough bandwidth. The most difficult part was the "middle" portion of the network, where the VOD streams for many groups of households were aggregated.
Yeah, right.
Mr. "640k is more than enough memory"
the idiot that predicted that the internet was a passing fad??
"During the next 10 years, millions of programmers and users will utilize this system."
:)
Bill was almost certainly right about this prediction. I'm sure that, between 1988 and 1998, at least two million people used OS/2 at least once.
Spake Bill:
"These things can scratch or simply get lost."
Already, we don't really "own" the movies we buy. A move to purely digital distrihbution would be accompanied by a massive push towards rental/pay-per-view models. I really cannot see the studios resisting the urge, and the gleeful adoption of iTunes suggests most consmers won't care (at least until their hard drive dies). I'd also start taking a sweeps on how long before revisionist editorial policy started affecting the available catalogue ("I'm sorry, that film is not available in China, your party representative has been informed").
To counter Mr Bill's quote, if it was simple and legal to back-up the movies and music I have purchased, I wouldn't need to be losing little silver discs, or need a Kafka-esque DRM micro-policing system. Leave me the hell alone!
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
why would gates bother with such a pronouncement? because he would benefit from dvd's obsolescence. dvd's have no drm capabilities to speak of, unless you consider css, which is an annoyance, but mostly useless. don't believe me? watch what's next: bill will start pining for new "improved" network protocols, which will help stop those bloody pirates, etc. microsoft can't engineer better products, so their strategy will be to continue business as usual: trap people by compelling them to use proprietary protocols. drm is just a fancy way of saying "ultra-proprietary". you must use microsoft, because nothing else will work, if you want to communicate with other people using microsoft products. as long as there are people using microsoft products that you must communicate with, you will have to pay for (but not "own", of course) the same ms junk they have.
a computer without ms is like chocolate cake without mustard.
Given the fact that the 8088 can only address 1MB and the ROM BIOS, Video Memory etc, require some of that address space, 640K is about right.
"The only reason he is cited in tech-related articles is because his business has been successful, not because his technology has been superior."
Other than being successful or having reality distortion field capability, what other criteria is ever used to quote someone on technology.
which door do i enter in microsoft bob to free myself from this passe medium?
Serenity now, insanity later.
Instead of DVD's becoming obsolete, maybe Mr. Bill (O No!!!) will himself become obsolete!! ;)
I have a bumber sticker in my cubicle that says
And, if people want it, is there a profit model for it?
Finest word processor ever.
I predict Bill Gates will be obsolete in the next 10 years.
Coming from England, I was surprised to see in the USA, 23" screen televisions labelled as "portable". Apparently, if a TV isn't build into some huge wooden cabinet, it's considered portable (handle or no)
Rich
Of course they'll be obsolete soon! They won't fit completely in 64k of RAM, which everyone knows is enough for anybody.
-----------------------
You are what you think.
He might be right.
The internet has alot of movie piracy on it already, i've heard rumors about Apple launching a movie download service. "iMovie" is what it will prolly be called. but besides DVD's won't be ovsolite soon
The internet is still pretty slow (for the home user) so i don't think downloading full DVD's is gonna be coming out soon. In 10 years this might be possible.
The FCC needs to start changing some laws about landlines, such as the one that states there can only be ONE cable company per area. Why? because Comcast Sucks Balls we got rid of comcast (for TV, we still have their shitty cable Internet) and we got DirecTV instead, DirecTV is going to have a hard time with TRUE "on-demand" however they do have TiVo. Satellite is limited by the number of satellites in their fleet, the number of transmitters/transmitters on each satellite, the FCC/IRU/ITU allowed bandwidth and the compression level they use. Dish Network for example, does not have as many satellites nor the bandwidth that DirecTV does, so they compress the video streams more than DirecTV. Cable is allowed alot more bandwidth, because they only use shielded coaxial cable, so they can use just about any frequency they want. The new kid on the block for broadband internet is called Broadband over PowerLine (BPL) however i hope this never is allowed by the FCC because it causes lots of interference to radio devices http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/ and i hope broadband over powerline never is allowed
in 2008 all broadcast television stations are going to be required to take their analog stations off the air, Most popular local stations broadcast a digital signal along with their analog one, so they can transmit HDTV. The FCC is planning on using the leftover bandwidth for wireless internet.
Bottom line: The FCC is keeping back GOOD technology! The FCC's job is to limit interferance, I don't understand why they have so many laws about landline such as CableTV and CableInternet, as long as it doesn't interfere with anything