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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.)
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.
He envisons a Microsoft DRM WMA future with Janus and its ilk. That's what he wants anyway, but he won't get it.
But, as it is with a standard source that requires new hardware and probably not terribly competetive rates, no thanks. I'll stick with NetFlix.
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
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!"
May have been.. until he proceeded to squash OS/2 like a bug when the agreement with IBM ended.
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.
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?
Seeing as MS is not a hardware company, I think you'll have a very hard time find a single instance where Apple did not beat MS at producing a PC product
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
Any display system for which DVD is not "good enough" (in terms of image/sound quality) isn't going to deliver much added value if it's just plunked into the corner of Joe Sixpack's living room. To get an experience that significantly improves upon existing high-end TV sets, you need a room specifically designed as a home theater. That sets a very high barrier to adoption.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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
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.
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.
but we already have what was said in the story:
It just goes under another name1980'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!
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.
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
I don't think it's entirely out of line to expect DVD to be obsolete in 10 years - at least in its current form. There are two issues - #1) the studios are afraid of piracy, especially with some of the very high speed networking that is just around the corner, and #2) the media is becoming far more compact both in data storage technology and in compression technology.
From Bill's point of view, I think he sees the studio's desire for Digital Rights Management as a way to plan the death of the DVD as it now is (which has a form of DRM, but it's been cracked). I also have a feeling that he sees high speed downloads and/or wireless as an alternate distribution means, but again, only with built-in DRM. This would probably be desirable, as if the DRM was cracked, some new form could be used on newer media. Some people will never give up on physical media, though, so there probably will be a "new DVD" format, maybe with a writable area that can manage rights management (probably tied to hardware like DIVX [Digital Video Express, not the codec] was, with some way to view like video stores do, and also probably the thing I dread most).
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
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.
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