Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!"
Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, is the world's richest man.
Hundreds of them, but it was still cents. ;)
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
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
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.
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??
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.
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!
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?
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.
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 those were accurate, i would be watching holographic movies inside my flying car today.
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
Its not really a question of DVD's. Of course DVD's will be obsolete but if you read the article he's actually claiming that the idea of local portable storage will be dead. That everything will be networked and centralised. He makes the point that why would we carry around some fragile copy of the data when we can just have it delivered across the network to whichever device requires it. This is the microsoft vision now, computers+network access in everything. It's an interesting idea but local portable media has so many uses that I doubt it will disappear. Especially given that it is so cheap to make that it is disposible. Already blank DVD prices are cheap enough to make DVD's disposable and Sony et al are talking about making discs out of cardboard.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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!
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.
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!"
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!
Because setting up a suitable server and network connection is beyond the capabilities of the average person, and will still be so in ten years; and because the smart early adopter knows better than to trust his entire digital life to a single corporation.
I've seen multiple ISPs go under, and they would have taken my e-mail with them if I'd been dumb enough to trust that my mail would always be available to be delivered across the network from their servers. Joe Sixpack is starting to learn that lesson with his "free web mail" service that seemed like such a good idea at the time. Think he wants to put his entire music, movie and book collections on the same system?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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!
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!
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
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
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:
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
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.'"
Personal attack isn't a good rebuttal.
And as for hardware costs - no they will NOT be "significant" and no, they will not "stay the same for a lot more bang."
I suggest that instead of trying to figure out where to place swear words for best shock jock effect, that you look at just how fast nanotech has snuck up on manufacturing - in another year or two you'll be able to *print* custom chips in one-off quantities at less than the price of a C/GPU today, and that trend will only continue.
And as a matter of fact, a graphics card which cost $800 only two years ago (at two years ago's value of the dollar, that makes it about $1100 in today's dollars) is now available at around $70, I'd say that's a "considerable" drop in cost wouldn't you?
And no similarly-placed graphics card today costs anywhere near $1100, most don't even cost $800, and that too is proof that the "considerable" cost of hardware is being eroded.
I don't think Intel or any other of the acronym soups you mentioned will be averse to making their chips do more and more for lower and lower manufacturing costs and then selling those same chips for a peanuts price and the firmware on a lease basis. Can you say "residual income"? They can.
Now stop thinking that things will remain statically stuck in this age of huge dumb expensive oneshot factories making millions of identical chips, which have to be sold at one-off markups. Go look up "agile manufacturing" and "self-assembling nanotechnology" and then tell me if you still think the major players are still thinking they'll be producing Durons and Athlons and P4s in five years time...
Also, tell me why any CEO worth his salt to his shareholders wouldn't begin charging for software which as you point out has neglible ongoing costs associated with it, on an ongoing basis, and forego the hassle of having to make all their profit off the one-shot sale of a piece of silicon, carbon, or diamond?
Think really really carefully here: A few years ago printer manufacturers did something that imroved their bottom line immensely? Can you remember what that was? Yes! They sold their printers at cost or just above, and sold consumables at huge whacking markups. Have you noticed any of the major printer manuf's foundering? Thought not...
And did you notice? I didn't launch a personal attack on you even though I consider that you wrote your own epithet extremely well. And I used not one bad word, unless you count words you can't understand as automatically bad. So I didn't end up looking like a total loser...
-- ted russ http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/mydynes/ http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/myblogs/
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
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.
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.
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
It'll never take off in foreign markets, though.
Can you imagine WMD in some place like Iraq?
Oh well, if an Anonymous Coward says so, it must be true!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
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
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? :-)
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
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)...