iPod To Eventually Hold All the Video In the World?

An anonymous reader writes "A senior Google exec has been talking up the prospect of iPods that can hold all the world's media due to the plummeting price of storage and its increasing volume-to-size ratio. Google's VP of European operations, Nikesh Arora, predicts that in as little as just over a decade's time, iPods will be capable of storing 'any video ever produced.'" From the article: "Arora believes, mobile is likely to follow the same path. 'Mobile is not going to be a different thing,' he added — and if the mobile industry is to capitalize on the growth of content, it would be wise to ape the development of the internet. He said: 'The mobile industry has to go through the same phases the internet has gone through... Mobile will have the same learning curve. It would be somewhat foolish to leapfrog the stages the internet went through.'"

Comments

Personal storage

[SatanicPuppy]

Personal storage is something we do now, because networking isn't cool enough. In ten years, it's entirely possible that networking will have increased to the point where the idea of keeping a local copy of ANYTHING will seem weird.

What then?

[Billosaur]

Let's suppose you can in fact cram all the audio/video in the world onto an iPod? What then? How could you conceivably use all that information? There aren't enough hours in the day as it is, let alone to work your way through all that.

Personally, I don't see how this could be useful. The rapid expansion of memory capacity coupled with the falling price has led to bloat, whereby content is trying to expand to fill up these enormous memory spaces. To what end? Isn't there some kind of inverse Moore's Law for memory?

Capacity.

[commo1]

What exactly is the estimated capacity for "all the world's [media]". This sounds like one heck of a bold statement when the numbers at the moment are unfathomable for holding a back catalogue of everything broadcast on network television and everything from blockbusters to B-movies from 1890 on, let alone net-generated videos, cable and alternative delivery methods.

Re:Capacity.

[grnbrg]

What exactly is the estimated capacity for "all the world's [media]".

Interesting question... IMDB currently has records on:

• 363,000 movies released theatrically. (Average of 2 hrs)
• 367,000 TV episodes. (Average of 30 minutes)
• 57,000 made for TV movies. (Average of 90 minutes)
• 51,000 direct to video movies. (Average of 2 hours)
• 5,300 mini seris. (Average of 3.5 hours)

Averages are wild-assed (but somewhat reasonable) guesses. Given that the MPEG2 encoding used by DVDs runs at about 25MB/minute or 1.5GB/hour this works out to about 2,000 terabytes for all current known video.

Assuming storage capacity continues to double every 18 months ( big assumption!), and that we currently have 500G drives commercially available, we can expect to see this capacity in a single drive in less than 20 years.

grnbrg.

Media files will keep growing

[linuxci]

I doubt that there'll ever be an iPod that can hold everything, but then again I doubt the author truly believes it. The more space we have the more we make use of it. 15 years ago a 4GB hard drive would be seen as enormous, now for many people 100GB ain't enough.

New content is produced all the time, content is also likely to be stored at a better quality as long as space keeps increasing. I'm looking forward to the day of 80GB nanos, to me the nano is the ideal size, any smaller and it'd be awkward to control.

Re:Everyone having every video?

[From A Far Away Land]

It's not so far fetched - and think of the bandwidth savings. Bandwidth will go to new content only, and our "video past" can be mass produced. If storage of that magnitude becomes real, it will revolutionize more than just the mobile video market. Datacenters could possibly look as different as computers from the 1960s do, compared to today's PCs.