iPod To Eventually Hold All the Video In the World?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @04:10AM from the one-miiiiillion-gigabtyes dept.

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.'"

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Re:Capacity. by grnbrg · 2006-11-28 04:55 · Score: 5, Interesting
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.