Customer demand for a simple, comprehensive solution to their digital needs should lead industry to ultimately get into the business of selling subscription based information access.
Our current anacronym "ISP", may as well mean "Information Service Provider". Whether that content is a movie, song, recipe, piece of software or DNA sequence is in essence irrelevant.
Equally peripheral is the means of access to this information, whether a headset, in the car, on the big screen at home or at a friends place. It all comes down to a bunch of chips and a hard drive, identical in function: The same connected playback mechanism, with context of use being the only differentiating factor.
But it will take a great deal of pipeline integration (sattelites, optics), standardization (amalgamation of information catalogs) and market saturation (everyone's got one) before the general obsolescence of portable, removeable data storage items. (The USB2.0/mp3 Player keychains are great).
Even under these future market conditions, there still remains some forseeable use for removeable media even if its strictly for "underground" use (double meaning applies).
This still gives no guarantee to the longevity of HDDVD/Blu Ray formats. However, IMO they'll get as good a run as any format would under todays conditions.
They may turn out to be like the DAT tapes, in the sense that consumers may not see the need, but the pros will eat 'em up....
Just riffin..
Great Thread!!! Thanks KK!!
Cheers,
Eric