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[Afro Thunder]

http://www.vnunet.com/news/1161117

Just when we thought the DVD could not be any more ubiquitous, Serge Tchuruk at the Alcatel Forum in Paris announces that the days of the rapidly adopted medium are nearing their end. The increasing availability, affordability, and speed of broadband will contribute to a more efficient delivery method of media content. Will DVD join LaserDisc in obscurity?

 

[darscot]

Not likely. Broadband dosen't have near the market to kill DVD yet. It's laughable to think that it ever will.

 

[Soybean]

I think broadband can and will kill movies on physical formats like DVD, but not anytime soon. Broadband is way too slow right now. Comcast On-Demand is too artifacty for me. And forget about movies in HD.

But yeah, I do look forward to the day when my movie collection takes up no physical space (I guess I could rip 'em to hard drive right now, but that has its own set of problems for me right now; maybe when I have better equipment).

 

[Liono]

The DVD definitely will not be replaced by broadband-- maybe a hi-def format but I doubt that too. Besides, i'm one of those people who loves taking a case off the shelf when I want to watch a movie.

 

[darscot]

They have a lot of hurdles to get over first. One being the unreliablilty of hard drives. Viruses would be a huge problem. I know I sure the hell would not trust the thousands I've spent on movies to be connected online and stored on a hard drive. One virus and poof there all gone!

 

[Soybean]

I was thinking you wouldn't even need your own local copy. You could just buy it and have it stay on some remote repository to access when you want to watch it. You'd probably want your own copy just in case (sentiment or in case internet goes out), but you wouldn't have to worry about it disappearing.

 

[darscot]

We are decades away from that kind of a network. Everyone would have to have the hardware to connect from anywere. How would I lend a movie to my grandma. Or pick up a DVD when I travel to watch on the plane. You would need a broadband terminal in every home that has a DVD player and every location you can buy DVD's.

 

[darscot]

One more thing the speed required would be insane. I can walk into a shop in an airport and in 2 minutes pick up a movie. The network would have to be fast enought that I could download an entire movie in the time it takes me to pick one off the shelf and go to the cashier.

 

[DarienA]

Short answer: Not in our lifetimes.

 

[ToxicAdam]

In 1989, if someone told me I would own hours and hours of music and not own a Cassette tape or CD .. I would've thought they were lying.


Who knows.

 

[darscot]

CD's are far from dead though. I dont know why but I lots of people that still buy them. The only reason online music did so well is because it is basically free.

 

[DarienA]

In 1989, if someone told me I would own hours and hours of music and not own a Cassette tape or CD .. I would've thought they were lying.


Who knows.

Broadband has quite a few more hurdles to accomplish that your example of one person. The issue in the US is broadband penetration. IS it increase? Yes. Is it affordable? Yes. But even still it's only a percentage vs that own/rent DVD's.

 

[The Faceless Master]

*maybe* 10 in the future, but right now it's not gonna happen

 

[Uncle Dukey]

Personally, I like having physical copies of things... I don't like having to worry about internet connections or highly restrictive DRM... At least with music CDs and DVDs now I know that any CD/DVD player can play them without being bound to something. The idea of being able to retrieve any media I own over the internet is pretty appealing though (STEAM...).

 

[luxsol]

Short answer: Not in our lifetimes.

Hopefully never.

The idea of having something streamed over the internet without owning a phsyical copy is ridiculous to me. It makes me think of DIVX (the former rival to DVD), Napster (as it is now) or Xbox Live. These services tend to be rental services where you pay for content but never actually own what you're paying for. After the service ends you keep nothing to show for all the money that you paid, or it becomes unplayable.
With the case of Xbox Live, you can only keep what you buy digitally stored on magnetic disks that are prone to corrupt over a period of time. When the service dies out (and it wil... or at least stop supporting old content) all the expansion sets that you bought for your game are gone.

If this ever becomes accepted it should be as widely used as Video On Demand... which is to say: a tiny fraction of the market.

 

[Hitokage]

CDs, or at least discs that keep to standards, have two significant and major advantages over online music: uncompressed digital audio and absence of any DRM scheme. With an actual CD you can copy and encode it however you want whenever you want again and again(until the CD dies anyway), but with a downloaded mp3 you're stuck with what you downloaded(probably a crappy 128kbps encode*) and with other formats you can't even do what you want with the file. So until I'm able to get both of these things from an online source, I'll continue buying CDs.


* Last I heard, iTunes was one of the worst mp3 encoders in a comparison test.