Merin's Blog

Forget Physical Media - The Future is DIGITAL

(Wed 02/27/2008 08:02am)
I often find myself and others trying in vain to get people in various forums and debates to understand that things such as HD DVD vs. Blu Ray, rental stores and advertising on television are all going the way of the eight track and sky writing and taking your stereo in to be fixed at local electronics shop -

- this things won't completely disappear, but they will be such a small part of the reality we live in day to day that they are not worth worrying about.


The online revolution is happening, despite about half the country not realizing it.  See, most of us are too happy that DVD box sets of television series are finally being released quickly and often that we don't understand that this is too late.  The people who've been using torrents and previous file-sharing programs know what the near future will be, however.  Just like the geeks who used their dial-up modems to connect to BBS's back in the day and chat with people, send messages, and download files knew that much of the "matrix" of Neuromancer was only a decade or two down the road.

Check out this story - http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-music27feb27,1,5116325.story?track=rss&ctrack=2&cset=true
- about how young people just don't buy CDs anymore.  Now, to be complete honest here, I'm late on the downloading music / iPod scene - I still don't have an mp3 player (I just, a little over a year ago, got a CD walkman that can play mp3 discs!) - I wanted an portable digital music player well before iPods were released, just have never bought one (eyed the Zune warily, but no, no purchases) - but the issue, my point, is that the change is finally happening despite all the foot-dragging of the entertainment industry.

Terrabye hard drives are about $250 at Best Buy.  A TB is 1024 gigabytes, you know, what a Blu Ray disc holds 50 of.  Blu Ray movies are, what, at least $25 on average?  Let's say $20.  To have the same storage of a TB HD, you'd need over 20 Blu Ray discs for the cheap price of  over $400.
Yes, those discs have movie content.  Yes, the HD is empty.  But I think my price point comparision is still valid.
Moving beyond the hard drive, there are flash drives out there, those tiny pack of gum sized digital storage devices, that can hold a lot of information as well.  You can get an 8 GB one (about a DVD of data) for like $35.  About a year ago that was the cost of a 1 GB.  See the trend?
Western Digital has out these portable HD's, about the size of an iPod or cellhone (not a slim phone or a nano, no, but like a wallet or checkbook,) called Passports.  These babies are a bit on the expensive side right now, $200 for about 300 GB or so (working from memory here, too lazy to google search), but the device has just hit the market - wait for competition and saturation and the prices, and storage capacity, will grow.

My point?  Physical storage for movies / music / what-have-you exists for cheap that doesn't require inserting and storing a single disc per movie.  And it's getting cheaper.  FAR FASTER than we went from mp3 music to iTunes and 40 GB iPods.

The hold up is the speed of data transfer via the internet.  We need those fiber optics cables lain that Vice President Al Gore was pushing for BEFORE he and President Clinton took office the first time.  The telecommunications industry is the hold-up here.  Government pressure / tax credits / grants would help with this (as a fast online network would be a boom to MANY industries and the government as a whole, if we could just get the concept past the "internet is a series of tubes" idiots in Congress.)

Of course, there is a chance I'm not looking far enough ahead.  Businesses love subscription services, and don't want consumers to own permanent physical copies of anything . . . the near future could well hit faster than I'd assume where we forget storing copies of what we want to watch / listen to / read / play, and instead our portable devices and home entertainment systems are always connected a vast, super-fast wireless communications network where we can access the media on demand without any need for downloading anything.  Who knows?

In the end, high-defintion DVD discs are just a blip that, historically, will probably not even attain the amount of reference that the DVD revolution will.  Blu Ray is, most likely, the new eight track cassette.

Of course, I still think eight tracks are pretty damn cool.  But I'd rather use my laptop for music, thanks.

Neuromancer Movie: Case is played by ...

(Fri 02/15/2008 03:17pm)
HAYDEN CHRISTIANSEN!!!

WTF?!?

I will write a proper blog on this later tonight, but need to express my concern.

Anakin FREAKING Skywalker is about to shat all over Gibson's classic.

EDIT 1 - Ok, just saw Jumper.  Christiansen didn't annoy me half as much as I expected.

I still think he's a bad choice for Case, though.