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I recently was in the market for a new console, and to make a long story short it came down to a) lots of good Xbox titles which I already own and sill play, and b) the PS3 has a Blu-Ray player.
Ultimately, I would not have minded a future of dusting off the old 360 in order to play a Halo match, or replaying my three favorite titles (Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, CoD Black Ops) on a new system (PS3). After some none-too-paltry research, I was pretty satisfied that console graphics were much the same, the price points nearly equal; which meant that, for me, the BRP was the real hanging point.
I already have two Blu-Ray players--one in the den and one in the bedroom. We also have an Apple TV in the den and the bedroom, and the kids have one in the playroom. I realized that, ultimately, we watch downloads through Apple TV or the LaCie media center (for MKV files and the like), and the BRPs collect dust.
I stuck with MS and bought a new 360.
So, now, the question: both MS and Apple claim that digital downloads are the way of the future, and I tend to agree simply based off my own family's habits and usage. What do you think: are discs truly on the way out, even BR discs?
The primary advantage of optical disks is the quality of original. I still buy DVD videos instead of purely digital so I can have a high quality original to rip from if there is a change in format or the digital copy suffers corruption. Digital formats are highly convenient because of the number of devices and locations they can be played. The other big advantage is the always available nature. With a digitized TV shoe I can have it run the while season without stop. I can even change seasons or setup my own sudo-TV like schedule of personalized programing. Optical disks eventually have to be swapped out.
Personally I never understood the need for BluRay. HD-DVDs would have been just fine as a format, that and DVD quality is still more then enough in the vast majority of cases. I see physical disk media going back to what the old tape drives used to be, high density/fidelity master copy storage.
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I'd guess larger more durable solid state drives coupled with cloud backups are the real way of the future. Once computers are 99% cloud-based, I wonder how large a SSD will be required, if the only need for space is buffering and with enough memory to process basic commands to connect you with the cloud.
The benefit to physical media storage and large capacity drives comes when the cloud collapses, or you experience some issue that keeps you from being able to connect.
Big yuck to purely cloud based computers. There are really downsides to not having physical acess to your data storage and having to rely on the vagaries of networked connections. While I enjoy a localized cloud (with my MacMini and Mac Pro running services, hooking in with my iPad and iPod) I'd never go for a solution that takes the majority of my data off the local networks and puts it on someone else's server solely.
Personally I think what we are going to see is a hybrid state where you may have one full computer per household which acts as both large volume storage (HDDs are getting seriously large), remote/virtual desktop use, and central entertainment hub. Then tablets or smart devices that have limited capacity for standalone but also act as thin clients to the home PC/Server. The off network Cloud acts as a secondary/echo data storage and acess point.
It will never by 99%, 50% at best. If you though people freaked out over "location gate" imagine what will happen people suddenly realize that services like Drop Box are totally open to data mining and trolling of your files if the hosting company so wished. Just as Google does, and FaceBook does.... Although I hope more criminally inclined types trust their data to the "Cloud" so law enforcement can easily gather all that incriminating evidence just as they can with emails.
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Never's a dicey word when it comes to tech.
At any rate, we're getting nearly as good with storage capacity as we are with processing speeds. There are prohibitively expensive 2TB SSDs available right now. I really can't imagine the sizes that'll be available in a mere ten years.
The whole thing with the cloud, though, is that it has the likely potential to make local storage size nearly irrelevant. People are funny--a couple years ago I remember arguing that I'd never buy movies from iTunes; I was afraid of the whole idea of not physically owning the movie. If my HDD crashes, the computer is stolen, the kids dump a quart of milk in it--I'm just out, there's no disc I may be able to recover, clean up, copy, because there's no disc at all. FF to mid 2011 and I haven't bought a DVD in, well, almost a couple years.
For me, I suppose, it's just one more step to store my music and movies in the Cloud...
I will continue to say never, especially to such hyperbolic figure. 99% of people's content will not be purely stored in the cloud. Meaning that it only exists on a remote server across the internet from your computer or personal device.
Will some (or many) people choose to eventually have a mirrored or synced backup in the cloud as another access point beside their home system? Quite, likely as people are already doing that to a limited degree. I haven't seen anyone load 2TB of personal data into such a system... personally I wouldn't wait 5 weeks to have that all uploaded the first time on a home 5.5 Mbps upload speed.
The reason I say at best 50% purely stored on the cloud is because of services like Netflix which will offer monthly subscriptions to content... a great deal of content. I'm sure someone would try to include that in the calculation. Assuming you don't count subscription on-demand services its still an incredible amount of data that wouldn't be archived locally. Which makes no sense considering the ever lowering cost of local storage. The only way that would even come close to changing would be a dramatic jump in domestic home internet speeds. Netflix is already eating 1/3 of prime time data transmission, I'd hate to see the net-traffic jam of everyone basically streaming everything all the time. I already see what happens in a K-12 classroom setting when one grade level all jumps on the internal network at once and basically stalls out the buildings outgoing connection until the system prioritizes the traffic... and that's for business class internet access. And that's just for relatively small sub-20 Megabyte flash files embedded in online(cloud) sites. I can very well imagine if that was constant and involved larger files.
We'll see how people deal with the Chromebook. Which is that 99% cloud computer.
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Processor speeds and local drive I/O has nothing to do with cloud computing. It's all about the network(internet).
On the local storage side large SSD drives are not currently a good option for data storage. For performance they most defiantly surpass HDDs and are about as close to RAM as you're going to get. The most cost effective solutions for balancing SSD level performance and HDD storage capacity is to use a hybrid drive, or setup two drives. One HDD for storage, one SSD for caching regularly accessed files/programs.
I've considered that in my computer, but even the smaller drives are still to expensive and I don't have that level of performance need. I don't even have a reason to look at buying an Thunderbolt card for my tower.
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I still argue that I won't buy movies off iTunes until I can be sure I can get at the content despite FairPlay. I resend my moratorium on music when that got opened, and on audio books when I found a solution to that conundrum. It's the DRM more then the file sizes I have issue with. Mainly because I trust local storage to become cheaper with time. Over 10 years I've hermit crabbed my way from 4.0 GB and off floppies, to 60 GB drives through now 2TB, nearly 4TB (max available) if I total all the drives and Windows partition. I have far more 'faith' in local storage capacity then I do on improved network speeds. I may be biased by being in the US as we don't have the best network infrastructure but LAN has typically trumped WAN or Internet for speed and access.
I've been shifting more and more to Steam for games, and likely will be a big partaker of the Mac App store.... none of which is truly "cloud". All of that becomes locally stored content, with some it having a "backup" in the cloud for redundancy. Still... having to install Shogun 2 and Portal 2 overnight remind me of how daft pure cloud only content would be for the vast majority of purposes. I wouldn't want to have to load programs or content that large from the internet each time I want to access it.
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I forget how poor access to the internet in the US actually is--here in Korea, speedtest.net clocks my wireless connection at 82.06 Mbps; I pay for 100 Mbps. I'm sharing the connection across four computers, three Apple TVs, and two Xbox consoles. HD downloads take, literally, minutes.
I can imagine a computer that needs a great processor, memory and graphics in order to deal with intensive operations, but very little actual drive space, since productivity software is web based, video, such as Hulu, is web based, and most of my actual data is stored in the Cloud, like my photo albums, Office documents, and web based games like the next CoD.
I'd also argue that claiming (in an admittedly undefined future) 99% or more of everything will exist somewhere other than your personal computer is not hyperbole, but eventually very likely. But I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Nonetheless, the rest of the developed world is not South Korea, and I'm sure to reconsider the current validity of cloud computing once I return to the States and it takes all day to download a couple HD movies, or my Evernote files remain unavailable just before the presentation due to the connection timing out...
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I'm a firm believer that Blu-Ray is the last of the optical media formats.
Obviously, it would be pure conjecture on my part to provide an "end-date", but all signs seem to point to digital distribution being the way of the future.
I don't just mean "cloud" services either, but traditional cable providers as well. Up here in Canada, one of the major western ISP providers (Telus) now offers IP based HD television, with a continuing number of integrated digital lifestyle services (Facebook, etc). How long before I can get DVD release date content? Probably not far, in the grand scheme of things.
Blu-Ray also fails to take one thing into account. As a consumer, I more and more appreciate being able to have access to my content, whenever and wherever I want. I'll use Netflix as an example - on my iPhone over 3G, on my xbox/ps3, on my tv and on my PC - I can start, pause, restart any of the content wherever I want; bus, office, bedroom. As DRM becomes less of an issue (if an issue at all in some cases) consumers will be able to more freely access and use their content whenever they want.
We already have lossless digital codecs fully capable of providing the same, or near, video and audio fidelity of blu-ray. It's really just a matter of someone having access to the bandwidth, display and audio capabilities to take advantage of it. Services are out there already that can deliver full 1080p/7.1 in under 6Mbps, and I think it won't be long before we're under the 3Mbps mark.
Just my 2c.
I forget how poor access to the internet in the US actually is--here in Korea,
Ah. Now your posts actually begin to make a little sense.
Sure, in some "undefined future", everything will be in the cloud. We'll all be long dead, so will our children, and everyone will be living in space. Not sure how valuable that prediction really is...
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One of the big issues between digital download and blu-ray is quality, now much of the quality issues are not because of the actual format but because of limitation put into the digital formats imposed by the media companies to push the physical buy over the digital buy.
Once the Media companies finally stop imposing the forced limitations digital should become a lot better.
For example sometimes you may be able to buy or stream a 720p download from itunes, but many times you will find out they are not surround sound, which for some like me is important. Not only are you getting 1080p from Blu-Ray but you can get up to 7.1 surround which you can't get from digital because the media companies won't let the suppliers like iTunes sell digitally.
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Ah. Now your posts actually begin to make a little sense.Sure, in some "undefined future", everything will be in the cloud. We'll all be long dead, so will our children, and everyone will be living in space. Not sure how valuable that prediction really is...
As usual with you, A, thanks for not really contributing anything to the discussion.
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One of the big issues between digital download and blu-ray is quality, now much of the quality issues are not because of the actual format but because of limitation put into the digital formats imposed by the media companies to push the physical buy over the digital buy.
Which from a philosophical/conspiratorial point of view, is one of the reasons why I also don't support Blu-Ray.
Sony Corporate has a significant investment in being a content producer in both music and movies. With Blu-Ray, they now also have a significant investment in the distribution platform. Add in DRM which is the natural bedfellow of wanting to protect your content while simultaneously distributing it, and you have a company vested in controlling how and where you can watch/listen to something. Or, god forbid how ... "sony movie looks best on a sony blu-ray on a sony tv" ... and they'd mean it.
When a company can willfully degrade or limit the quality of content on one platform (iTunes, et al), because they own a signficant investment in another (blu-ray), the only loser is the consumer.
Sure, in some "undefined future", everything will be in the cloud.
Closer than you think. As an aggregate, the technology community has not only smashed Moore's Law, they're rapidly approaching a point where there's no practical ability to take advantage of it.
As usual with you, A, thanks for not really contributing anything to the discussion.
You don't need to read my posts. (Please!) See my name and avatar, move on. I know I'd appreciate it.
You made (a series of) confusing posts, and you didn't bother to state your assumptions and current situation that might significantly color your view. You didn't think that might have been helpful to the conversation? Really? I could have just said I disagreed and moved on, but at least I made the post pointing out where things started making sense to me.
Really, now. Moving to the cloud is entirely dependent on both the speed and ubiquity of extremely high speed connections that are also affordable, which is something the majority of the world doesn't have, and likely won't for quite some time. Add in the move to UBB (usage based billing) in large swaths of the world, and the move to the cloud is even cripplingly slower.
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Add in the move to UBB (usage based billing) in large swaths of the world, and the move to the cloud is even cripplingly slower.
The excuses given by the providers is that they need to go to this billing type to reduce bandwidth usage so it does not effect the end user.
What worries me, is as more and more people start using Smartphones and streaming video site (Netflix, hulu) and they start tapping that usage cap and the companies start seeing the money come in, that once the companies actually decide to upgrade their aging infrastructure to handle the increase usage that they won't raise those limits because they don't want to lose the money coming in.
Which in the end will kill Tech because people won't want to use the Smartphones and those streaming sites because it will be costing them too much money.
We are already seeing that happen in Canada. The providers have lowered their cap significantly, some of the lowest in the world, and because of this NetFlix is having problems getting subscribers in that country.
What we need to see is the Providers stop spending money on just maintaining the infrastructure and start upgrading it. The technology is there to increase the bandwidth, the companies just are not willing to spend the money to upgrade it because they are all comfy with the current status quo.
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Actually the real issue here is that many connectivity providers like Comcast with XFinity, are becoming media providers as well. And what you may very well see is tiering of access if Net Neutrality is not maintained. In such a scenario Comcast will prioritise it's own content, i.e. XFinity, while throttling down content from external providers such as NetFlix and iTunes.
We saw this up in Western Canada with VoIP.
Tons of mom and pop VoIP providers suddenly found their service unusable when the ISP started offereing their own service ... at perfect quality :)