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Originally Posted by LoganSnake
Actually, the way things are going, media will go toward downloadable material. Like MP3s, video distribution will be done through online channels. It will take a decade or more for that to become mainstream however. According to Microsoft, HD-DVD is just something they introduced to get even more consumers to their side because they want all video media to be distributed digitally.
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I vehemently disagree. The studios and media moguls desperately want things to go this way, but most consumers don't, and those that do will probably change their minds if it really catches on. Apart from the bandwidth issues that Will mentions, there are also much stronger forms of DRM that can (will) be implemented, meaning much less allowable use for what you pay for. Also, most media available like this will likely stay in a rental type of set up. you will never even "own" anything more than the right to watch it once. Music has already proven the horrors of DRM to fair use. Don't support them taking that away for our video as well.
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Originally Posted by Willravel
Besides, once laptops switch over to solid state, the price of production will drop off considerably. Considering that 1) it can't be scratched, 2) it has MASSIVE storage capability, and 3) it's rewritable, it seems the best option currently on the horizon.
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Well, that' partly true. It has a much lower storage capacity, currently, than platter-based media (hard drives). Also, even with the cost slowly falling, the costs currently are absolutely astronomical. It will not be soon that the prices fall to a range that people are comfortable with. From a performance standpoint, SSDs are great, but from a storage and cost standpoint, they have several years left to mature (at least).
There are other technical matters here that need to be taken into consideration. First, the smallest scale VRAM chips available do not carry the same data/sq. in. as magnetic media. While the chips are being manufactured smaller and smaller, so are the particles on magnetic platters. There are still HDD power-houses that are making improvements and we could easily see 2.0-2.5TB drives available by 2009, pushing the capacity bar that much higher for SSDs to meet. They also both have similar problems. While moore's Law applies to SSDs, there are other laws and principles of physics that apply to the magnetic platter HHDs. It's amazing that both have come this far, and reasonably speaking, both are nearing an end. On the magnetic media front, PMR or Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, recently allowed the 1TB barrier to be crossed. On the solid state front, perhaps Intel will license it's new High-K Dielectric tech and memory manufacturers will be able to use it for larger capacity, lower power memory.
Hitachi has also announce 30nm and 50nm read heads, which they promise will allow for 4TB drives by 2011.
Either way, I don't see SSD taking over for large-scale storage anytime soon. The most likely outcome are the hybrid devices that are being developed, using magnetic platters for the bulk of the storage and SSD tech to cache and pre-cache commonly used data (like system files for faster boot times).
As for bandwidth, again, FiOS isn't really a solution, as AT&T and Verizon have started to prove. The infrastructure is only part of the issue. And 100Mbps devices aren't a technological limitation either. it's core switching and routing as well as IP protocols that need to be revised. Stronger multicasting support, better core switching and such would make content delivery a more viable option. But, as I said before, I believe that connected media delivery is only a benefit to the pocketbooks of the studios and will prove to make most consumers very unhappy in the end.