I was in a Sony store last night. Walking through the mall, I was lured in by the glossy TV screens and the idea of potentially making the move from DVD to Blu-Ray. I’ve never owned an Blu-Ray player and, to be honest, have been somewhat skeptical whether Blu-Ray will quickly replace the ubiquitous DVD format.
The sales rep. that chatted me up was, unsurprisingly, enthusiastic about the quality that Blu-Ray delivers. This same salesperson also told us that we should expect to pay $60 for an HDMI cable. Ouch.
Nevertheless, I didn’t walk home with a Blu-Ray player. But I did start doing some reading. Are retailers pushing Blu-Ray players on their customers to support the new format? Can an up-converting DVD player suffice for now? And the even bigger question: what’s next after Blu-Ray?
My intuition tells me that the USB Flash Drive format may be a viable alternative. We already have Flash Drives which can hold ample data. To put it in perspective, a standard DVD holds 4.7 GB of data, a Blu-Ray disk holds 25GB (or 50GD if dual-layer). USB Flash Drives have come down in price and gone up in capacity. If you really need the space, you can even get them as large as 256GB, more than five times the storage capacity of a double layer Blu-Ray disk. Optical disk readers, e.g. Blu-Ray, DVD and CD players, are inherently fragile and sensitive to heat, condensation, and dust. USB Flash is more robust, and certainly more portable.
So the question remains, what’s next after Blu-Ray? Will it be a new optical disk technology, such as Holographic Versatile Disk (HVD). Or will it be a type of card or portable thumb drive? And don’t forget, there’s also the possibility that we may soon just be downloading all of our data heavy content from the cloud, e.g. like renting movies via iTunes.
Any bets on the future of Blu-Ray?
3 comments ↓
I have followed exactly the same thought process. But I think that it goes one step further than a USB flash drive.
I think that interfaces like Apple TV and other home theater hard drive systems will take over. Buy your movies online and automatically sync to your laptop, desktop, and TV hard drive. Or as bandwidth allows have it all stored on a personal movie server and stream it to your computer, tv, or phone on demand.
This technology already exists, but in my opinion it is only being slowed down by the maximum allowable adoption rate.
Good point. We’ve got companies like Apple and Blockbuster that have invested in the online distribution channel. Assuming that our devices can talk to the ‘cloud’, we may not need anything portable at all. Well, at least not a portable device just for storing data.
OMG. Hilarious comparisons. We can’t use usb flash drives for movies because the video can’t be accessed fast enough from that little stick. If you insisted on using a flash drive, you would have to install the 50+GB movie on your disk player first and then play it from the player, which would take time that no one wants to deal with. Then that would mean that the player would need a massive hard drive. And I’m not even going to start with the copyright issues from installing a movie on your hard drive and potentially giving them away to thousands of other people. The future is no disk at all. In the future, your player will receive a network similar to cable tv or satellite. If you bought the movie, your data will be stored at a far away facility ready to broadcast it to you whenever you select it from your menu.
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