Blog Maverick is a blog run by the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and one of the guys behind HDNet, who provide high-definition TV.
He has a post about HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future where he makes some interesting points:
1. DVD will always be limited in size (even if it moves up to 50GBs), but portable hard drives aren't - and keep on getting larger capacity.
2. Making movies/programs in high-definition and then distributing via hard drives will allow media companies to kill off internet piracy - because the files will be too large to share over public networks.
HDNet are already having to compress their programs down to fit the broadcast standards. Putting them uncompressed on hard drives would increase the quality that people could watch them at on their TV at home.
Stumbled across your blog, so I thought I'd respond:
ReplyDeleteI can assure you that Hard Drives are not the future of video media. When I worked for Intel, years ago, I read an R&D report about a technology that is a cross between HDD & DVD. I'm not a techno-geek, so I can only put it simply- It uses two laser to read & write the polarity of a molecule within a special polymer material. The material is made in layers and each layer can be written to like a hard drive platter. The report said that it was going to use every couple of layers, for the sake of accuracy, but each layer could feasibly be used. The first experimental demonstration used a disk the size of a DVD, but on it was two terabytes of information. Also, this material/laser combination is not limited to disk shape. As long as a mechanism is configured for it, the info could be contained on a strip, like a credit card. Since it requires the interaction of two lasers at a specific coordinate to change the molecular polarity, the material would be immune to magnetic interference, like a DVD. This was back in '96, so I'm sure they've made some headway. No doubt, the technology will be introduced at a smaller capacity when Hard Drives are around a terabyte, or something. I imagine it will be marketted like a Removable disk drive that can effectively replace HDD's. Oh yeah, it could move up to 400 MB/sec... any technology you know that has that capacity??? I say about 2007 - 2010 will see another highspeed optical revolution in computing. (only 15 years behind the curve.) haha.
Oh and I'm publishing anonymous, because I suppose that I could get in a whole lot of trouble for telling about this.