Next Generation after Bluray?

[Bobby Henderson]

First rule of thumb is NOTHING is cheaper than hard pressed media discs. Movies on a stick is possible, but expensive.

I'll second that.

I just don't know why so many people are fixated on this notion of movies going from optical disc over to flash-based media. While it might seem cool from a gadgety geeky perspective, it is just plain silly from the business minded standpoint of cost. It would be far more expensive to distribute a movie on flash media than a mass replicated disc.

Worse yet, flash memory has only so many read-write cycles of life before it starts to degrade. Like data on hard discs, data on flash is volatile. So that makes the notion of someone using the same flash card "sneaker network" style to shuttle new movies from the store to his hard disc not really so great. Why bother doing that anyway? Just download the movie direct to hard disc and get the thumb drive out the situation. What happens when that hard disc dies? All the data on it is gone. When I get "laser rot" on an old DVD it's pretty cheap to merely replace that one disc.

Blu-ray Disc has a long life ahead of it. At least a decade will pass before anything better could even be delivered. Hardly any movies have 4K digital masters. It's not a commonly used standard yet. Consumer-level computing and electronics hardware doesn't have the performance muscle to handle D-cinema quality digital files or 4K movies either. Real time downloads in HD material in Blu-ray quality won't happen for at least another 7 to 10 years if it ever happens at all. American telecommunications companies will do as little as they have to in boosting the speeds of their Internet infrastructure. In the meantime they're going to start tolling everyone for high bandwidth use. That kind of kills that whole "downloads are going to take over" prediction.