Optical Discs roadmap + FTTH projections

[What'sHD]

"The optical disk technology roadmap predicts that a single side of an optical disk will hold 1 Tbyte or more in 2010 or later. At the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage (ISOM/ODS) 2005, held in Hawaii in July 2005, the ISOM Steering Committee organizing the event revealed a roadmap calling for 1-Tbyte capacity and a 1-Gbits/s data transfer rate in about 2010."


Reading this, I got to thinking the post-BD optical format could kick some serious butt. With Quad-HD displays (at least) and lord knows how many channels of uncompressed sound, its going to be heaven.

Seeing as how BD will easily last until 2010 as a movie technology, downloads don't seem that attractive even post-2010 cos projections on FTTH are that, by 2011, about 90M households will have fiber connections and these connections will not support (for all households simultaneously) close to the kind of data rates optical media will.


Thus, downloads circa 2010 will be fine as a replacement for 1080p-via-disc but likely not good enough for Quad HD and so forth. So, ironically, early adopters may be the last group to adopt downloads for their HT fun, assuming we follow the upgrade path to Quad-HD etc. If we stick with high def, then downloads seem to be the way to go post-2010, at the earliest.