Think of 78RPM records. Not sold as new for 60 years, but still available on eBay for ridiculously cheap prices, so there’s a shitload still out there.
Fast forward to CDs, DVDs, BluRay, all of which I imagine have a larger customer base than 78s ever did, then apply the 78 trends to them. They will still be around for a very long time (assuming they don’t turn to dust, fade or melt). And if you can buy a 78 for a dollar or two now, it wouldn’t be a good long-term investment plan to stock up on BluRays.
The OP wasn’t asking about computer data stored on discs, but to me, all disc types have been obsolete for a year or more. CDs and DVDs are too small, even Blu-Ray discs are too small (and too expensive) compared with hard drives. The only near-term replacement I can see would be a disc that costs under a dollar and stores a minimum of 10 TB, not to mention a fast data transfer rate. I don’t know of anything like that under development.
In support of this, but the tape->DVD format change was so successful because DVD was a relative godsend. Compared to tape, there was no rewinding, playing the media didn’t wear it out by design, picture quality was markedly better and more consistent, you had things like chapters you could jump to instantaneously, etc. DVD had so many advantages that it was fairly compelling to switch.
Blu-Ray, OTOH for all intents and purposes has one single worthwhile advantage over DVD and that’s picture quality.
to be fair, you don’t need all of Blu-Ray’s 40 Mbit/sec to get a image quality that’s markedly better than DVD. HD cable/broadcast makes do with 12-19 Mbit/sec using crusty old MPEG2. AVC or VC-1 would be a good bit better in the same bandwidth vs. MPEG2.
Records had a dimension which DVDs and BluRay don’t - some purists believed they offered more “real” sound quality. I highly doubt anyone out there is refusing to dump VHS because of the picture quality. 8mm or something, maybe.
One other reason that will delay the end of DVD’s: I discovered recently that HD content can be recorded onto a DVD. Obviously A DVD doesn’t hold nearly as much information as a Blu-Ray disc, but you can record maybe half an hour of HD video on a DVD. You do need a Blu-Ray player and an HDTV to view that content, but since this means that DVD’s themselves may be useful as a cheaper medium for transfer of mid-length HD programs, that may help keep the standard meaningful for a while.
I doubt that physical discs will become obsolete for a very long time.
Many (most?) people are not technical-minded enough to use a downloading / streaming service: imagine your mother or grandmother struggling to download a film, or attempting to solve the technical problems that inevitably will arise. It’s so much simpler to buy a DVD from a store, pop it into the machine and press PLAY. And if you’re not looking for something specific, it’s much easier to browse through discs in a store than an endless series of on-line menus.
Also, many people (including me) don’t like to spend money on something that doesn’t physically exist. I want something I can hold in my hands, something to show for my hard-earned cash, something I can line up on my shelf.
Blu-Ray players are fairly affordable now: I imagine that production of stand-alone DVD players will stop within two or three years (there will be no need for them, because Blu-Ray players are backwards-compatible). I would guess that DVDs will be gone from our store shelves within five years, once Blu-Ray discs become cheap enough, and Blu-Ray players commonplace enough.
After Blu-Ray, who knows? I can’t really see a need to supersede them…until VHD (Very High Definition) TVs are invented…?
The cheapest Blu-ray players are still priced around $100 with high end players still going for between $180 and $250. A “high end” DVD player (which isn’t all that different from a cheap one) will only set you back $80 while I can pick up a cheap one for $20-$30.
The price difference is still great enough that not everyone will be switching to Blu-ray just yet. It might become the dominant format in 2-3, but DVD players will still be made for a while yet.
I think this is a key point. Until net-streaming to the tv is as simple as popping in a DVD, there will be a substantial demand for DVDs.
Just by way of a personal example, a computer geek friend of mine was raving in the late 80s about this internet thing, how he was talking on line with people all over the world, and so on. I asked him how to do it, and he started reeling off a long line of technical geek-speak. I just gave it a pass. It wasn’t until Netscape/Internet Explorer came out, pre-loaded on my computer at work, that I started surfing the net in the mid-90s - because it was easy and I didn’t need to know anything about how it worked.
I think that’s the same barrier that net-streaming to the tv faces - for those of us who aren’t really computer literate, it has to be easy.
TIME made this point in an article recently looking back at the whole napster/piracy issue - that the music industry thought they were doomed because music was starting to be free on the internet, and they wouldn’t be able to sell their product anymore. Then Steve Jobs came along with iTunes, and demonstrated that you could turn a profit on music on the internet, because he made it easy to download for a small fee, as opposed to having to have the technical smarts to know how to get free music on-line: easy trumped free.
To everyone who figures everyone will just watch on computers: what happens when those computers crash or get viruses? There are so few people who do backups as it is. Unless you think we’re headed to a world with no physical media whatsoever…
Most likely what happens eventually is we don’t pay a flat rate for broadband anyway, an internet connection becomes finally another utility.
This has pros and cons. One of the pros is, if you notice, water/electric/gas utilities are fairly heavily regulated by Public Service Commissions at the State/local level. What this means is their tariff rates are regulated and honestly most of those utilities trend towards being highly affordable. Another pro is, some people use internet to a very small degree. For example the grandmother who turns her computer on once a week to read emails, under a metered system her monthly bill could see a reduction of as much as 90%.
There are of course also some cons, for example high volume downloaders that are hitting 300-400 GB or more of bandwidth usage per month are going to see very high bills, of course as technology improves 300-400 GB / month will not be a “high number.”
This is going to be a long while off, though. For one thing many of the entities that are providing internet service are also content providers, they don’t necessarily want their business model to become like that of other metered utilities. What they seem to want is the ability to keep charging high monthly fees and additionally charge people lots of money for going over certain usage thresholds. As well as being hosts of “content libraries” (on demand video services) in which they can charge $0.99-4.00 or more for the rights to stream a movie.
Maybe I’m being optimistic but I don’t think the ISPs will win this one. I think eventually everyone will get all their voice, data, and video service through an internet connection and that connection will be billed just like any other metered utility. I think ISPs will of course offer their own content libraries but entities like Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes will offer theirs as well and they will probably have a bigger selection and more competitive price, the ISPs will probably only have the advantage of being able to give end users free physical devices which can function as media browsers for their customers and make it easier to buy from the ISPs media library than from Amazon or iTunes.
This is where the big Net Neutrality debate comes in. What most people fear (and with good reason, given recent events) is that ISPs who desire to rent data from content libraries will prioritize such traffic and treat traffic from iTunes or Netflix as “second class.” In essence they’d be using their control of the physical network to gain market share against Netflix, iTunes and other content providers. My assumption is eventually the regulatory framework will be resolved against such practice, but some people would say I’m being optimistic.
We aren’t that far away. 5-10 years, tops. As it is people stream movies all the time without even using a computer; what cable company these days doesn’t have Video On Demand? Same thing.
We’ve gone from almost nobody using E-mail and stuff to almost everyone using it AND the Web AND Facebook and all that sort of thing in 15 years. Now that the common doofus is familiar with the computer, adding movie download’s a small hurdle.
I just signed up for Netflix so I could stream movies to the TV. I mean, I could have done it on the laptop, but that requires me to lug the laptop over there, plug it in, and so on. Netflix required thirty seconds of entering passwords into my Wii.
