Microsoft's manager for Media Entertainment Convergence, Richard Doherty, said both HD DVD and Blu-ray will be obsolete in 5 years. Speaking at the annual Digital Hollywood conference, Doherty said,
“I don’t know that high definition will be delivered on an optical disc in five to 10 years. At Microsoft, we’d rather HD wasn’t on a disc.”
He feels, as do others, that downloading will be the access portal of the future, combined with very large hard drives.
Netflix is already testing downloadable viewing at no charge for their subscribers, and it seems clear that at some time in the future, most of what we want could well be on someone's servers, just waiting for us to access it. This has been happening gradually ever since Sun announced Java. The more we depend on our computing on line the more providers will be able to lock us in as a consumer and it makes sense as a business model. It will be an interesting future.
