DISQUS

Fazal Majid · 1 year ago

I wish it were the case. The whole idea of single purpose physical formats is an anachronism in the digital age.

That said, there is a problem with distributing movies on flash: I/O bandwidth, not capacity. 32GB flash cards are already available, if expensive, but the best cards have write capacity in the low tens of megabytes per second. A 10MBps card would take almost an hour and half to transfer a 50GB movie. People sometimes hand over their film or memory cards at the photo counter to process and/or print while they are shopping, but the delay would certainly put a crimp on mass-market adoption.

There are ways to deal with the problem. For starters, DVDs or Blu-Ray contain a lot of redundancy: multiple soundtracks in various formats and languages, extras, and so on, that could be stripped if a hypothetical machine knows the capabilities of the target device. Flash write speeds will improve, driven by the emegrence of SSDs as hard drive replacements, but there is still quite a ways to go.

mediastrategy · 1 year ago

Sounds like Laurie doesn't really understand the retail market, consumer purchasing behaviour, or the technical aspects of DRM and digital distribution. If she did, she wouldn't propose a mechanisms that (1) is far more expensive than disc distribution (2) is technically unsuitable (as Fazal mentions) (3) has nothing to do with zero inventory (Blu-Ray discs could be burned on site the same way flash memory could be written) and (4) does not address consumer behaviours such as browsing, impulse purchasing, lending, collecting, etc. Finally, the idea that retail desires a zero-inventory model is fallacious... if they truly achieved a zero inventory model, there would be no reason to go to their store. You would just buy online and they'd cease to exist. Blu-Ray will be successful for the next decade because (1) it's cheaper than all the alternatives and (2) it utilizes the existing retail and distribution networks and (3) it does not require consumers to re-learn or change their behaviours. The chance that consumers will start going to shops en mass and filling memory cards up with HD movies in the next decade is about the same chance that geeks like Laurie will learn somthing about business - that is, zero.