The Murky Future of Optical Discs

[dmoser]

Here is an article from Processor.com talking about the future of optical discs and asking what ever happened to it?

A sample from the article- "Although CD and DVD have been unarguable successes for consumers, their enterprise counterparts have been largely relegated to niche markets."

Here it is:
http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp2844%2F21p44%2F21p44.asp&guid=&searchtype=&WordList=&bJumpTo=True

What do you think?

[neilwilkes]

Replicated content will always be king.
Optical discs are far more reliable than any downloaded files can ever be.
Written discs, as we all know only too well, do not always play nice, support is not mandatory on any set top player, and replicated discs can hold higher quality video too - I have lost count of the number of players that simply choke on video files encoded at anything over 7,000Kb/sec.

Next problem is the amount of time it takes to D/L a full movie.
Again, end users are voting with their credit cards, and buying into Broadband packages that give a cheap service, usually with capped monthly download limits of 2Gb or even less.
The time it takes is also a problem.