Obvious Diversion

There’s been talk recently that the next format, whether it be Blueray or HD-DVD (it’ll be Blueray), will be the last physical format. In the five years or more that Blueray will displace the current DVD standard, it’s believed that bandwidth will be everywhere and plentiful and, as a result, movies and data will be available when and where you want it over that network connection.

It makes sense, although with the way bandwidth growth is lagging in the United States as compared to countries like South Korea, it’s also easy to see a future where the majority of bandwidth connections are still sorely lacking ten years from now due to the interests of entrenched monopolies. Truly though I believe that the progress of bandwidth alternatives such as WiMax will progress to the point of challenging the local monopolies intensely, after which bandwidth across all options will explode with a new wave of investment.

There is one last factor to consider in all this. Will the content we consume continue to grow at such a rate that physical formats will be faster and easier to pass data around? That’s the situation we’re in today, where Netflix moves billions of bits via the US Postal Service faster than any Internet connection can.