Letters to the Editor
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Storage Costs
If you own, oh, 50 movies, that's up to 1.5 terabytes. Depending on what you buy, that's $300 to $400 worth of hard drives.
Even today, that's not $400 worth of hard drives. You could pickup 3 500GB drives for around $350 if you shop around. 1TB drives are now hitting the market. I'd expect to see 2TB drives within 2 years selling for about $300.
Both of these formats are DOA. Most consumers aren't particularly interested in them. Cable companies are already rolling out HD on demand, for a lot less than $20 a movie. Most folks don't want to see something more than once or twice anyhow.
Remember DVD-Audio and Sony's goofball Super Audio CD's? HD-DVD and BluRay are the video equivalents. Nobody gives a crap. They want to download their video and watch it on their iPhone or on their cable box. They don't want to hook up yet another stupid player to their television, jump thru more tedious DRM hoops and re-purchase their libraries all over again in some new format that's destined for the scrapheap in 5 to 10 years.
If these two formats had come out a couple of years earlier - or better yet if the industry greedheads had been able to settle on a single format - hi-def discs might have stood a chance. They missed their window of opportunity. By the time they even begin to become established, the market will have passed them by.
Even if, by some miracle, downloaded content doesn't bury HD-DVD and BluRay it's likely technological progress probably will. The Japanese are already making noises about the NEXT hi-def format, probably holographic discs, which will sport capacities theoretically in excess of a terabyte. They'll make BluRay look like an old 5.25" floppy drive.