HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future

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HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future

Mark Cuban, owner of HDnet, the Dallas Mavericks, and the guy behind The Benefactor reality show, has a great post over at his site about HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future. Mark brings up a lot of good points about how hard drive space is constantly moving up while price per byte falls, while upcoming DVD formats will be limited in storage capacity and technological improvement over the years. He mentions recent experiments with various video formats and storage devices:

On the plane, I popped the first keychain drive into the USB Port. Got the ready signal, got prompted to open my video player, and watched a nice movie right from the keychain drive. On the way home, did the same thing with the other movie. I loved it. Far less space than DVDs. Could put them in my pocket instead of filling up my briefcase. I immediately went out and bought a 1gb keychain drive so I could hold 2 movies on 1 drive, in addition to my first 2 drives.

He goes on to describe various HD formats and how someday Netflix could send you a hard drive instead of a disc. I doubt anyone behind emerging DVD formats would embrace this kind of cutting edge technology, but it's great to hear someone in the industry willing to share these ideas. [thanks Olivier!]

by Matt Haughey August 22, 2004 in News

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Actually, having the likes of Netflix using a digital medium that provides flexible encryption algorithms might be appealing to movie publishers. It could allow for greatly improved protection to intellectual property, with each Netflix (or similar) file individually encrypted for the legitimate recipient.

Posted by: Fergus Sullivan at Aug 23, 2004 4:20:23 PM

I'd hardly call shipping a hard drive around in the mail cutting edge. When I was building my last new system about 12 months ago, the 80gb drive I was sent was damaged by the shipper. I had it replaced with drive that was also damaged by the shipper, and had to be replaced.

The new DVD formats with the blue wavelength lasers _are_ cutting edge. I think, in my opinion, you have it 100% backwards. HD-DVD = new, good idea. Mailing hard drives = bad, bad idea.

Posted by: Paul Tenny at Aug 24, 2004 6:38:14 AM

Actually, if you expand on the idea, it's actually a very good one. HD-DVD may be cutting edge, but they're still remarkably simple to damage, the same as standard DVDs.

Rather than mailing hard drives in the sense of mailing a big internal drive like we use on a PC, it would be much more effective to have movies on keychain flash drives, or the new keychain mini-hard drives. It would be much much more sturdy and resistant to damage than a DVD or HD-DVD, almost as cheap to produce, and also easier to use in terms of a player. Why have a disk tray when you can slot a keychain into the side or front or top? The actual player could then also be much more compact too, and the benefits in terms of power economy are incredible too. A keychain flash drive does not require nearly so much electricity as spinning a DVD up to speed and firing a laser at it. The potential for taking flash based movie technology mobile is incredible. The battery life on a portable flash movie player would far outstrip portable CD and DVD players.

Smaller, more economic, and much more reliable than DVDs, and almost as cheap. We should have skipped DVDs altogether and used the more logical choice of flash or mini hard drives a long time ago.

Posted by: S. Ramsden at Nov 14, 2005 4:49:46 AM

You have to be impressed that he found time to write this while fighting with the NBA all the time. You may hate the guy, but he does have a handle on technology.

Posted by: Todd Lokken at Mar 16, 2006 10:20:45 AM

HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future

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