So as we are all aware by now there’s the whole Blu-Ray vs HDDVD debate on which HD movie/video format will win. While it seems to be clearer these days that Blu-Ray is going to be the winner with multiple studios announcing the allegiance to Sony’s Blu-Ray format, I’m not convinced that the future of HD content will even be on Blu-Ray. Why? Keep reading.
As I’ve stated before, I think that the wave of the future is going to be medialess - meaning that there will be no tangible media for movies and content. Look, it’s quite simply the trend that we see now. All your favorite movie rental places are coming out with a download or on-demand video service, such as Blockbuster & Netflix. Even Apple is starting to get in the game with their revamped Apple TV product, which lets you download some movies in HD format.
So how is this going to be accomplished? How are the big ISP’s going to manage that much bandwidth and streaming media over their networks? Well, I guess you could start by saying that they are commiting to better connectivity such as fiber-to-the-curb service by both AT&T and Verizon. But what about all that bandwidth moving through the internet and major backbones? It’s not! And I’ll tell you why. While I think that clearly the future for HD content is in fact medialess and will be streamed over major transit carriers, the way that it has to be done is via set-top boxes in a BitTorent model. About two years ago I wrote an article about ISP v2.0 and streaming media to a set-top box as a media center PC replacement. However, being that I work for an ISP (Speakasy) I don’t think that streaming media in it’s final state is going to go over the net. Rather, it’s got to be localized and supported by BitTorrent set-top boxes so that media can be delivered locally on last mile connections rather than upstream on the major carrier backbones. Here’s a great article over at Wired on Myka’s new BitTorrent set-top-box; it’s a pretty good read.
Watch folks, HD media v2.0, set-top-box v2.0, and ISP v2.0 will be born soon. All your content will go right into your living room without inserting or ejecting a tangible disc.