You can't be serious?! Jim Simon wrote: Can't really acknowledge that, though. The reports I'm reading all say that Blu-ray sales continue to grow. Now if you want to say 20 to 40 years, maybe. ... I wonder if it will actually be possible to buy a Blu-ray disc in 20 years? I can't imagine. There certainly won't be any standard media players around to play them on. Blu-ray or other physical formats will become a collector's item just like vinyl records. And it will definetely not be the future delivery format for neither homemade nor industry manufactured media products. They are far too expensive to produce compared to the decreasing sales figures that everyone expects. DVD sales have dropped dramatically, and Blu-ray sales are very far from making up for the drop in DVD sales even if BRD sales have increased during the past year. That is only what you would expect when the players and the discs have become more affordable. But even if we don't consider illegal copies of films, both the DVD and the Blu-ray discs are expected to disappear as a mass consumer product within a foreseeable future. Not in 20 or 40 years but most likely within the next 5 years. I could provide you with at least 25 links to articles that address this issue and come up with some very good arguments for it. At the end of the day the fixed, non-flexible, closed structure formats like DVD and Blu-ray are by no means suited for the era of mobile, handheld devices. They require mechanical (vulnerable) parts inside the products which just doesn't fit very well with the trend towards creating more power-efficient playback devices. I mentioned cloud based software earlier in this long discussion. Even big fat Adobe will have to take the fact into account that they won't be able to sell individual software licenses to the same extent in the future for several reasons: Both private and public institutions are constantly looking for ways to save money (cheaper products that can deliver semi-good results will be considered) Cloud based software solutions will eventually become fully competetive with the Photoshop suite, because there's already plenty of single freeware products that can deliver similar quality in different areas of the production process. And for instance, Drupal-based solutions will actually enable all these different products to play together. Back to the piracy issue... If Matroska is the preferred format for storing HD movie content illegally it is still the preferred format for a very good reason: It's the optimal delivery format! Whether you've bought your films and music legally or illegally, you still want to be able to back them up in the most flexible, space-efficient, lossless storage format there is. It's just like when the music pirates paved the way for the once industrially banned MP3 format. But MP3 was the better format, because it actually supported the needs of the consumers better than any of the existing formats back then. Today, no one can imagine a hardware or a software product that will not read an MP3 file. Professionals will just keep using whatever formats they're told to deliver, and that is primarily decided by what is offered by Adobe, Sony and Canon. These companies just have a long history of fighting against open standards, so I would expect them to be the last of the last to support open standards.
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