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Which came first? The chicken or the egg? 
Professional music editing software already supports FLAC, because the vendors in this business can't afford NOT to support the most clever, open sound format there is. They still try, of course, but once musicians has the option to use it, they wouldn't go back to using any of the industrial standards, unless they are forced to (that is if the state-of-the-art editing software doesn't support it for some reason).
WAVE has been outdated for the past 10 years. The fact that we still use it is just because of the fact that Microsoft, Adobe, Sony, Canon and Apple all keep insisting that we should use THEIR formats and not the better alternatives. If you can't compete with lossless and space efficient, you can always decide not to support it instead.
The most versatile web "toolbox" there is, Drupal, has a web player that supports streaming of MKV files. All the different codecs that goes in the MKV container are already supported if they are streaming friendly (like Matroska itself).
Because Drupal is an open standard, we will probably soon see support for the advanced Matroska features such as subtitles, indexing, multiple audio tracks and even menus... Even DRM if the commercial developers were interested in saving money by being less dependent on Flash. Apparently they aren't, or maybe they just aren't aware of the better alternatives?
The better formats aren't being used because Adobe don't want them to be used - not because their customers wouldn't use them, if they had the chance and knowledge to do it.
... The chicken refuses to lay a new egg so to speak! 
If we acknowledge that the market for systematic and widespread DVD and Blu-ray content is going to be practically non-existent within the next 2-4 years, this leaves us with streaming, broadcast and web sites. MKV is ideal for this purpose, because it already fully supports all the market-oriented requirements such as DRM, subtitling, indexing etc.
Computer playback only? I just gave you a list of some the hardware manufaturers that actually supports MKV playback on their standalone players and platforms. On top of that users are constantly trying to "jailbreak" other standalone players to support MKV playback for one very good reason: The users want it, but the manufacturers don't want them to use it! Sony's Playstation is a well known example.
The main difference from a market perspective between MXF and MKV is actually the lack of broad MXF software support. Only a small percentage of MXF files are are actually being used for video content. MXF is an acknowledged standard like BWF (sound) and AAF, but the format is practically unsupported by any free software product at the moment. Furthermore, it also still seems that there isn't a consistent, standardised support for generating MXF files with video, multiple audio, subtitles and indices... These features have already been supported by the MKV container for years.
I have no strict preference for MKV. I just wish there was a properly supported multimedia container, but the industry is constatnly fighting against it it seems. That is why MKV was invented by the user communities.
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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