Bill Gates on HDVD/Blu-Ray

[andrewducker]

There's currently a major power struggle going on over the successor to DVD.  Bill Gates has this to say, which I agree with:

Understand that this is the last  physical format there will ever be. Everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it's even unclear how much this one counts.

I can see the next generation being useful - broadband isn't wide-spread enough for everyone at this point.  But it's definitely taking over as a delivery medium - the only software I've installed from CD recently has been Windows itself.  Everything else has been downloaded, and the same goes for most video and music.

Comments

[andrewducker]

allofmp3.com takes advantage of a legal loophole in Russia and you damn well know it. It is an entirely different case to the others. It is a clever setup, but it is not in the same class as something like, say, iTunes.

In both cases people are happy to listen to music without the aid of a shiny box. We weren't talking about legality - we were talking about whether people wanted the physical object to go with their music.

The BBC are curently making a large chunk of their previous week's broadcasting available on VoD, for free. I look forward to seeing how other companies compete with this.