Home Entertainment in the Future - Post DVD

[dongleSmith]

Frankly, the DVD format is one of the coolest inventions since the VHS/Beta cassette tape. It has given film artisans a chance to tell the audience what they intended for their movie to be and the reasons why they did what they did. But DVD is a fading technology. You may not see it. It's progressively slow.

I'd like to hypothesize what home entertainment in the near future might be.

One of the things about DVD is the size. It's small, compact and nearly identical to a Compact Disc. A format that's so familiar that we understand how to use it even with no prior knowledge of the DVD format. However the current format is fragile. We need an item that's both small and durable.

The next logical step would be the idea of cartridges, but not the cartridges from the NES days. They would need to be even smaller. I'm thinking more along the lines of sizes similar to the famed Star Trek "isolinear optical chip" or even more remotely the TurboGrafix-16 game chips, but with a somewhat larger thickness. How would this work, you ask? Simple. Technology is making hard disk drives smaller.

Back in the 1950s hard drives were about the size of a medium size office space. Then in the 1980s the first 1GB hard drives were about 8-10 inches thick and weighed over a pound. In the early 1990s, hard drive manufacturers figured out a way to build thinner disc plates. Additionally they made these plates double-sided so that data could be store on either side. By stacking these plates on top of one another they have been able to create higher capacity store devices. We're now in a time were hard drives now reaching 100-plus gigabytes. Other forms of storage devices such as CD-R, CD-RW, Zip, Jazz, etc also augment the hard disk drive technology. In the last four years portable hard drives have become a reality. Companies like ARCHOS, IOMEGA, and others pushing the envelope. But none of these compare with Apple's IPOD. A device that contains a blazingly fast 10GB firewire drives and only weighs 6.5 ounces! How small can hard drives get?

It's only a matter of time before drives reach wristwatch size, or even the size of quarters. A drive like this could have a storage capacity of 20-30GB. Placing one of these drives encased in an object similar to an isolinear optical chip, and extended some sort of copper or silicone connector tips to communicate with whatever unit would be needed to read the drives contents, would classify the chip as a cartridge. The only item needed of course would be a player capable of playing the movie and extras contained in each cartridge.

Packaging could consist of a specially molded jewel cases. The cartridges could fit easily and snuggly into the available slot. And because the entire drive and connector tips are solidly encased in the cartridge's container they could, unlike today's DVDs, withstand a lot of abuse. Additional the casing would be transparent so the studios could place small 3x2 rectangle-sized labels; similar to CD labels.

I wish I had the time to draw out what I see in my head, but I don't. I'll leave it up to your imagine to see what I envision.

In the meantime what do you think?

[pacmania_2001]

http://www.c-3d.net/product_frameset.html

This is the future. Been discussed here earlier. I dont think people will like cartridges, seems too much like the eighties. I think the CD/DVD/FMD discs will just get smaller so they are like those game cube discs.