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Old 15th September 2003, 17:19   #10  |  Link
General Lee D. Mented
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Join Date: Nov 2001
Posts: 92
DVDs will be cheap and auto-destructing (see disney's latest move). Blockbuster will be hurting due to lost revenue from overdue movies, as they now don't need to be returned, ever. They just oxidize in 7 days. To compensate they'll try and affiliate with large chains like walmart and 7-11 to do point of sale disposable rentals. Netflix will be the main competitor, and doing better as they now no longer need to pay return postage on destructable DVDs.

H.264 set top boxes will be being discussed by industry magazines, with maybe one or two expensive ones actually available on the market. The content base will be nonexistant because 99.99% of the public believes "DVD is good enough." There will be discussion of upcoming blu-ray disc HD players that use H.264 as their native format due in 2 years (7 years from now).

In the DVD "backup" (snicker) scene, MPEG and derivatives will have been crushed by advanced supertemporal wavelet codecs and adaptive codecs. $1 256MB solid state MRAM cards will be the portability medium of choice for video, which people like to watch on PDAs and laptops on the go (if you're at home, why not just burn the damn dvd without reencode and watch it on tv?). DVD burners software will have heavy copy-protection circumvention features, much like CDR software does now. This will be useful for people who just brought home a stack of $2 self destructing rental DVDs and want to "back them up in case the layer oxidizes before my legal rental window expires." The "We have too much free time" scene will be hacking ways to get movies to play on portable game systems, popularized by sony's playstation portable.

Software app development will have moved on to editors, and new apps that not only encode but peform functions equivalent to Premiere and in some cases beyond will be in various stages of completion.


Filesharing apps will be smarter and still rampant. Various security measures will be integrated (see earthstation 5) to provide anonymous downloading. Cable modem providers will be losing customers to DSL as they block more ports and throttle more bandwidth, aggrivating users. DSL providers that are hurting now will be gaining customer base by advertising openness of access and "Guaranteed bandwidth that's never capped."

mf will have a girlfriend, who may or may not be an actual biological girl. :P
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