I'm suprised nobody has brought this up sooner:
Given the exponential jump in solid state storage recently (as well as Samsung being one of the big manufacturers of solid state storage, if not THE biggest), they probably have a solid-state solution in the works. SDHC only took off a couple of years ago, breaking through SD's 2GB limit to set the bar up to 2TB. Since then we are seeing insane prices for flash memory storage.
This is why I believe solid-state will (eventually) get a foothold in the movie industry:
- With circuit miniaturization constantly improving, we are getting to a stage where manufacturers can decide to add more storage to the device, or cut costs by using less raw materials. If HDTV becomes the standard for the next decade or so, solid-state will quickly reach the 'desired' size to fit a movie on (around the 64GB mark. Not far off already) and start to become cheaper. With optical, you cannot physically reduce raw material usage per disc.
- If a mass market solid-state movie media type does become a reality, the players could be insanely cheap to produce compared to their moving-state rivals, and theoretically have a lot lower fail rate.
- As sad as it may be, solid-state media would be a lot easier to implement a hardware-based copy protection device into the media, which would gain immediate interest from the major manufacturers from the start.
