How long will Blu ray last

[joeorc]

Rpruett said:

Squilliam said:

Feylic said:

Squilliam said:

rafichamp said:
Longer then DVD, reason why? Peoples internet speeds are still too low for downloading content from the web. Digital Distribution still needs about 6 more years to come over physical distribution.

Blu Rays maximum delivery is something like 35Mbps. If you had a 50Mbps internet connection you could easily manage as good if not better than Blu Ray quality sound + video over the internet even accounting for less than advertised speeds. Most Cable/DSL companies are pushing for 100Mbps to the home. Realistically you could probably get away with 30Mbps internet as most consumers couldn't tell the difference between similar bit rate but well encoded content, or if they do they don't particularly care for the difference.

Wow, where are these speeds available? I currently have 1Mbps and that was JUST upgraded! The fastest in my area is for regular residential use is 7. Average North American download speed is only at 7Mbps, so yeah, it's gonna be a little while before digital distribution goes mainstream.

In a few countries around the world, but that figure is increasing every year with greater investment in infrastructure. Cisco for example is increasing the speed of their switches considerably every year for instance.

Yeah, in select areas in countries the size of Rhode Island.   Realistically this is several, several years off from being anywhere close to 'mainstream'  and even further from getting people to opt for it over Physical media.    Digital distribution will stamp it's place in the coming years but it's certainly not going to take the lead anytime soon.

and that does not even include the bandwidth cap.

you even see it today in 3G networks, before you have to pay more for more internet use. at a certain point it get's way too expensive to have up/download speed's in that broadband speed for the consumer to say that they are going to pay that amount esp. when your vast majority of internet user's esp. in the 50+ year's old use the internet for Email. there was a study done last year about this very same thing about Digital downloads being in the forefront over physical media, the problem is it's not the advancement of the technology, its the very fact with youtube, facebook, twitter and all these other internet social networks. they all take a big chunk of your bandwidth that the ISP companies are able to handle, the end user's are out pacing the speed at witch the ISP's can cover their upgrade's to their networks. that's the big problem that will pretty much never go away. you can have all the speed you can but if there is more people using up the bandwidth in your area than the network can handle it will not matter. That's one of the big reason's why there is a cap now an there most likely keep the cap in the future.

here is a good example of such.

Bandwidth Battle: How Entertainment is Strangling Education on Higher Ed Networks

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 11/13/09

The next time a college or university considers an expensive upgrade to its network to accommodate growing demand, it might be good to remember that the increased demand isn't necessarily owing to greater use of the course management system or student retention program. According to recent research, more than three-quarters of all bandwidth consumed on campus is actually taken up with applications that fall into the categories of gaming, social networking, media, file sharing, and Web browsing.

Peer to peer (P2P) file sharing all by itself takes up a whopping 22 percent of total bandwidth. Plus, the research found that students are taking extra steps to conceal their online activity, belying the notion that university networks are considered "open" by their users.

The examination of higher education environments was done as part of a broader assessment of business networks by Palo Alto Networks, which sells firewalls and access network control products. Palo Alto often installs a demonstration firewall on a prospect's network to monitor activity--typically what travels through the Internet gateway--and then generates a report based on seven days' worth of application and threat activity.

"We'll produce the report and meet with the CIO and the security team and say, 'This is what we found,'" explained Product Marketing Manager Matt Keil, author of the report."Nine times out of 10, [they'll respond], 'Wow, I didn't know it was that bad,' or, 'Wow, I knew there was a lot of entertainment on my network, but I didn't realize it was chewing X percent of my bandwidth. We need to do something about this.'"

For the research report focused on education, titled "Academic Freedom or Application Chaos?" and available with registration, the company compiled data from the 35 university network assessments it had performed over the course of 18 months to measure the amount and type of data traffic traversing the Internet gateway. During the brief period the networks across those universities were monitored, the Palo Alto appliances detected 589 different applications in use, guzzling 64 TB of data.

Pervasive P2P 
Of the applications found in use on university networks, 203--more than a third--fell into categories not directly related to the business of higher education. These applications for file sharing, Internet browsing, audio streaming, social networking, and gaming sucked up about 78 percent of total bandwidth and generated 48 TB of data. Because of the open nature of networks on campus, the author wrote, "blocking them is not really an option."

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/11/13/bandwidth-battle-how-entertainment-is-strangling-education-on-higher-ed-networks.aspx