Next-Gen (2018) will be digital only, online required, streaming entertainment boxes.

[Alby_da_Wolf]

SvennoJ said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

[...]

And even in 2020 fibre wont' be widespread enough, digital only would mean giving up any hope to get a share of new markets. It's just that Blu-Ray, maybe with more layers, will simply be THE LAST optical disc standard, after it development of portable storage, besides HDDs, if they'll still be viable, will continue on flash memories, like now, and holographic memories and Heaven knows what else, but not discs due to their inherent latency, that won't improve very much, due to spin speed limits, and that hence will become more and more a hindrance compared to growing transfer speeds of the discs themselves and even worse compared to latency of other techs.

There is s till a chance HVD will make it, at least for storage options. http://www.techtwick.com/holographic-versatile-disc-hvd/ 3.9tb writeable discs will still be cheaper then flash memory cards by the time the tech is ready. 1gbps transfer rate is not bad either. SDXC 128gb is $400 atm, I found a 256gb one for 460 pounds, 5gb of writeable BD-RE discs costs $10. Quite a ways to go.

4k 4/6/8 layer blu-ray will come first, but if super hi-vision or 8K gains traction in 20 years, pressing discs is probably still cheaper for collectors then flash cards.

It doesn't matter to me if it's on a card or on a disc, as long as I can still collect it. Even if we finally get fibre here, and the streaming experience is like for like with all extras and sound/language options included, I would still like to browse my own shelves, read the extras of the back or the booklet inside, instead of browing menus on a screen.

I agree about the collecting value, whatever the tech, owning an original support will give all those emotions and satisfactions
we already had since vinyl.

About HVD, interesting tech, and it will surely be a strong competitor for USB HDDs and flash drives and pen drives, but most probably it won't be as widespread as DVD and BD if it won't reach the mass production and low-cost stage of its lifecycle early enough.
BTW, being a disc (and not a sealed and very well balanced one as in a HDD), it will suffer too from tens to hundreds millisecond-range latency, that will look, compared to its even faster transfer rate, even worse than previous disc techs, so, yes for storage, but exactly the same limits as current optical discs, very good to store and stream huge amounts of data, very bad for random access, so very bad for interactive and real-time. Anyway, the same pros and cons of BD, but with a capacity more than 100 times a single layer BD should be attractive enough for the same uses.