BluRay in PS3 was Win/Win for Sony

[Smash_Brother]

I agree, and I hate to use anecdotal evidence to support a claim, but here's the thing.

My parents, who are 60 and 56 and not the most tech-savvy of people, haven't bought a DVD in years because they figured out how to download movies off of Direct TV (they burn the ones to disc they want to keep, but that's only due to the HD space on the Direct TV box lacking).

Physical media will DEFINITELY go away at some point: as the next generation of tech-savvy children replace the previous generations, they'll take no issue with media being 100% digital. If old hippies like my parents can figure it out and forsake physical media, then the next generation will be able to do so for damn certain.

Also, I firmly believe, on the subject of physical media, that people guard it because it costs so damn much. $22-25 for a new DVD is pretty steep, but $15 to buy it on iTunes ain't bad.

There will come a time when we have a rewritable media which holds several terabytes and we'll use it to store movie files, but I don't even think BR is going to be a stop-gap on the road to said media.

Hell, bigger media formats are already on the way...

http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/29/call-recall-unveils-multi-terabyte-optical-storage-solution/

If BR's claim to fame is the amount of data it can hold, it's not going to have that fact to boast for very much longer.

And honestly, I expect that, if ANY optical media will remain, it'll be the one with a player than can read increasingly larger optical discs, like how SD cards are scalable. The winner will be the player that can read 500 GB discs today and will also read 500 TB discs tomorrow.