I think you have just described why Cloud Computing is a dream of someone whose head is in the clouds.

Getting back to Blu Ray, I think that it will plateau at a quarter of the market or less. The economic downturn is hurting big electronics purchases -- and a large HD TV is what is needed to truly enjoy Blu Ray.

By the time things get going again, a new tech will be ready to take its place.

Mike from Morgantown

iTunes video.

Heck, they could at least built it in without movie support. Just read/write data.

There's people buying the horribly overpriced XDCam writers just to have a comfy way of archiving video.

But hey, I forgot, Jobs vision: everything will be on the cloud. And iTunes video revenue.

Within 2 years it will start to really pick up.  Prices on players are very affordable now... now we just need to wait for the media to come down.  $30 retail price tags still scare off most customers.

Downloading is the future, but it will be very niche for a long, long time.  As crazy as it sounds, there are still people on dialup.

And it would have to start from zero, just like BD did years ago. But by then BD would be cheap enough to be a no-brainer, considering its back-compatibility too, to choose it instead of an old DVD drive only a few bucks cheaper.

What I think, instead, is that BD drives have good chances to become widespread, but BD contents and BD blanks could have a less pervasive spread: people would have the CHOICE between BD and DVD and would choose BD mainly for movies heavily relying on effects and photography, while could happily settle for good enough and cheaper DVD's otherwise. At the same time BD blanks woud be used instead of DVD's only when necessary. And if we remember, we had two major removable standards since even before CD-R became commodity: first we had floppy and iomega Zip (*), then floppy and CD-R/RW, now we have CD-R/RW and DVD+-R/RW, having DVD and BD instead of a single standard wouldn't be anything new. And let's not forget DVD struggled even longer than BD with HD-DVD in an internal fratricide format war between "plus" and "minus", a war settled with a tie and the final dual format drives success that allowed DVD to take-off on PC's.

(*) let's not count the old 5.25" and 3.5" floppies coexistence, their respective capacities were in the same order of magnitude, they were redundant as they didn't cater for different purposes, so eventually only 3.5 survived.

Oh really? From the 0 you say? Im sorry, look at that USB2.0 thing on your PC. It's not exactly at 0, EVERYONE has it nowadays. I went to a conference recently and they were giving out information and data on 64MB flash drives instead of CDs. Also with USB3.0 transfer rate will be 4.8Gbps, booting up Vista in 28 seconds from beginning to end. SSDs are far superior to any disc format right now, and those flash sticks are getting cheaper and cheaper by the month (16 gigs for 25 bucks wewt!!!). Not to mention USB slots are FAR cheaper then a BR player, in fact I have 8 of them on my laptop. Did I also mention USB3.0 will be also backwards compatible?

^^
SSD is not cheap and flash sticks cost per GB is higher than discs, so as soon as drive price gets low enough BD will be attractive for a large enough subset of storing needs. Both SSD and flash sticks, anyway, already have an edge right now over rewritable discs, as the latter are way too slow and expensive enough to make flash preferrable for their speed even at a slightly higher cost. BD-RE IMVHO will be a sensible choice only as a better heir of VHS cassettes compared to the slow, awkward and too small DVD+-RW, so only for stand-alone recorders and almost nothing else. For other uses I see a combination of different tech as ideal: USB HDD fast and cheap, very high capacity, SSD fastest and expensive, medium-high capacity for uses really needing the fastest option, BD-R, permanent storage of medium capacities, DVD-R, cheap floppy heir and smaller backups, Flash stick, fast and practical floppy heir.
This said, BD isn't ready yet for PC mass market, still too expensive and slow, for the PC I finished building some days ago I still chose a DVD burner, I have enough disk space on internal and external HDD's for when DVD is too little or too slow, I too use a Flash stick and find it very useful and practical, although not a solution for every need, and I won't buy a BD burner before it's under 50€ VAT included.

Well with the rate of how fast Flash is expanding, I think they came out with a 128gig one for a couple thousand dollars now, the lower end drives become cheaper and cheaper with each iteration. If it keeps growing with this speed, the lower end will start getting quite large, eventually surpassingh BluRay's capacity, not to mention speed.

^^
Sure, with time, but right now you can already have a 25GB BD-R for less than 10€ including sales tax in EU and in US for even less, $7 or less sales tax excluded, and prices are going down. Solid state non volatile memories are great for speed, but for medium sized home backups BD is becoming cheap, burners are still quite expensive and slow, but next year they'll be under $100, and in two years they'll be cheap, and blank discs will be cheap too. Even if 50GB SSD drives will get very soon cheaper than a BD drive, they won't be cheaper than BD discs, at least not in the near future: if the industry invests in them as changeable media, they'll surely get cheap enough for that purpose, but it will take more years than it will take to BD to become commodity. As I wrote before, anyway, Flash is already a rewritable commodity media, still more expensive than DVD+-RW discs, but so much more fast and practical, by now +-RW optical media are good almost only for living room players and recorders, and this already applies to DVD, not only to BD. As you wrote, you get 128GB SSD for $2000 now, even at a faster than Moore's law price drop it will take at least 5 years to it to drop under $30 and then, for a 64GB drive, maybe to drop to $10, but in 5 years a 50GB BD-R disc would be under $1 and the drive under $30 and you only have to buy it once, so for permanent copies it would be an obvious choice, although small SSD by then would be already commodities and the obvious choice for a lot of other uses.

Unfortunately for me, none of the netbooks these days can run 64-bit linux thanks to atom (and I can't aford another panasonic). Almost all of my projects would be pain in the ass to get running. I need the ample virtual address space to feed my mmap-io addiction and coding remotely just irritates the hell out of me for some reason.