I see the future

Here's my prediction for thirty years from now. Nah, I'll say twenty years from now:

The current trend is for people to download music instead of buying the physical medium (e.g. compact disks), such that much (more than half?) of the music sold today never sees a physical form.

But that's not yet the case for movies and t.v. shows (YouTube not withstanding). However, this is due -- I reckon -- to limitations of bandwidth and storage.

In twenty years, people won't bother to own DVDs, or Blue-Ray, or whatever else. Instead, there will be two main modes of storing one's video footage. Most folks will just subscribe to a video service. This will be a massive online repository of movies, t.v. shows, and what-not: much like YouTube, but with better video quality (full resolution!). This service will be about US$20/month in today's dollars -- but will be bundled with your internet connection service, so the cost won't be noticed. There's no need to actually store anything, as it's all ''on tap''.

And, for folks that have more obscure tastes -- or who generate a lot of home movies -- there will be an online repository for a reasonably small fee (US$5/month?) where you can save copies of your obscure art films, home movies, and etcetera. You **could** save them to your home network -- but this allows you to ''tap in'' to your collection when you're, for example, over at a friend's place and want to show off some obscure find.

Both of these options will come with some sort of ''bookmarks'' or ''favorites'' listing, so people can remember what the heck was the name of that movie they liked (the one with the chicken!), out of the mega-thousands of movies in the collection.


Yeah: twenty years. Thirty at the latest.

I'll be 58 (or 68). And I'll **still** have boxes and boxes of VHS video taped t.v. shows... :)


--GG