DVDs will be dead in a decade: Bill Gates

[XEROX]

Bill Gates, Microsoft czar and the world's richest man, says there's no future for the DVD (digital video disc), according to a report published in the German daily Bild.

The world's leading technology guru foresees the DVD technology as becoming 'obsolete in 10 years at the most.'

He said that movie-watchers of the future will find the idea of buying a shiny disc with a movie stored on it 'ridiculous.' He predicted that these movie fans will instead watch films on television sets that will be able to download films and programmes via the Internet.

"The entertainment of the future will definitely not be on a DVD player, that technology will be completely gone within 10 years at the most. When you consider that today we carry music and films around on silver discs and then have to insert them in computers, that is actually pretty ridiculous. These discs could end up being damaged, or simply getting lost," the Bild quoted Gates as saying.

"The TV of the future will show us exactly what we want and when we want," Gates said. "It will know what we don't want our children to see. It will be able to show us a display of family photos and on a command will remove the ones with the mother-in-law in them from the display, if we want it to."

Gates said that the home computer will know who we are from our voice or our face. It will know what we want to watch, our favourite programmes, or what the kids should not be allowed to see, said the Bild report.

However, The Inquirer, which also reported the Gates speech, stated that Gates' predictions could at times be 'inaccurate,' and referred to him having said that there's no future in the networking novelty called the 'Internet.'

http://in.rediff.com/money/2004/jul/19look.htm
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Highly unlikly!!

Admin: Follow on post merged with this one.

 

[gf0012-aust]

DVD's on a platter may die off, but I suspect that DVD's stored on devices such as USB keys will take over.

 

[XEROX]

dude, a dvd is 4.7gb - on a USB key?????????

Nooooo!!!!!!

 

[XEROX]

Not in 10 years maybe 20, anyway the lastest tech is going to be blue lasers for dvds,

Instead of reading off a palstic disc, it will read of a 54%paper surface mataerial

suprise suprise suprise invented by Sony!!!

 

[gf0012-aust]

dude, a dvd is 4.7gb - on a USB key?????????

Nooooo!!!!!!

Last year IBM's R&D Division designed a storage device that stored 1 x Terabyte (A thousand gigabytes) onto a medium the size of a matchbox.

I have a hard drive on display in my office that is as big as a small form factor computer and it's only 3 megabyte. That HDD cost $250,000 to buy new. Within 10 years the drives were as big as 2 x sunglass cases and had 10 times the capacity and cost 1/1000th the price. 5 years after that the drive had shrunk by another 50% and now hold 350 gigabytes. and cost half the price.

Nothing is impossible. You can already buy USB HDD's that are 2 gig

Moores Law applies to more than just CPU power.

 

[srirangan]

Dude, this is the same guy that said and I quote:
640KB should be more than enough for everybody - William Gates

Point is, no one can predict technology, but as all tech stuff get obsolute, so will the DVD.

 

[XEROX]

What is the benchmark internet speed in india and aussie land, Sri, gfoo12!!

And what will it be like in 10 years??

 

[gf0012-aust]

What is the benchmark internet speed in india and aussie land, Sri, gfoo12!!

And what will it be like in 10 years??

Most of the regionals have access to broadband. It's only the remote areas that are restricted to landline modems. Although some country areas are too remote from landlines or optical cable, so they have to resort to satellite.

 

[XEROX]

i can see the my country the u.k having a 12-15mb internet speed by then, but still when you are downloading a dvd (4700mb) from the net it will take ages??

I disagree with Gatesy, that it will replace the dvd!!

 

[Soldier]

What is the benchmark internet speed in india and aussie land, Sri, gfoo12!!

And what will it be like in 10 years??

Most of the regionals have access to broadband. It's only the remote areas that are restricted to landline modems. Although some country areas are too remote from landlines or optical cable, so they have to resort to satellite.

And I guess most of those areas are served only by Telstra. Last time I checked back in 2003, Australia even being a developed country does not have a advance broadband networks in place. In fact countries like Japan, China, Singapore are mode advanced and networked. Most of Australians are given a lollypop of broadband via Ku band satellite dishes only.

 

[XEROX]

In the UK a typical phone line can handle a 25mb bandwidth!!!

 

[XEROX]

He once said that there was no future in that little networking novelty called the Internet

Bill Gates photograph from car incident in his teens

 

[Soldier]

In the UK a typical phone line can handle a 25mb bandwidth!!!

That is an absolute wrong assumption of phone lines capable of handling 25 mbit bandwidth. BTW on what QAM are we talking about? Wire can handle the bandwidth but what about the hardware used which is going to be a bottleneck in the whole issue. Also, UK has a pretty advance Broadband Network by the name of NTL... which may not be as good as US systems but still is the best Europe can offer.

 

[XEROX]

Its true the phone lines in the UK can handle 25mb, and Sweden possible has the best broadband network in europe, its benchmark is 8mbps

TeliaSonera to offer 8 Mbps ADSL to 71 percent of Swedish households
http://www.telecom.paper.nl/index.a...ite/news_ta.asp?type=abstract&id=47718&NR=680

Sweden leads all countries in Internet penetration at 76.9%

 

[Soldier]

Its true the phone lines in the UK can handle 25mb, and Sweden possible has the best broadband network in europe, its benchmark is 8mbps

TeliaSonera to offer 8 Mbps ADSL to 71 percent of Swedish households
http://www.telecom.paper.nl/index.a...ite/news_ta.asp?type=abstract&id=47718&NR=680

Sweden leads all countries in Internet penetration at 76.9%

Brahmos, Using ADSL you can't go beyond 3 miles link radius from a telephone switching center. There is no technology which exists in the world which can make it happen atleast as of now. So ADSL being cheaper also can not compete with broadband connection speeds offered through Hybrid networks. Besides ADSL can maintain the speed only on 64 QAM modulation and on 128 or 264, it goes down the drain.

As said earlier, the telecom hardware used is not compatible as of yet to support high speeds when it comes to a subscriber not living in 2.5 mile link radius of a switching center. Sweden may have the best penetration,but I was talking about technology which is being implemented in broadband market. Considering the techology, it is US which is number 1, 2nd comes Canada (thanks to Shaw and Rogers) and third is UK.

 

[XEROX]

What kind of platform do japan run on??

 

[Soldier]

What kind of platform do japan run on??

Broadband does not have any specific platform other then DOCSIS 1, DOCSIS 1.1 and DOCSIS 2. Anywhere in the world these are the three platforms on which broadband internet is being run. US and Canada are moving over to DOCSIS 2 and UK also is in the league.

 

[XEROX]

I thought japan would be ahead of the uk in terms of tech!!

Suprising??

 

[Soldier]

I thought japan would be ahead of the uk in terms of tech!!

Suprising??

When it comes to Broadband, US is ahead of every country in the world. Standards are written down here and all ISP's try to implement those standards in their respective countries. UK itself has not done anything when it comes to taking broadband one step higher but has simply copied US. UK without doubts has long way to go to reach the standards of Canada before it can even compete with US.

 

[gf0012-aust]

I thought japan would be ahead of the uk in terms of tech!!

Suprising??

When it comes to Broadband, US is ahead of every country in the world. Standards are written down here and all ISP's try to implement those standards in their respective countries. UK itself has not done anything when it comes to taking broadband one step higher but has simply copied US. UK without doubts has long way to go to reach the standards of Canada before it can even compete with US.

Are you sure?, last time I checked, Sth Korea had the largest digital network system in the world. They have the highest broadband saturation.

I discovered this when doing a project on military communications. SK is the most broadband capable country in the world by a long shot. They might not have internet usage stats as the measurement - but the cabling is there and used in a number of other comms areas.