At the risk of being labeled “The Mad Mac Prophet of the Mid-Coast”, this week I’m proffering this peerless prognostication: the DVD, as we know it, is dead. That’s right. Finito. Kaput. El muerto. Done. Stick a fork in it. Room temperature. Sleeping with the fishes.

“But, Pete”, you say, “Wait a minute! My local discount superstore has aisles upon aisles (upon aisles) of movies on DVD. I just signed up for NetFlix to get movies on DVD delivered to my home. In fact, I just finally got a computer that will record DVDs. Whaddya mean DVDs are dead?”

Let me qualify my “moment of clarity” by restricting my DVD eulogy to those “old school” disks capable of holding but 4.3 gigabytes (GBs) of data (like my archived photos, old Quicken and Word files, those kinds of things), and those bearing DVD-quality movies.

There are five final nails in the DVD coffin that are being pounded in even as we speak (read). The first is the size of our digital media collections. Today’s consumer-grade seven and eight megapixel digital still cameras produce images that are four megabytes in size. That’s only 250 images on a one gigabyte memory card. Digital camcorders produce video files over 100 megabytes in size for every minute of video captured. High-definition camcorders producing much larger files are just around the corner. In order to take their music with them, folks are digitizing (“ripping” in the pop lexicon) their CDs to load onto their iPods and other such devices. A full-length feature film, captured from a DVD or purchased at an online store, is over a gigabyte in size, even at iPod viewing size. We’re producing more digital media than we can keep track of, much less store.

The second nail in the DVD coffin is the plunging price of digital storage. Key fob sized flash memory cards holding 2 gigabytes of data and 250 gigabyte hard drives can be found for around $50. By this time next year, 8 gigabyte flash memory cards will by available, although pricey. Heck, I know some folks who are still using computers with only 10 gigabytes of hard drive space.

The third nail is high-speed data transfer, both into the home and within the home. The number of computer users still saddled with a dial-up connection is dwindling rapidly. A 3 megabit-per-second DSL connection costs what 256 kilobits-per-second did just a few years ago. Wireless home network speeds are about to be “kicked up a notch” with the introduction of the 802.11n standard (once the “powers that be” decide what the standard really is). 802.11n offers the promise of transfer speeds four times the current 802.11g standard.

The fourth nail is the distribution of feature-length motion pictures and entire seasons of popular televisions shows (both traditional venues for the DVD) via the internet. Right now there a at least a half-dozen online movie stores, with more sure to enter the market as soon as the concept proves itself.

The fifth nail is the high-definition DVD. Once the early adopters have been sufficiently gouged (paying $1000 for a high-def DVD player) and the player prices begin to drop, the growing numbers of high-def TV buyers and the growing numbers of movies available on high-def DVD will converge. Computers that can burn data onto a Blu-Ray DVD disk will follow shortly. Dual-layer Blu-Ray DVDs can hold up to 50 GB of data.

So what will the future in a world without DVDs be like? For that answer, you need only wait for the near future – next week, to be exact.

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski