The digital revolution

The Blu-Ray/HDDVD debate will be a moot point in a decade or so. Media of all sorts is going digital. You can see this with the emergence of ipods and mp3s as the preferred method of appreciating music. The speed of data transfer is not to the level needed yet, but eventually hard storage will all be done on a central storage device. All of your large music, movies, program files will be remotely accessed by whatever device you are currently using. You wont need a blu-ray player if your television can remotely access your computer, or even an online music archive, and play a high definition file from there. If download speeds are fast enough, you would be able to access this file from anywhere connected to the internet, negating the need for hard copies. However, the only limiting factor we currently have is this speed. The most apparent answer to this is fiber optic cable. Fiber can deliver transfer of data at speeds faster than any of our current devices can process them. Why worry about portability if all of the data that you need can be delivered on demand. The main hurdles to this will be the costs of the cable and the ability to regulate the new ease of data transfer.