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 November 1,
2005
Declining Portable Media
Good news for my wife! For years she’s put up with the fact that the walls of our family room are covered, from floor to ceiling, with shelves crammed with LPs, 45s, tapes, CDs, and every other portable sound and/or video format you can think of, obsolete or not. The prospect of having to pack all that up when we move house is more than a little daunting. We may not have to. It may be somewhat premature to pronounce these sorts of recordings obsolete, but the day is approaching when such physical items will be things of the past, and our entertainment will come entirely from computer-style memory. For audio, that day is already here for many, as the Apple iPod juggernaut shows no sign of slowing down. At the moment, most users load their iPods by ripping existing CDs, but there’s a lot of downloading going on too; in the future, that may be the primary -- or only -- way to purchase music. We’re also seeing the arrival of home-entertainment servers that can store immense amounts of data equivalent to hundreds of hours of movies or TV shows, and which can then be fed to different displays throughout the house. The day of wandering down to the video store to rent the latest DVD may be disappearing. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine all our music and video (and games and computer files) being contained in a single such component that takes up no more space than a conventional VCR or DVD player, every item available at a moment’s notice. Goodbye shelves! ...Ian G. Masters
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