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The Rise and Fall of the Optical Disc
By Jonathan | January 28, 2008 at 8:27 pm
CDs have been around since 1982. I’ve been around since 1982. Some might say the introduction of the aforementioned items mark two of the most important dates in history…both US and World.
Maybe you don’t like history, but you should really know about these things. Especially the date of my birthday (November 18). Cash or checks preferred.
I don’t want to go into details about the CD, and how it was the best thing since the cassette tape, and then mention CD-ROM drives on computers and how they were the best thing since the floppy disk, because we all know these things. Well, if you grew up in the 80s and early 90s you know these things. Kids these days hardly know what a floppy is.
Then we got the DVD which was basically a movie on a CD, but it held a bunch more stuff than a standard CD (like, say, a movie?), and CD-Rs which enabled people to create their own custom CDs. Cool, right? We’re not done yet. CD-RWs came out shortly after that, allowing users to write on the disc more than one time. This works out great in the MP3/CD player in my car. Writable and re-writable DVDs are [obviously] the best thing since CD-RWs, but the price per disc is still pretty expensive.
This brings us to about the year 2006 when the newest discs were introduced for high definition video: HD DVD and the Blu-ray Disc. These guys hold a ridiculous amount of data when compared to a CD or DVD, especially depending on the format of the disc (single layered, double layered, triple layered). HD DVD and Blu-ray essentially provide the same end result: high def video in 1080p. How could the consumer lose?
A format war. Toshiba (HD DVD) and Sony (Blu-ray) couldn’t agree on a standardized format of the disc. And why should they? Each company stands to gain huge sums of revenue if they win the war…the loser will be forced to concede and begin producing hardware for the winner’s technology. Last check Sony was holding 75% of the Blu-ray disc market. Meanwhile the consumer was sitting back waiting to buy because who wants to buy an expensive piece of technology that may not even be around in a year?
So where am I heading with all of this rambling?
The optical disc is dying. The optical disc provides us multiple types of content including [but not limited to] data, audio, and video. There currently are multiple methods of obtaining all of this content without using an optical disc. Some detail:
Data: When is the last time you have purchased a piece of software that you were not able to download directly from a webpage somewhere? Some companies don’t even provide optical media, or if they do they charge extra. When you give files to your friends, do you put them on a CD, or do you throw the stuff on your flash drive instead? You can buy 4GB flash drives these days for $40. 4GB is over 5 times more than your standard CD.
Audio: iTunes, Napster, Amazon MP3, Walmart music downloads, and others.
Video: iTunes, NetFlix, In2TV, and others.
All this stuff to your computer without leaving your house. How great is that? “But Jonathan, I use my CD-ROM drive all the time on my computer! All the time!” Are you sure? Did you take the time to burn that CD last week or did you throw those data files on your flash drive…or maybe just email them to yourself?
Flash memory is getting cheaper everyday, so why can’t we give our friends a small thumb drive instead of a CD? Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but this stuff is getting cheap. Remember when floppy drives started disappearing from computers? We got over that. We’ll get over the lack of optical drives soon enough. These computers don’t even have CD-ROM drives:
Fujitsu LifeBook (certain models)
Levono ThinkPad (certain models)
MacBook Air
You’ve heard it here first, folks.
Topics: technology | No Comments »