Microsoft says HD-DVD and Blu-ray to be obsolete in 5 years

Oh Microsoft, when will you learn to keep your damn mouth shut? Richard Doherty, Microsoft’s Media Entertainment Convergence product manager (try saying that one 3 times fast) made a bold statement recently, claiming that both HD-DVD and Blu-ray will be completely obsolete within 5 years. Seems that the company envisions a world where high definition content exists entirely on hard drives and servers. Is the death of physical media on the horizon? Probably, but 5 years seems like an incredibly optimistic estimate. Hi-Def content requires an incredibly large amount of storage space. While average disk size is increasing steadily, it’s hard to imagine your average consumer with enough storage space to digitize an entire collection’s worth of content. Is this a case of Microsoft speaking without thinking again? We think so. Then again, who knows? If Microsoft wants to distribute a couple of terabytes of storage free of charge to everyone with a PC we certainly wouldn’t argue.

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