Optical Drives on Their Way Out

Optical media is on its way out thanks to services like Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon’s streaming. What we will be seeing in the years to come is all of your content tied to an account, stream-able to your TV or PC. I believe strongly in this because services like Netflix and Valve’s Steam for video games are huge right now and only getting bigger.

Once you purchase a digital copy of a game or piece of software on Steam, for example, you can access it and re-download it on any computer. If you have a Mac and PC, you can play the titles and software on both as long as you’re logged in. I think this gives the power back to the consumer (which will make them less likely to pirate software because getting software like this is convenient and easy, and most importantly it's theirs forever, no need to ever re-buy anything!). You don’t have to worry about scratched discs when you want to install something, and if you want to free up hard drive space you can just uninstall something and just re-download it when you want to use it again.

We see this switch happening now with Amazon and iTunes, huge services with music and movies with one click purchasing. What’s great about this is it un-clutters everything. No stacks of DVD cases or other optical media. Streaming content on Netflix might also introduce you to something you might not otherwise watch (with thousands of stream-able titles).

Optical media is restricting. You can have X amount of space on a disc, the DVD or blu ray player can only hold 1 (or few / many) disc(s), it’s more expensive to purchase the physical copy than having a streaming service like Netflix. All bullet-points favor streaming and account based downloading vs. optical media. The only thing I can think of that might hinder someone switching to digital / streaming is if they’re a collector and like to collect the movies and art books that come with special editions of movies and things, similar to how people collect records.

The streaming will likely happen either in a small set top box (Amazon just announced a new one) or it will be embedded in your TV. I think our cell phones will act as a remote and a hub to our digital accounts to select and stream / play the content we want to watch.