There’s been a steady decline over the last few years in the sales of music CDs as a good share of music has gone over to electronic formats, i.e. music download services like iTunes and Amazon and also streaming services like MySpace Music and the much talked about Spotify.  A few old stick-in-the muds (like me) still prefer to have the disk, as something physical to own, and also as a backup, but a generation is growing up with no experience of this physical ownership and are happy to have music loaded into their iPods and phones.

The video industry has so far cut a different track, with DVD disks dominating in the physical format wars for the last decade, and many previous formats from the past put to death (laser disc, VHS, betamax).  Now the industry is focusing on a new format, Blu ray Disc (or BD), first launched in 2003, and now apparently reaching maturity with the majority of movie titles dual-launched on DVD and BD.  BD is a technical improvement, allowing MPEG-4 AVC support (H.264) in resolutions to full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels), and comparing BD with DVD, the prices are still a little bit higher.  Players are probably still two to four times more expensive (same for drives to go in PCs), and movies on BD are probably a third more expensive than the equivalent DVD.  I would guess that in a couple of years time the players will be cheap enough that those replacing tired DVD players will not have to think hard about investing in BD.

However, the format is not without its critics.  Apple’s Steve Jobs has said that the Mac family will not be getting BD, and this is both for technical reasons (i.e. streaming technology like iTunes and YouTube HD provide “good enough” quality) and because licensing BD is less than ideal.  Friends of mine consider BD to be “too little, too late” in terms of performance-vs-price and have either stuck to DVD, or are exploring streaming alternatives. 

Online streaming of video is, I think, the “elephant in the room” that points us to where this is all going.  Apple’s iTunes has been a successful online streaming service for some time, selling movies and TV episodes; services like Hulu and BBC’s iPlayer allow catch-up via the Internet.  Many successful mail-order DVD businesses like Blockbuster and LoveFilm, now have an online streaming service so that you can spontaneously watch movies on demand, instead of waiting for the mailman to deliver.

We should not forget either that there is a huge international community of users ripping and sharing files using technology like BitTorrent, despite governments like those of the UK and France putting laws in place to discourage them from doing so.  It is understandable that the content owners would want to prevent people from swapping content in this way, and I agree with this, since people in the movie industry have to make a living too.  However, what this shows is that there is a large constituency of users out there that are not bothered about Blu Ray, and would likely buy a movie as a stream of data (from Warner, Sony etc), and store it on a large hard disk at home to stream to their own TV as they choose.  This is an analogue of the way the music business is already going, with the content now only as bits.

It seems to me the Blu Ray could be the last physical format we see, with video as well as audio moving to a ‘bits only’ delivery system, and home entertainment running entirely from hard-disc based content stores, be they PVR or NAS or PC server.